Bicycling

What If Lafayette Avenue Had a Protected Bike Lane and Ped Refuges?

Hilda Cohen, Ali Loxton and 1,600 petition-signers are asking for a painted bike lane and a road diet on Brooklyn's Lafayette Avenue: They're hoping to calm traffic and improve the area's bike network by turning one traffic lane into a bike lane, and they helped persuade Brooklyn Community Board 2 to ask NYC DOT to revisit the idea.

By Noah Kazis

3:53 PM EST on January 24, 2012

Hilda Cohen, Ali Loxton and 1,600 petition-signers are asking for a painted bike lane and a road diet on Brooklyn’s Lafayette Avenue: They’re hoping to calm traffic and improve the area’s bike network by turning one traffic lane into a bike lane, and they helped persuade Brooklyn Community Board 2 to ask NYC DOT to revisit the idea.

Streetsblog reader jacob-uptown asks: What if you reallocated that space to build a parking-protected bike lane and pedestrian refuges?

By flipping the bike lane and the parking lane, he suggests, cycling and crossing the street would be that much safer. He Photoshopped the image to demonstrate what a protected bike lane might look like on Lafayette (current conditions are below).

Like what you see?

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.