Cyclists Fuming Over Mayor Adams’s Removal of Bedford Avenue Protected Bike Lane

Cyclists pulled out the full gamut of expletives on Monday as the word spread that Mayor Adams will tear up part of the Bedford Avenue bike lanes after hearing some complaints from non-cyclists in Williamsburg.

“What the fuck!” Mel Regalario, who was commuting to work on Bedford Avenue in the soon-to-be-unsafe zone between Willoughby and Flushing avenues. “Where are we supposed to ride?”

“Unwise and unsafe,” added Jeanette Samyn, a Bedford-Stuyvesant resident who was also using the bike lane on Monday to get to work in Williamsburg. “I don’t think he cares if we die.”

The mayor said he reached his decision to return the roadway to its previous status — which the Department of Transportation says was one of the most dangerous in the city — after members of the Hasidic community said that some children had been struck by cyclists. The mayor later put out his own propaganda video showing cherry-picked and edited video footage of children being struck by cyclists after running into the bike lane from illegally parked cars or double-parked buses.

The video did not mention Williamsburg children who were killed by drivers, including Yitty Wertzberger last year.

Helen, a cyclist on her way to Manhattan, didn’t believe the incidents warranted the abrupt removal of the lane because there’s always a design or enforcement fix.

“Sometimes [a parked] car is an issue because it’s blocking the view,” she said, adding that school buses routinely drop off kids between illegally parked cars, making it nearly impossible for cyclists to see them when they run across the bike lane. 

City officials did respond to complaints after the bike lane was installed in October by painting mid-block pedestrian islands, loading zones and crosswalks, but they did not implement physical improvements such as bus boarding islands to separate pedestrians and cyclists. Such a design would require using parking spaces for safety measures, a move that the mayor resisted, likely under the belief that car drivers cherish using the curbside lane for parking.

As such, several cyclists saw the mayor’s move as blatantly political — just as when he truncated the McGuinness Boulevard safety improvement on behalf of a powerful business interest, and campaign contributor, in Greenpoint.

“There’s a very important voting bloc that’s using their leverage over the mayor to remove the bike lane,” said Josh, a Williamsburg cyclist.

But other voting blocs want the mayor to follow city law and install 300 miles of protected bike lanes and 200 miles of dedicated bus lanes — a requirement under the Streets Master Plan that Adams has failed to meet.

“I just feel like he’s gonna do anything to kill as many people as he can,” said one cyclist, who declined to give his name. 

Hasidic leaders said they want the protected bike lane to shift to Classon Avenue, but Regalario cautioned the mayor against that scheme.

“I had a friend who got squished by a semi truck near the BQE there,” he said, citing the fact that Classon is an on- and off-ramp to the highway.

He said he didn’t know if he’d keep biking if Adams couldn’t ensure his safety.

Samyn echoed that.

“I don’t really know what I’m gonna do because there’s nothing that feels safe around here except this bike lane,” she said.