Hey, #bikenyc, you just set an all-time record — but you won't get your gold medal until after the next Olympics.
In June, almost 278,000 bike trips were made on the Williamsburg Bridge, an all-time high that surpasses the previous record of 267,000 in September 2020. And from January through July of this year, bike trips over the Brooklyn-Manhattan span are up 11.6 percent compared to last year — and up nearly 40 percent from the same period in 2019 (the last fully pre-pandemic period).
Yet those soaring numbers won't soon translate to any new infrastructure to handle the influx and induce more cycling — though you could be forgiven for thinking it would. After all, city Department of Transportation officials announced in February 2023 that they'd received $18 million in federal funding to put Delancey Street on a road diet and bolster the existing crowded two-way bike lane on the south side of the center median.
What's happened in the 18 months since that announcement of federal funding? According to the DOT, not that much.
The design process is underway, but a final design won't be approved early 2025 at the earliest, with a four-year construction starting that fall, the agency said. The price tag for the entire still-undesigned project is now $65 million: $37 million from the city funding and the rest from the feds.
The predicted 2029 ribbon-cutting (at the earliest) is a glass half-full for one prominent advocate.
"The bad news is that a better Delancey Street bikeway is still a ways off, and public construction in the city generally still needs leadership to allow it to happen efficiently," said Jon Orcutt of Bike New York. "The good news is that the project will be a good one, with hard separation, a wider bikeway and hopefully relief from the cruddy street surface we suffer on Delancey today."
People have felt unsafe on Delancey for years. In 2012, activists first started calling for design changes, citing nine fatalities and 742 injuries in the five years between 2006 and 2010 on the roadway between the Williamsburg Bridge to the Bowery.
Delancey has gotten safer, thanks to the two-way protected bike lane and some pedestrian infrastructure installed in 2018. In the five full years between 2019 and 2023, the number of deaths dropped to one and the number of injuries dropped 46 percent to 401, according to city stats.
Other counties heard from
Meanwhile, cyclists are also setting records on Kent Avenue, where DOT has no plans to provide more cycling infrastructure, even though several massive developments and several parks have come online or are about to.
In July, more than 157,000 cyclists passed the DOT's counter on the Williamsburg bike path. That also beat a record set in 2020.
And the bike trips from May through July of this year are higher than any previous May through July.
"The Greenway has been built out on Kent and Flushing Avenues around the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on West Street in Greenpoint ... and should now be constructed through the North Side of Williamsburg," four advocacy groups wrote to DOT earlier this year, even before the record-setting month. "Meanwhile ... Bushwick Inlet Park will one day span at least 27 waterfront acres west of the Greenway, and Marsha P. Johnson State Park houses the flagship destination
for Smorgasburg.
"Together, these waterfront parks attract thousands of residents and tourists toward the East River, with few options to safely cross Kent Avenue once there," continued the letter by Orcutt, plus the leaders of Transportation Alternatives, the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, and the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance. "Today the Kent Avenue bike lane is dysfunctional. ... The bike lane sees chronic intrusion by motor vehicles with no enforcement or management by city government."
The DOT's response did not please locals, with a spokesperson telling Gothamist that the city’s priority is “providing safe and accessible corridors for transportation” for “historically underserved communities” (aka not the wealthy north Brooklyn waterfront).
It may not be a concern for DOT, but it is a concern for local pedestrians and cyclists. In 2020, the last time Kent Avenue was experiencing close to these numbers, only one cyclist and two pedestrians were injured in the first seven months of the year. This year, it's two cyclists and two pedestrians — low numbers, but trending in the wrong direction.
Cyclists also set new records on the Queensboro Bridge in June (with 209,440 rides), but in that case, the city is finally at work on creating new pedestrian space on the southernmost lane of the bridge so at least cyclists don't have to share their two-way bike path with walkers.
And in July, cyclists set a new record over the Pulaski Bridge between Brooklyn and Queens, making 127,805 trips.
