Six blocks down, dozens more to go.
The Ocean Parkway bike lane remains in terrible shape, even as the city wraps up a years-long project to patch up a half-dozen blocks of the beleaguered southern Brooklyn path.
Those limited fixes for the chronic cracks and bumps in the country's first bike lane date back five years, when local electeds threw funding at the Parks Department to do the work, and advocates called on officials to figure out a better way to maintain this key bike and pedestrian transportation infrastructure.
"You’ve got the oldest bike path in America and in a lot of places it doesn’t look like it’s been maintained since the 1890s," said John Tomac of Bike South Brooklyn.
The 5.4-mile, 1894 mall connects Prospect Park to Coney Island and it is the only protected bike lane for miles in southern Brooklyn, but its disrepair has long rendered the once-glorious bikeway barely usable.
The city finally began fixing up less than a mile of it between Avenues R and X for $4.1 million last year — funding first kicked in by then-Council Member Mark Treyger all the way back in 2019.
Construction is set to wrap up in November, eight months behind its last completion date in March, according to its online tracker.
But after that stretch is done, more than four miles of Ocean Parkway still wait on repairs, and the city has no concrete plan.
That's because the underfunded Parks agency doesn't have its own dedicated unit or contractor for greenway resurfacing, and has to go through a multi-year capital project process each time it wants to renovate a pathway.
“They’re on month 16 now and they’re still wrapping up the resurfacing work of six blocks of greenway," said Brian Hedden, of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. "Those six blocks are not even remotely the entire problem on Ocean Parkway."
Greenways across the city have fallen into dangerous disrepair as a result of poor maintenance, as Streetsblog has extensively documented.
Much of Ocean Parkway looks like this as roots break through the surface, causing dangerous uneven pavement that is especially treacherous at night:
In more hopeful news, nearly $100 million in federal funding came raining down to help the city finish a key greenway connector in uptown Manhattan, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on Friday.
The cash will fund a 1.35-mile "grade-separated bikeway" below the elevated subway tracks on 10th Avenue, between W. 201st Street and the Broadway Bridge.
It's backed by $96 million in federal grant money, and will look similar to Brooklyn's Flushing Avenue or Tillary Street, but with bus boarding islands, according to DOT spokesman Vin Barone.
Readers of Streetsblog already knew that the city had planned to build some sort of protected bike lane there by 2027, but the project now won't break ground until 2029 because of federal approvals the city needs for the larger work, Barone said.
The city must still figure out how to properly maintain the greenways it already has, advocates said. There's no need to look further than road repaving for cars, which the Department of Transportation does without all the fuss that Parks faces for simple repair jobs, noted one bike lane booster.
"They need to go to contract for basic stuff rather than having an on-call asphalt or concrete contractor, or work with DOT on it," said Jon Orcutt, director of Advocacy at Bike New York, who used to work at DOT under the Bloomberg administration. "[Ocean Parkway] remains one of the poster children for a new greenway maintenance regime."
When it does do the work, the Parks Department puts cyclists in harm's way by not providing safe detours, as riders uptown have learned the hard way as they face two simultaneous closures this fall along the Hudson River Greenway, the country's busiest bike lane.
Parks spokesperson Chris Clark pointed to a 2023 announcement by Mayor Adams that pledged $7.25 million for 40 miles of new greenways across the city.
That press release included a section called "Historic Brooklyn," which will "explore" extensions at the southern tip of Ocean Parkway and the east end of Eastern Parkway, and "establish new design and maintenance standards" for both routes.
There is still no timeline for that work.
