New Ninth Avenue Separated Bike Path is Already in Place

3:16 PM EDT on October 3, 2007

The unprecedented new physically-separated bike path running along Chelsea's Ninth Avenue has already been set up using temporary materials. The Department of Transportation is billing it as New York City's "street of the future." New York 1 reported yesterday:

Bicyclists have a new lane to use in Chelsea, and the city is hoping to expand the project around Manhattan.
The new bike lane runs along 9th Avenue between 16th and 23rd Streets. Cyclists are protected by a lane of parked cars in the middle of the street. The city is also putting in special signals to make it clear when cyclists can cross.
Eventually a strip of pavement will separate cyclists from the parked cars. Even in its preliminary form, cyclists seem to be loving it.
"It keeps you away from the traffic so you don't have to worry about the cars, and crossing over and stuff like that," said one cyclist.
Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan says it's all part of the city's bike master plan.
"We're bringing in the best practices from around the world to the streets of New York City," she said. "Mayor Bloomberg has said that he wants us to look at ways that we can bring more efficient ways of moving around the transportation network, so it's very much in keeping with PlaNYC."

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks 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. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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