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Protected Bike Lanes

Six Inane Arguments Mayor Adams Is Using To Defend Ripping Up The Bedford Ave. Bike Lane

City bureaucrats are undermining years of data-driven work to make streets safer in service of that mayor's bid to remove the protected bike lane.

The Streetsblog Photoshop Desk|

Mayor Adams believes that if car drivers park illegally, well, there’s nothing he can do about it, according to court papers.

Legalese is one thing, but Mayor Adams is inventing an entirely new courthouse lexicon in his bid to rip up three blocks of protected bike lanes — and make cyclists less safe — on Brooklyn's Bedford Avenue.

The Adams administration is currently barred from implementing its plan to tear up parts of the protected bike lane, after a state appeals court judge issued an injunction last week. But the mayor's legal henchmen are still working diligently to justify the cheap election-year ploy, filing on Thursday another defense of their anti-safety position.

Buried in their clauses and "therefore's" is a bunch of baloney that City Hall hopes will convince a judge to let the Department of Transportation remove the protected bike lane.

You probably have better things to do than read the whole brief — so, presented for your amusement, here are the worst arguments from one of the worst cases the city is currently trying to argue in front of a judge:

'We're powerless to stop people from parking in pedestrian areas we installed'

The DOT installed the protected bike lane on Bedford Avenue last fall, over a year after first proposing the plan. The moment the bike lane went in, some Hasidic leaders decried the lane as dangerous and unfit for an area where school bus drivers drop off kids mid-block. The DOT then painted some mid-block pedestrian areas next to the bike lane, but since paint is not protection, drivers frequently park on them.

"DOT noted that the designated school bus dropoff zones were frequently blocked by parked cars," the city court filing states on page 5.

This is a bizarre argument for removing a protected bike lane; in essence, the city's Law Department is arguing that it is impossible for the City of New York to establish consequences for people parking in areas specifically built by the city to ensure that children are visible when they cross the street.

It's particularly ironic, given that one of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch's favorite arguments for her unreleased crackdown on cyclists is that bike riders want to live in a "consequence-free environment." But drivers do apparently live in that ramification-less world, based on the city's court argument.

'We are powerless to get school bus drivers to use the mid-block drop off zones we created for them'

Speaking of giving up before even trying to use the city's existing enforcement powers, on page 7 of the brief, Law Department attorneys Hannah Sarokin and Claude Platton told the judge they could not get school bus drivers to drop off students at the new painted bus stops because that "was not the custom ... in that area."

So it's the custom of the school bus drivers to violate safety rules? If that's the argument, well, the city is contending that it is powerless in the case of local custom. But we live in a society, don't we? Could bus drivers start driving the wrong way down the street at 40 mph and call it a custom? Of course not. That would be ridiculous.

And yet...

"In June 2025, DOT created a presentation assessing multiple options to address the community’s concerns about the three-block portion of the bicycle lane. In that presentation, DOT noted that the designated school bus loading zones had not worked as intended in the subject area," the lawyers wrote.

"Potential proposals to improve the loading zones, and particularly cyclist visibility, all relied on school buses using only the designated zones (and those zones remaining unobstructed), which was not the custom of school bus operators in that area."

In short: We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.

DOT even apparently suggested doing the bare minimum work of educating school bus drivers on the purpose of the school loading zones in a private meeting with Hasidic leaders, according to a presentation from June included in the court filing. But apparently that was simple impossible due to "local customs" on a public street used by people from across the city.

Instead, DOT leaders opted to torch their credibility and undermine the agency's own Vision Zero mission to make streets safer — submitting in an affidavit to the court that the protected bike lane had made the street less safe despite the city's data to the contrary.

'Removing the protected bike lane does not widen the amount of space for vehicles'

Going a bit further on the subject of DOT torching its credibility, on page 17, the city quoted DOT Deputy Commissioner Eric Beaton suggesting that putting parking back on the curb doesn't equate to giving extra space for motor vehicles:

"[P]etitioners assert that the modification constitutes a major transportation project because the city will 'widen the open street accessible to automobiles.' They provide no citation for that assertion, nor could they," Beaton said. "As DOT made clear, 'the number and usage of lanes on the street will remain the same, and the motor vehicle travel lanes will be entirely unchanged.'"

