Bedford Ave. Protected Bike Lane Would Benefit Residents, Businesses: Data

A huge portion of the thousands of cyclists who use Bedford Avenue between Dean Street and Flushing Avenue every day are using it to get to homes and businesses in Bedford-Stuyvesant or Clinton Hill, a new data analysis of the corridor shows, debunking the common belief that street safety projects aren't built for the benefit of people who live in a given neighborhood.

The data shows that the long-delayed effort to create the neighborhood's first protected bike lane would provide street safety benefits specifically for the people who live in and support the local economy of Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill. Local businesses have in fact stood up to the support the protected bike lane proposal, with 41 businesses on the stretch between Dean and Flushing signing on to a letter backing the project.

"We have over a thousand people coming through Artshack every week, and half of them are kids," McKendree Key, the founder of Bedford Avenue ceramic studio Artshack said at a rally in March. "Most of them are coming on foot and lots of them are coming on bikes. Every day I try to bike down the bike lane to go home and it's just always, always blocked by vehicles."

On a typical day in the fall of 2023, about 8,300 cyclists traveled at some point on Bedford Avenue between Dean Street and Flushing Avenue, according to data compiled by Replica, an independent traffic modeling firm that uses anonymized cell phone and transaction data, connected vehicle, and Census counts and other publicly available data.

Replica's data crunch also showed that 56 percent of the cyclists using the stretch of Bedford Avenue where the Department of Transportation has proposed turning a painted bike lane into a protected bike lane were people of color, and 45 percent of them ended their trips in Bed-Stuy or Clinton Hill.

And of the cyclists heading to one of those two neighborhoods, 60 percent of them ended their trip at a residential location, and 29 percent of them ended their trip at a retail location. Half of the people showing up to a retail spot on their bike were there to shop, while another third were there to eat a meal and 8 percent were showing up to work.

While everyone cycling on a given street deserves to do so safely, the data for Bedford Avenue shows that plenty of cyclists live in Bed-Stuy right now and could use the safety benefit like upgrading a painted bike lane to a parking protected one.

"It's clear that the bike lane on Bedford Avenue is not just serving pass-through traffic; there's a considerable amount of people local to Community Board 3 and Bed-Stuy that rely on that facility to go to work, come home, and to frequent local businesses," said Replica analyst Arthur Getman.

The DOT revealed its plan for a protected bike lane on Bedford Avenue last year, and an agency rep told Brooklyn Community Board 3 that the city was going to install the upgrade in the back half of 2023.

But after the April community board meeting, the DOT buried the project and gave no public updates for the rest of the year. Last November, Council Member Chi Ossé revealed that the DOT told him that the bike lane was delayed until "at least" the spring of 2024, but as of March this year, Ossé said that the DOT was still dithering around with community outreach.

Delaying Bedford with little to no explanation is part of an Adams administration pattern for transportation projects. Adams's City Hall has delayed, watered down or buried bus lanes in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx and bike lanes in Brooklyn, all on the advice of political actors in the mayor's orbit like Tiffany Raspberry, Menashe "The Chairman" Shapiro, Ingird Lewis-Martin and Richard Bearak.

In the meantime, the waiting game is not having any beneficial effects for anyone on Bedford Avenue. The number of crashes on Bedford between Flushing Avenue and Dean Street in the first six months of the year jumped from 87 crashes injuring eight cyclists, seven pedestrians and 36 motorists in 2023 to 97 crashes injuring six cyclists, 12 pedestrians and 50 motorists and killing one pedestrian in 2024.