City offi cials want to install a protected bike lane on Emmons Avenue by the end of the year. Google
COURIER LIFE, FEBRUARY 7-13, 2020 3
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
The city’s chief street designer
hopes to fast-track a protected
bike lane along Sheepshead
Bay’s Emmons Avenue
this year, after area Councilman
Chaim Deutsch pressed
offi cials at an oversight committee
hearing on Jan. 29.
“I really want to have a
conversation on this and try
to get it done, if feasible, because
I think protected bike
lanes are the way to go, and not
shared bike lanes with cars on
the streets,” Deutsch said at a
meeting of the Council’s Transportation
Committee.
Department of Transportation
Commissioner Polly Trottenberg
claimed her agency
had to work out some of the
plan’s details, but she voiced
her support for constructing
the bike lane in 2020 — a year
earlier than her agency had
proposed just hours earlier.
“I hope to get it done this
year, yes,” Trottenberg said. “I
think there’s still a few design
issues we’re working through…
I think we’re close, but still a
few things to work out.”
Plans to install a bike lane
along the southern curb of the
maritime boulevard between
Knapp Street and West End Avenue
have been kicked around
for years, including in 2017
when offi cials wanted to connect
Emmons Avenue with the
Jamaica Bay Greenway.
But the transit department
quietly shelved idea earlier this
week, when they announced
10 miles of new protected bike
lanes in the borough slated for
construction in 2020 — but notably
left off the Emmons Avenue
from that timeline.
Some residents of the transit
starved neighborhoods
accused the department of
shutting them out in favor of
northern brownstone Brooklyn
neighborhoods.
“It’s great that they’re
expanding but it looks like
they’re only going after the
low-hanging fruit and those
communities already suffer
an embarrassment of riches of
bike lanes,” said Craig Hammerman,
who recently moved
to Brighton Beach. “Whereas
in southern Brooklyn, bicyclists
and pedestrians are taking
their lives into their own
hands — we’re the slaughter
capital of Brooklyn.”
As Hammerman noted,
southern Brooklyn neighborhoods
accounted for many of
the cyclist deaths in Brooklyn
last year — where 18 bikers
died borough-wide.
The area suffers in particular
from not having a decent
east-west route for bikes,
according to Hammerman,
who pointed out that one of
the few safe routes for bikers,
the Riegelmann Boardwalk,
only provides limited mobility
— and is only open at select
times.
Another local bike advocate
noted that one of the few other
main arteries serving the area’s
pedal pushers is the 19th-
century built Ocean Parkway,
which has become a lumpy
mess due to tree roots pushing
up through the roadway’s pedestrian
and bike mall.
“It’s like going down a
mountain bike path,” said
Brian Hedden, a co-founder of
the advocacy group Bike South
Brooklyn.
The new bike lane plans
make the Bay Ridgite cautiously
optimistic that city’s
transit honchos will implement
more bike lanes in the
southern parts of the borough
than they have in the past —
largely due to resistance from
community boards there.
“Traditionally, it’s been
diffi cult for DOT to propose
any bike lanes for southern
Brooklyn, because community
boards tend to deny the existence
or legitimacy of resident
cyclists,” he said. “It’s also not
only about who lives in that
place — nobody has made that
claim about the Belt Parkway.”
Fast track
Emmons Avenue bike lane
could happen this year
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