Who is supposed to believe that? The entire purpose of a parking-protected bike lane is to narrow the street in a way that paint simply can't. As the DOT itself is trying to convince a judge, the city can't be asked to be held responsible for preventing people from parking on paint. Also, anyone who has ever ridden a bike in this city has come across cars parked in or driving in painted bike lanes, especially this one.

Don't believe me? Well believe our tech overlords at Google:

Is that enough? Nah, let's keep going, the lawyers for the city think you and the judges on the Court of Appeals are stupid:

OK, I'm done.

'Removing the bike lane is simply a community compromise'

In a few places in the city's brief, lawyers suggested that tearing out a life-saving piece of protected infrastructure was the "compromise" solution, such as this passage from page 14: "An issue unique to the area required a solution equally unique, and the city developed a rational compromise to address it."

Of course, the idea of a compromise is stretched way past its breaking point when one side gets its maximal demand and the other side gets fucked. And as Peter Beadle, the attorney representing the plaintiffs suing to keep the bike lane in place, points out, the compromise was born of "a single meeting with one constituency." One constituency that literally booed a child who spoke up in favor of the bike lane.

'We don't care what the bill author says, this is not a major transportation project'

Chief among the city's arguments during this saga has been that what DOT is doing is not "removing" a bike lane (which it is) but merely "modifying" the lane, which means DOT didn't break the law requiring it to notify area elected officials and offer the community board a hearing on the plan.

In their filing, city attorneys pointed to the lower court ruling that "the city had a rational basis for its decision to modify the bicycle lane, that modification did not constitute a major transportation project under the Administrative Code."

Of course, when we asked the actual author of the bill, Council Member Lincoln Restler, what he made of the judge's decision that he never considered "modifications" of bike lanes, Restler was blunt: "That's horseshit," he told Streetsblog.

It's also at the very least intellectually dishonest for the DOT to claim that they simply don't give presentations or hold meetings on transportation projects that merely modify existing conditions. Here's a community board presentation on widening a pair of protected bike lanes and pedestrian bumpouts in Manhattan, which is an actual tweak as opposed to a wholesale abandonment of an existing design.

'Actually, don't believe our data'

One gets the sense that someone in the Law Department or the DOT just wants to completely tank any and all street safety efforts. How else do you explain the fact that, on page 6, these people basically tell the judge that NYPD/DOT traffic crash data is bunk.

"Though DOT noted that overall injuries among cyclists and pedestrians were down 47 percent in the portion of the Bedford Avenue at issue following the 2024 redesign, not all collisions are reported to police," the city write in its filing.

"This is particularly true in the area at issue, where the community commonly uses the private ambulance service Hatzalah, and DOT did not have full records from Hatzalah at the time it compiled its data."

Surely no one will seize on this in the future to make the case that DOT cooks the books to get the outcomes it wants.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but it at least feels to me that it is flagrant BS to tell a judge a campfire story about secret extra-dangerous outcomes that may or may not be happening on Bedford Avenue.

But Beadle is a lawyer and told me he specifically objects to the inclusion of the Hatzalah "data" in a letter he recently wrote to the court.

"Respondents rely on unsubstantiated claims of collisions between people riding bicycles and children along the subject stretch of bicycle lane that have not been properly documented or made part of the record in admissible form," Beadle wrote.

"However, the only actual substantiated crash data that is part of the record establishes that injuries overall on Bedford Avenue have been reduced by 47 percent, a dramatic decrease, which indicates reverting to the old design would significantly increase the risk of crashes and resultant injuries to everyone on Bedford Avenue – including the same children respondents claim are placed at risk by the current design. How can respondents rationally trade the current significant documented safety results of the redesign for something else, when they lack the very data needed for comparison?" he wrote.

That right there, that's lawyer speak for "This is Clown Town, your Honor."

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