Sunset Park will have to wait for the next mayor to get the safe streets it was promised years ago.
The city again delayed a protected bike lane on Third Avenue in the lower-income Brooklyn neighborhood until at least 2026, Department of Transportation officials told a local community group, a setback that followed pushback by local business groups opposed to a road diet on the deadly strip.
DOT won't move forward this year at all on an overhaul of the chaotic speedway under the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, according to Community Board 7 District Manager Jeremy Laufer, who relayed an update from an agency liaison last month.
"We should not expect to hear from them [DOT] in 2025 and there will be no action, no safety measures added to Third Avenue in 2025," Laufer said at the CB 7's full board meeting in March.
The agency told him it wanted to do – wait for it – "additional outreach," a refrain that has become City Hall's kiss of death any time Mayor Adams decides to ax or water down street safety projects either on his own volition or as a sop to a cohort car-first critics (see McGuinness Boulevard, Ashland Place, Underhill Avenue, Fordham Road or the Queensboro Bridge pedestrian path).
"They say that they need to do additional outreach in the community for residents and businesses and other parties, and say they will get back to us in 2026. Don’t know if I believe that," Laufer said.
DOT officials previously said they could implement the changes by the summer or fall of 2024, but after pushback by some local businesses, led by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, DOT postponed its plans last fall.
The board's chair accused the agency of giving in to these groups's unproven fears that removing a lane would harm their operations, and likened the backtrack to Mayor Adams wavering on other street safety projects like the notorious McGuinness Boulevard saga in Greenpoint.
"We’ve been fighting for this for over a decade, it feels like the city is acquiescing to some of the businesses and the Chamber," Julio Peña told Streetsblog, referring to safety efforts that date back to the Bloomberg administration. "It reeks of what happened on McGuinness Boulevard.
"It’s throwing their hands up and waiting for someone to be injured or killed," Peña added.
The board more than a year ago had endorsed near-unanimously that DOT remove one of three lanes in each direction of Third Avenue, between Prospect Avenue and 62nd Street, to make room for a parking-protected bike lane and shortened pedestrian crossings.
It was one of three options the agency put on the table. The other two options included keeping three lanes each way while adding a painted curb extension next to the outer lanes, and another that would have removed a lane and added painted pedestrian spaces next to the median as well. Only option three included a protected bike lane.
The changes cannot come soon enough, as DOT logged 14 fatalities on Third Avenue between 2016 and 2023, including four cyclists and four pedestrians —more than three times the amount compared to nearby Fourth Avenue, which has a protected bike lane design the road diet on Third would mirror.
Third Avenue has long been a scar cutting through the industrial waterfront, with trucks and cars barreling down the roads six surface street lanes, along with the six elevated lanes on the highway above.
"It’s dark, it’s dangerous, the roads are crumbling, it’s an absolute hot mess," Peña said.
Here are just some of the preventable deaths on Third Avenue in recent history:
In 2019 drivers killed 27-year-old Fernando Trejo near 52nd Street and 26-year-old Hugo Garcia near 28th Street within the first month of that year. Later that year, a tractor-trailer driver fatally mowed down 30-year-old Em Samolewicz after she was doored into traffic near 35th Street, and in December, a truck driver killed 85-year-old Brendan Gill near 39th Street. The following October, 31-year-old Clara Kang was killed by a motorcyclist while biking home from her shift as a nurse at NYU Langone near 56th Street.
DOT suggested the three options for Third Avenue, after "extensive community outreach," according to the agency's presentation, including three workshops, merchant surveys, and an online feedback map.
But that was not enough, according to Brooklyn Chamber President and CEO Randy Peers, who gave the board an earful last year for endorsing a "radical" proposal without consulting his group, nearby Industry City, and other establishments in the area.
"[We] were upset to learn that the community board voted on the Third Avenue redesign option that was the most disruptive and radical option with little or no consultation or input from the thousands of businesses that are going to be negatively impacted," Peers said at a board meeting in March of 2024. "Their voices will not be silenced or dismissed."
The business group then circulated its own web survey with leading questions like "How important is a protected bike lane on Third Avenue, given the existing six-mile long protected bike lane on Fourth Avenue and bike lane on Fifth Avenue?"
The questionnaire also asked what impacts businesses expected from a road diet — only offering negative answers, such as "significantly impact loading and unloading operations" and "reduce customer volume due to traffic and lack of parking options."
Peers claimed that survey respondents opposed the changes as too "disruptive," but declined to provide the questionnaire's results.
"The feedback was clear, the road diet was not welcomed and would be very disruptive," he told Streetsblog in a statement. "Why the community board immediately defaulted to the road diet plan is unclear, and the vote was a big disregard to the generational businesses that have been part of Sunset Park longer than most of the board members themselves."
DOT did not release any forecasts for a road diet on Third Avenue as part of its proposal, but a citywide review of other lane removals have shown they reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured on average by around 30 percent, according to agency data.
The area's Council Member Alexa Avilés said locals were "excited" about redesigning the avenue, but stopped short of calling for the DOT to see the road diet through.
"Since the proposal for a redesign was first put on the table, multiple stakeholders have expressed interest and excitement around redesigning a critical transportation corridor in our community," Avilés said in a statement. "My office will continue to ensure that all stakeholders are appropriately consulted."
Peers previously came out against the road diet on McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint, which he also claimed would harm businesses along that northern Brooklyn corridor. Adams watered down the northern portion of that roadway plan, after the politically influential local soundstage company Broadway Stages got the ear of the mayor's then-advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin. Lewis-Martin resigned in December amid corruption charges.
The mayor, who up until recently faced his own bribery allegations in federal court, largely stayed out of many livable streets fights over the past months. But Hizzoner has now found a second wind, calling off a planned opening of a pedestrian path on the Queensboro Bridge, and leaving the popular open streets program out to dry.
A DOT spokesperson did not deny the delay until next year, and said the agency would collect more "feedback." The official also pointed to a separate project Hamilton Avenue and Third Avenue, where the city is adding a two-way bike lane to an expanded sidewalk as part of the Brooklyn waterfront greenway. That redesign ends at 29th Street, where cyclists divert onto Second Avenue, and does not reduce the number of car lanes on Third Avenue.
"We continue to collect feedback for this project as we deliver a variety of projects in the area—including the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway grade-separated bike path at Hamilton Avenue and new concrete medians, curb extensions, and signalized crossings along Third Avenue to enhance pedestrian safety and reduce crossing times," said Anna Correa in a statement.
