Bike Lanes on Track for Staten Island’s Clove Road Early This Summer

The project has three segments: sharrows north of Forest Avenue, narrowed car lanes to make room for bike lanes south of Broadway, and a road diet plus bike lanes in the middle. Map: DOT [PDF]
The project has three segments: sharrows north of Forest Avenue, narrowed car lanes to make room for bike lanes south of Broadway, and a road diet plus bike lanes in the middle. Map: DOT [PDF]
Clove Road is set to get bike lanes this summer, including a half-mile road diet, nearly two years after Staten Island Community Board 1 asked DOT for the street safety fixes.

Running past the Staten Island Zoo on the way from Wagner College to Port Richmond, Clove Road is a key diagonal connection across North Shore neighborhoods. The project covers 2.3 miles, from Richmond Terrace to Howard Avenue, just north of the Staten Island Expressway.

With 7.3 traffic deaths or serious injuries each year per mile, this section of Clove Road is a “high-crash corridor,” according to DOT [PDF].

The northernmost section, between Richmond Terrace and Forest Avenue, will get sharrows. On the southernmost section, from Broadway to Howard Avenue, existing car lanes will be narrowed to make room for five-foot, painted bike lanes on each side of the four-lane road.

For the half-mile in between, which runs from Forest Avenue to Broadway near the Staten Island Zoo, DOT is proposing a road diet. The street will be converted from four lanes in each direction to two, with a striped center median and turn lane. Painted bike lanes will be added in both directions.

The plan also nets 14 new parking spaces and converts approximately 103 parking spaces on Clove Road from overnight-only to 24-hour parking.

“It adds a bike lane, it adds pedestrian improvements, and it actually adds parking,” said Transportation Alternatives Staten Island organizer Greg Mihailovich. While there was some skepticism of the road diet from CB 1 members on Tuesday, Mihailovich said, most seem to believe the project “would protect pedestrians and it would help traffic flow.”

DOT first showed the plan to CB 1 last November [PDF], and presented a modified plan [PDF] on Tuesday to the CB 1 transportation committee. The new plan features additional turn lanes, including dedicated right-turn lanes at Purcell Street, Martling Avenue, and Broadway.

Despite general support, CB 1 has yet to vote on a resolution backing the proposal. “[DOT] will review suggestions from attendees before finalizing a plan,” an agency spokesperson said. “We anticipate the community board will support the project at its next full board meeting in May. DOT is aiming for implementation in the early summer.”

  • Ben_Kintisch

    Yay for Staten Island! Having just recently ridden in Tour de Staten Island, I can vouch for the fact that it does not have much in the bike lane department. Congrats SI activists for this nice victory. Get working on the next one!

  • Sunnyside resident

    This… this is insane.

    The intersection at Clove and Victory is choked as it is, and now we’re shrinking the lanes AND encouraging bicycles? To go where, exactly? I don’t get why policies that makes sense in the other 4 boroughs get applied incoherently on Staten Island. Unless this is coupled with finally adding right turn lanes on Clove, this will be a disaster. Even then, the morning queue south/eastbound on Clove will stretch back to the Zoo.

  • Yeah. I mean what if people got out of their cars because of these bike lanes and then started using bikes instead of cars to go along that road in the morning?

    What would happen then?

    Oh, wait.

  • I love it that this angry comment, incidentally, comes from someone identifying him/herself as a resident of a neighborhood many, many miles away from Staten Island.

  • Jesse

    The politics of livable streets infrastructure in New York:

    (a) Build livable streets infrastructure in outer borough: “But we DRIVE here! This isn’t Manhattan! Tell those smug latte-sipping, yoga mat-carrying yuppies to keep their fringe lifestyles on their own island.”
    (b) Don’t build livable streets infrastructure in outer borough: “How come rich Manhattanites get all the NICE THINGS?!”

    There are people in camp a and camp b all over the city. If your camp is the majority camp in your district and the city does something you don’t like, then you’re being tyrannized by the government and some wacky niche agenda (no doubt promoted by people who are richer and more powerful than you are). If your camp is the minority and the city does something you don’t like then you are being tyrannized by the majority who’s bought into some wacky formerly niche agenda (no doubt promoted by people who are richer and more powerful than you are).

    If your camp wins, regardless of whether you are in the majority or the minority, then the democratic process works!

  • millerstephen

    Sunnyside is a neighborhood in Queens, yes, but it is also a neighborhood of Staten Island.

  • Sunnyside Resident, count your blessings. In 2010 Staten Island politicians and the Staten Island Advance got the Father Capodanno bike lane removed after a fuss over a handful of motorists got ticketed for using it as a turning lane. The Richmond Terrace bike lane is used as a parking lot, and most of it’s markings have become illegible. The sharrows and line markings on Bay Street are, as seen below, disappearing like the Terrace bike lane has, and all complaints to the DOT seem to stop dead at the Staten Island Borough office. Staten Island City Council member Vincent Ignizio gets away with publically encouraging drivers to use bike lanes for parking, and encourages the NYPD to refrain from ticketing them.

    http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/11/18/cyclists-blindsided-by-citys-erasure-of-father-capodanno-bike-lane/

    http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/08/25/electeds-local-media-wage-war-on-staten-island-cyclists/

    James Oddo is now Borough President. Count your blessings, driver, you’ve got more local support than me and my bicycle do. If anybody should be complaining it’s me and my bicycle.

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