Eyes on the Street: NYPD Cedes 29th Street Protected Bike Lane to Illegally Parked Drivers

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It took two deaths to get DOT to install protected bike lanes on 26th and 29th streets in Midtown. Now that the lanes are in, what will it take for NYPD and DOT to keep them clear?

A tipster sent the above photo of 29th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, where drivers are parking in the curbside bike lane and adjacent buffer, forcing people on bikes to jostle with motor vehicle traffic.

While the 29th Street bike lane east of Seventh Avenue appears to be working out well, crews still haven’t gotten around to painting it green. This segment is “blocked every day like this,” according to our tipster.

This is the situation the new street design was intended to fix. NYPD should be doing its part to keep drivers out, but being NYPD, cops are making things worse:

It shouldn’t take this long to make a new bike lane usable. Here we are halfway through summer and 29th Street is still a work in progress.

  • https://twitter.com/robogreen/status/1026110953866313729

    bonus content–not just an a$$hole cop car, but a CHAPLAIN car! sadly, not charlie chaplin, and also apparently being a NYC police chaplain you get to drive an 80k BMW for reasons.

  • Daphna

    Let’s take all those concrete jersey barriers that clutter up the Hudson River Greenway and put them in the buffer area next to the 29th Street bike lane.

  • crazytrainmatt

    I’ve gotta lay the blame on DOT for this one: I think it’s been two months since they started painting lines and still half of it is not green. The protected sections are an unusual parking arrangement for cross-streets so of course if drivers see one car parked curbside they all fall in line. DOT needed to get the paint down and cones in much more quickly in until enough people figure it out. Some of the promised blocks look like they haven’t done a thing: on 26th between 1st and 2nd, a curbside unprotected lane was supposed to replace parking along one side, but I wonder now if they are just slow or they’ve lost their courage.

    Another problem with this lazy painting schedule is that drivers on many blocks seem too timid to park right up to the traffic-side white line, and instead park a foot or two in. This happens on the wider protected lanes on the avenues, but here it’s a pretty thin line between the door zone and the meandering pedestrian / peeing dog zone.

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