BREAKING: Mayor Adams to Remove Bedford Avenue Protected Bike Lane Citing, Bizarrely, Safety

Breaking (or braking) news: Part of a protected bike lane that was installed last year to calm a notoriously dangerous Brooklyn corridor will be removed by the Adams administration, making the roadway less safe.

It is exceptionally rare for the city to remove an already installed protected bike lane, given how much community outreach the Department of Transportation is required to do in advance, but Mayor Adams issued his fatwa on Twitter late on Friday:

The tweet appears to cover the stretch between Willoughby Avenue (the mayor's tweet said "Street") and Flushing Avenue, though the full protected bike lane runs north from Dean Street to Flushing Avenue.

The notice comes about two weeks after Adams, under fire from Hasidic opponents of the bike lane, journeyed to Williamsburg for a town hall, where he heard plenty of supporters of the bike lane defend how it has made the roadway safer, but also heard from Hasidic Jewish leader who claim that moving part of the bike lane to Classon Street would be better.

Those leaders claim the bike lane has made the roadway less safe after several children dashed into the bike lane from illegally parked cars or school buses, straight into the wheels of oncoming bikes.

At the town hall, however, the mayor had been non-committal, punting to DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez, who made it clear that the bike lane is working.

"One thing that we should note is that before this bike lane from 2018 to 2022 … this is the area that had the second largest numbers of pedestrian fatalities and crashes in the city,” he said.

Adams vowed in 2021 to as mayor build 300 miles of bike lanes in his first term, but he has fallen way short of that goal, and has also fallen short of the mandated quotas of the Streets Master Plan. The Bedford Avenue lane was among those bogged in delays before construction started in 2024.

Since completion DOT has repeatedly made tweaks to the bike lane, including adding school bus loading zones, daylighted corners, and no standing areas, but drivers continually park in them, rendering them not only useless, but adding to the danger because children can’t be seen.

The Hasidic community hailed the mayor's announcement.

The irony of Hasidic opposition to bike lanes is that Hasidic children have long been fodder for local car drivers. In 2024, a Hasidic driver struck and killed 10-year-old Yitty Wertzberger at Wythe Avenue and Wallabout Street, near where the bike lane went in.

And just days before the bike lane was completed in October 2024, a man was killed by a speeding hit-and-run driver, a symbol of how reckless drivers can terrorize a neighborhood.

Moving the bike lane to Classon Avenue, as the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg have demanded, has been criticized by street safety advocates because it would put cyclists on a chaotic stretch of roadway that serves as both an exit and an entrance ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Informed of the news of the removal of the bike lane, Council Member Lincoln Restler just texted us, "Awful." In a subsequent tweet, the blind-sided lawmaker said, "Instead of identifying solutions to enhance safety for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers, the mayor is making a purely political decision to rip out a bike lane with no alternative. This reckless and arbitrary decision will lead to more tragic crashes, and it will be his fault."

And his counterpart Chi Ossé tweeted, "The protected bike lane makes EVERYONE safer. Would the mayor prefer that people check the road for oncoming cyclists before crossing to the sidewalk, or be potentially flattened by a 2 ton car? Shameful and dangerous decision."

The removal of the bike lane by mayoral fiat appears to violate city law, which requires notification of "affected council members, senators, members of Assembly, and community boards" when the city "will ... add or remove a bicycle lane of any length."

In this case, no notification was given.

The reversal joins a raft of bikelash policies Mayor Adams and his First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro have decreed as the election for his replacement has heated up.

In late April, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch began ramping up traffic tickets to criminal court summonses for e-bike and bike riders, and last week, the mayor declared he would lower the speed limit for battery-powered vehicles to 15 miles per hour. City Hall has also enlisted interns to deploy propaganda confusing e-bikes with illegal mopeds.

Adams also abruptly intervened in the 11th hour to stall the Queensboro Bridge pedestrian path opening in March, before relenting two months later.

As such, the mayor's Bedford Avenue assault quickly became fodder for the mayoral race. When told of the decision, Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani condemned it.

“It's one more example of Eric Adams ripping up a bike lane in response to a special interest instead of the public interest of keeping people safe," Lander said. "In a Lander administration, when the DOT finds that a bike lane or a bus lane, or daylighting, whatever it is, will keep New Yorkers safe, I will implement it. And it doesn't matter whether it's a wealthy donor from a film studio or some political supporters.”

Mamdani, who was at the same event at which both candidates endorsed each other, added: “Safety has to be paramount in any decision that's being made, and sadly, that's not been the case under Mayor Adams, and we have so many instances where we have seen this administration play politics with people's lives.

"Thinking about the Queensboro Bridge, I hear so often from constituents who simply were terrified at the prospect of having to share a roadway that doesn't even fit the entire width of a bicycle, and yet, for weeks, we had an entire roadway that they could have been using, that would have been safe for them ... and yet the mayor refused to open it," Mamdani added. "And this is time and time again. We have to have in New York City where safety is paramount. 
We have to have one where we deliver protected bike lanes and bus lanes, and where we fulfill the laws of the street's master plan.”

The saga of the Bedford Avenue bike lane dates back years. The Bloomberg administration installed a painted lane on Bedford slightly north of the current controversy, but still through the Hasidic community in 2008, but it was later removed.

Advocacy for the current lane started in earnest in 2023, when Good Co, the Black-led bike club, spearheaded a petition drive with Transportation Alternatives. The group's focused their efforts between Flushing Avenue and Dean Street, where Bedford and Rogers avenues merge at the famed statue of Ulysses Grant, and the roadway becomes a northbound war zone befitting the beloved Union general: three jammed lanes for cars and trucks, plus a bus lane, but no bike lane at all.

The city's own data and independent crash-tracking efforts showed at the time that Bedford could use road-calming. Bedford Avenue also runs through what the DOT calls Tier 1 and Tier 2 Priority Investment Areas, locations the DOT says are areas with high population densities and under-served neighborhoods that have not gotten their share of street safety improvements, in the Streets Master Plan.

In the first five months of 2024 — before the October 2024 installation of the bike lane — there were 88 reported crashes on the stretch between the Grant statue and Flushing Avenue, injuring 51 people, including six cyclists and 10 pedestrians.

In the five full months of this year — after the installation — crashes dropped by 18 percent to 72 total reported crashes. And total injuries dropped by 25 percent to 38.

This is a breaking story. Please keep hitting refresh. We are writing as fast as we can.

— with Kevin Duggan, Dave Colon and Sophia Lebowitz