Mayor Adams's famous unreleased door-to-door survey about the Underhill Avenue bike boulevard found overwhelming support for the traffic redesign, which explains why the mayor wasn't eager to share the results.
After Hizzoner paused the construction of the nearly completed redesign in 2023 and ordered the Department of Transportation to go door to door to re-solicit opinions on the Underhill Avenue bike boulevard, residents said they were cool with it. The project was eventually finished in early 2024, but the results of the survey were never shared — and the Department of Transportation even rejected a Streetsblog Freedom of Information request seeking the results. (We sued, but that case is pending.)
The DOT eventually gave the results to another person who requested them — and that individual shared the data with Streetsblog: the door-to-door effort found that the redesign was broadly popular on the block and in the neighborhood. Almost 60 percent of the residents of Underhill Avenue supported the bike boulevard design. And 70 percent of respondents in the broader Prospect Heights neighborhood said they supported the review and over 80 percent of other respondents had positive feelings about the design.
All in all, the results mirror other surveys done before the endlessly surveyed bike boulevard was completed. A 2021 DOT survey found that 86 percent of respondents were in favor of making permanent changes to Underhill. After Adams paused the project, the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Corporation got over 2500 signatures on a petition asking for the administration to finish it.
The bike boulevard has worked. There were only eight crashes and two injuries total on Underhill Avenue in 2024, compared to 20 crashes and 10 injuries in 2023. But even as the redesign has made the street safer, opponents are trying to undo the project with yet another survey going over every piece of the design and asking if people want to restore the street's unsafe design.
"Any project of this magnitude warrants a thoughtful review to ensure that the implemented changes align with the original goals," said a representative from Brooklyn Community Board 8, which sent the survey. "It's also an opportunity to identify aspects that may need adjustments."
Opponents of the redesign, the United Neighbors of Prospect and Crown Heights, promoted the survey as something the DOT asked for from the neighborhood.
However, a spokesperson for the DOT told Streetsblog the agency has nothing to do with the new effort.
A neighborhood activist who's supported the redesign throughout the pause of the project said the relatively minor change has been so contentious because the mayor never stood behind the design created by his own DOT.
"That we're still here speaks to this administration's unwillingness to get out in front of the policies that they're implementing and really champion them." said Alex Morano, a volunteer chair of Transportation Alternatives Brooklyn. "The administration keeps indulging [opponents] over and over, and we're in this situation where there's conflict in the neighborhood that could have been completely avoided if, from day one, the administration was just out out in front of this, saying, 'This is what we're doing. This is a good policy for these reasons. And if you have questions, come to us and we'll talk you through it.'"
