Bicycling

The Plan: Making Brooklyn’s 9th Street Safer for Everyone

Below is a sketch of DOT's plan for 9th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We think it's a great plan deserving of support. The new configuration narrows a notoriously dangerous four lane road down to two travel lanes and adds a median with left-turn bays and a pair of bike lanes with three-foot buffers.

By Aaron Naparstek

4:46 PM EDT on April 10, 2007

Below is a sketch of DOT’s plan for 9th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We think it’s a great plan deserving of support. The new configuration narrows a notoriously dangerous four lane road down to two travel lanes and adds a median with left-turn bays and a pair of bike lanes with three-foot buffers.

The plan is a response to community activism that started after a sedan careened through the front door of Dizzy’s Diner on Eighth Avenue and
9th Street in the summer of 2004. Miraculously, no one was hurt. But the event galvanized
neighborhood residents to begin a process that generated more than 1,200
signatures urging the City’s Department of Transportation to address
long-standing pedestrian-safety and reckless-driving problems on 9th Street.

This proposed “road diet” is modeled on a successful plan that DOT implemented on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights in 2005.

Some opponents of the plan don’t like it because they believe that it will hinder their ability to double-park to load and unload their cars. I have asked an opponent of the project to write a short piece for Streetsblog outlining the opposition.

If you live or work within the boundaries of Community Board 6 or
Park Slope, or if you use 9th Street as a pedestrian, motorist, cyclist
or bus rider, please take just a minute to fax in your support to Community Board 6 ahead of their meeting on Wednesday, April 11 at 6:30 pm.

Aaron Naparstek

Aaron Naparstek is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparstek's journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. He was also one of the original cast members of the "War on Cars" podcast. You can find more of his work on his website.

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