Thursday’s Headlines: Car-First Fifth Avenue Edition

Fifth Avenue was once slated to become a bus-only shopping corridor. After that, it was slated for a protected bike lane.

Now the city wants to turn it into a "pedestrian-first corridor," in the words of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez. But the plan Rodriguez and Mayor Adams feted at a press conference on Wednesday keeps two lanes for cars and scraps a bus lane, all while dedicating zero space for people biking.

This "pedestrian-first corridor" will include wider sidewalks, planters and seating — but for $550 million, the mayor said at Wednesday's announcement.

"We're going to double the sidewalk space ... so that the avenue is safer to cross, green the avenue with more than 230 tree planters and adding new seating and better lighting," Hizzoner said.

Adams first announced the redesign in the fall, after a half-decade of negotiations with mom and pop stores like Armani and Tiffany and Co. Those retail interests banded together to shape the redesign process after the Department of Transportation first floated banning most cars from the strip to speed buses.

Thanks to the efforts of Dolce and Gabbana and others, New Yorkers and tourists who spend their hard-earned money on the avenue will get more space to walk — but cars will still get the majority of the roadway space, with no dedicated safe space for people biking. Just 12 percent of people who shop on Fifth Avenue arrive by personal vehicle, according to DOT surveys.

At the same time, more than 110,000 daily bus riders across 40 routes travel on Fifth Avenue — many of them stopping at its many stores. Those bus riders got a second bus lane for faster service under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio (who killed a DOT plan to turn the strip into a mostly car-free busway). Under the plan forced on the city by car-first business leaders, they won't even have that.

"Mayor Adams's Fifth Avenue Half Billion is a huge corporate giveaway at New Yorkers' expense," Riders Alliance spokesman Danny Pearlstein said in a statement excoriating the mayor's announcement. "Slow, unreliable bus service on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue wastes precious time for more than 100,000 working New Yorkers every single day. Riders need a Fifth Avenue busway and a mayor who puts our needs first and prioritizes our time on busy city streets."

They used to say the streets here were paved in gold — really they're paved in concrete that for the lucky few turns into gold.

Meanwhile, Gothamist panned the plan as "money to upgrade [the] Fifth Avenue shopping district," while The Post ran with Rodriguez's "pedestrian-first" message to frame the project as an attack on cyclists and drivers.

In other news:

• Another fake Sean Duffy congestion pricing deadline has come and gone. (Daily News)
• The Knicks lost the first game of the NBA's Eastern Conference Finals in heartbreaking fashion, but at least they all got NYC streets temporarily named after themselves. (ESPN)
• New York's anti-bike lane, anti-congestion pricing deputy mayor jury rigs his cell phone to make it more like a Blackberry. (Gothamist)
• New video showed a terrifying — but fortunately not deadly — Bushwick hit-and-run. (ABC7NY)
• The NYC Ferry to the Rockaways is getting more service, and a fare hike. (Gothamist)
• The Times lent some friendly ink to the Central Park Conservancy's effort to redesign the park's drives to "avoid conflict."
• Council Member Inna Vernikov <3's Streetsblog. (Inna Vernikov via X)
• ICYMI: Mayoral candidates Adrienne Adams, Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos and Scott Stringer all oppose the NYPD's bike crackdown: