Mayor announces construction timeline for
long-awaited Brooklyn Bridge bike lane
BY BEN VERDE
Construction on the hotly anticipated
Brooklyn Bridge bike lane is fi nally
underway and is scheduled to be
completed by the fall, according to Mayor
Bill de Blasio.
Work on the road-level cycle path began
Monday, June 21, with the closure of the
left lane of the Manhattan-bound side of
the bridge, according to City Hall.
“When that lane opens up it will be
brand new, it will be for bikes only,” de
Blasio said. “It will be a beautiful and radical
reimagining of a New York City icon.”
The existing Brooklyn Bridge bike lane
has long been a mess, with cyclists and
pedestrians jammed onto the same narrow
wooden walkway where tourists pose for
photos, creating endless confl ict between
commuting cyclists.
City Hall intends to ease that confl ict
with the introduction of the roadbed level
bike lane, but some cyclists worry the lane
is too narrow and will only create further
confl icts between cyclists when they are
jammed into the 8-foot-wide, two-way lane.
The Department of Transportation has
maintained that an 8-foot-wide path is
Construction on the Brooklyn Bridge bike path will begin June 21.
the only possibility, and has rejected the
premise of closing down another lane on
the Brooklyn-bound side of the bridge
within the current timeline because of their
need for at least one inner lane for bridge
maintenance and the need for further traffi
c studies.
The de Blasio administration has
pushed the lane as one of the mayor’s
signature safe-streets achievements as
COURTESY DOT
he prepares to leave offi ce and as his
signature Vision Zero program falters,
with 2021 on track to be the deadliest
year for road fatalities since the program
was launched.
News of the bike lane was fi rst broken
by Brooklyn Paper when a Department
of Transportation staffer let slip the plan
during a Brooklyn Community Board 2
meeting in June of 2020. Mayor de Blasio
and former Department of Transportation
Commissioner Polly Trottenberg denied
Brooklyn Paper’s reporting at the time —
before making the announcement ahead
of de Blasio’s fi nal state of the city address
in January.
The installation of the lane coincides
with an ongoing boom in bike commuting
in New York spurred by the pandemic,
which inspired some New Yorkers to ditch
the subway in favor of more open-air methods
of transport.
Recent Department of Transportation
data shows that an average of 21,872 cyclists
pedaled over one of the city’s four
East River bridges on weekdays this past
May — 4,715 more than in May 2019 when
thousands more people were commuting
into Manhattan for work.
“As we recover from the pandemic we
look forward to more New Yorkers getting
back to work and commuting,” said State
Senator Brain Kavanagh, who represents
Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights.
“We also get back a longer term trend
which is more and more New Yorkers taking
bicycles as an important and healthy
and environmentally friendly way of getting
around.”
City unveils new Lower Manhattan bus lanes
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
The city unveiled on June 10 three
blocks of new bus lanes and a buspriority
traffi c signal at Battery
Place near the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel in
Lower Manhattan, which offi cials say will
relieve congestion for commuters heading
to Staten Island.
“Bus improvements at Battery Place will
save valuable time for Staten Island bus riders,”
said Department of Transportation
(DOT) Commissioner Hank Gutman in a
June 10 statement. “In a year’s time, each
commuter will have gotten more than a full
day of their lives back.”
The DOT added a curbside bus-only lane
to three westbound blocks of Battery Place,
between Broadway and West Street, along
with a traffi c signal allowing buses a head
start when turning right toward toward the
inter-borough tunnel.
The last block at West Street also has a
raised ridge with plastic fl appers to discourage
other drivers from illegally hogging the
red-painted lanes.
The changes — which are in effect
24/7 — will mostly benefi t the 12,000
A Staten Island Express Bus in Lower Manhattan.
daily riders of the Staten Island express
buses who fi nd themselves routinely stuck
in bumper-to-bumper traffi c during the
evening rush hour, according to one senior
DOT rep for the island, who related her
own commute home from the agency’s
headquarters at nearby Water Street.
PHOTO BY KEVIN DUGGAN
“I get on the bus on Water Street, then
I sit in traffi c along State Street and then
Battery Place, anywhere from 20-40 minutes
— and that’s a good night,” said DOT
Staten Island Borough Commissioner Roseann
Caruana. “You can only imagine the
frustration after a long day at work sitting
on the bus — sometimes standing on the
bus — watching traffi c lights turn green,
then yellow, then red, and sometimes moving
a few inches for each cycle.”
In contrast, the buses zoom past other
drivers once they reach the far side of the
tunnel due to high-occupancy vehicle lanes
there, according to DOT.
The new bus lanes came at the request
of Staten Island Borough President Jimmy
Oddo, and are part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s
Better Buses initiative to speed up the city’s
notoriously slow bus network through the
addition of dedicated lanes and busways
around the Five Boroughs.
“The redesign of the express bus system
for Staten Island has been one of the most
challenging endeavors of my career,” Oddo
said in a statement. “Moving 30,000+
Staten Islanders to and from Manhattan
every day will never be easy. That’s why
it is that much more important to aggressively
correct and improve everything in
our control.”
The DOT has committed to build or
improve 28 miles of Better Buses projects
this year, serving almost one million riders
a day.
4 June 24, 2021 Schneps Media