This would be fantastic! Much of the time when I ride this route there are more cyclists than cars.

Jay Street is one of the important corridors in the whole city, which calls for a high level of design and really getting it right. A 2-way bikeway on a street like this is not a best practice, especially one requiring a weird crossing at Tillary southbound and presumably Schermerhorn northbound to get to the center.

Either by removing parking (the side streets should all have loading zones even today) or converting the street to one way (as Smith is south of Schermerhorn) they can free up the space for full segregated cyclepaths on the sides of the street. Under the best possible option this would include bus islands so that people on bikes do not have to mix with buses.

A connection to one of the East River Bridges (there are only a few of these, and they aren’t building them anymore) is too important to half-ass like this, especially since the DOT won’t be coming by for another 20 years to improve it again.

Also, why would you ignore Smith Street? It’s part of the same corridor for people coming from the south. This stinks of people from Prospect Heights who only have to deal with it for a few blocks from Bergen and are not thinking of the full network.

No one’s ignoring Smith Street. Whatever problems there are on Smith, they pale beside the double-parking, bike-lane and bus-stop blocking, and u-turns on Jay, and as busy as Smith is, it has just a fraction of Jay Street’s pedestrian activity.

As someone who’s put a lot of volunteer hours into advocating for change on Jay Street, I encourage you to do the same on Smith. It takes a village, for lack of a better phrase.

The ideas that came out of the workshop are just ideas. Conceptual designs. They show what can be accomplished, but not what necessarily has to be done.

But I do agree that a 2-way bikeway isn’t the best idea. For starters, it will be obsolete very quickly, as bike traffic continues to pick up. We need bike lanes that are wide enough so that people can pass other people. Also, a red light would mean a line of cyclists stretching back for a block, which is not ideal. You want bike lanes that are wide enough for two or three cyclists to wait next to each other so they can bunch up at the light, as is common in Copenhagen.

When DOT comes to CB2, it needs to come with a design that looks toward the future, not the past, as you mention.

I’m sorry I mentioned Smith as I’d rather talk about this proposal itself, but my point is that bike infrastructure is supposed to be comprehensive. The gaps in ALL of the protected bike lanes in Manhattan are possibly the biggest problem in cycling in New York today.

There’s still way too many bikes here to have them riding single file even if the existing lane functioned as (under)designed.

This seems like a good way to kill a lot of bicycle riders. Center bicycle lanes are a poor idea, worse when two-way, and place bicycle riders in dangerous positions way too often. There is a reason you never see them anymore in The Netherlands, Copenhagen, and similar places.

There is also the problem of how bicycle riders access destinations along Jay street. Rather difficult from the middle of a high traffic road.

Shared space was a great idea but has proven a failure in The Netherlands and are all being converted to standard designs. They worked well for a few years but then cars and trucks quickly dominated leaving things worse than before they were converted to shared space. For a more recent example take a walk down Exhibition Road in London. Shared space only works when motor traffic is limited to local access only and then for only a very short distance. Any through traffic creates problems.

The cross sections in the pdf arent dimensioned, but they and the picture above appear to be around 8 feet total, 4 in each direction, definitely not comfortable for passing (often even uncomfortable passing someone coming the other way!). Even if its 10, that’s not wide enough.

The Dutch minimum is 11′ for a bidirectional cyclepath, which I think is the width of Sands Street, where its comfortable to pass, or the narrower parts of the Hudson River Greenway, which is still too narrow because of its heavy use and lack of a pedestrian path.

Is the off ramp from the bridge the primary reason for not going with one-way tracks on either side? Is there a better way to route a SB bicycle & pedestrian path through this area? Under the ramp (and Bridge?) somehow?

Is the picture above backwards? Should the deadly bike lane be where the black car is? Also, does anyone know what the purpose of the sharks teeth are at this junction? You’ll see that occasionally where lights are routinely off or go in to blink mode, do they do that here?

What’s the best way to connect cyclists to the bridge path then?

I’d be OK with one on Delancey leading to Allen because left turns are banned for the entire distance and the bridge entrance is in the center already, but that’s the only location I can think of, and its a special case.

One of these on each side, at the absolute minimum.

A fixation on 2-way is really stupid. Dutch, Danish, and others tossed them out decades ago except where they do not parallel motor traffic and there is space to make them exceptionally wide. A 2-way parallel to motor traffic and where it must cross junctions with other roads is quite dangerous.