You're killing us, Mr. Mayor.
The Adams administration has completed its work to remove a protected bike lane on Bedford Avenue and, as expected, it no longer protects cyclists.
Bike riders are now dangerously squeezed in between parked cars and fast-moving traffic on Bedford between Willoughby and Flushing avenues, as drivers revert to doing ... exactly the same thing they were doing when the Department of Transportation decided enough was enough and installed the protected bike lane last year.
"A bunch of cars were parked in the bike lane, and suddenly I had to pass those cars by going into traffic, which is unsafe,” said one cyclist who gave the name Audrey. "Do I feel less safe now? Yes, absolutely."
Asked about Mayor Adams, she expressed optimism for the future.
“Hopefully, he’ll soon be out of the picture," she said.
The effort to protect cyclists along Bedford Avenue has proceeded in fits and starts over the last two decades. But help was slowly on the way: Bedford between Dean Street and Flushing Avenue was named a Vision Zero Priority Corridor because 641 people were injured, 29 seriously, between 2016 and 2020. It retained that ignominious status with five pedestrian fatalities in 2021 and 2022.
But the Department of Transportation finally acted, completing a parking-protected bike lane on the strip late last year — a move that the agency said reduced total injuries on the full 1.5-mile stretch by "more than 12 percent" and "by more than 38 percent for pedestrians." Notably, total injuries in the stretch between DeKalb and Flushing "are down 47 percent."
Nonetheless, after installation, members of the United Jewish Organizations, a powerful Hasidic group based in nearby Williamsburg, claimed the lane was dangerous to school children being dropped off by private buses. The leaders of the organization invited Mayor Adams to a "town hall" meeting at which they claimed to speak for the community, though many speakers were from the actual neighborhood and spoke in favor of the bike lane.
Nonetheless, Mayor Adams overruled his DOT and ordered the bike lane converted from a protected to a painted lane between Willoughby and Flushing avenues. There was a bit of back-and-forth in courtrooms, but a judge eventually allowed the work to commence. And that demolition project was completed swiftly.
Immediately, the unsafe conditions returned. Cyclists obviously noticed.
“It’s not safe because the people double-park their cars,” said rider Sylvie Courey. "I don’t like it. I’m really bummed about it. It’s really bad.”
Street safety experts rued the day.
"Exactly what we predicted and warned about is happening — the unprotected bike lane is being treated as a parking lane by local drivers, forcing people riding bikes into dangerous traffic," said Peter Beadle, a lawyer who argued to save the bike lane on behalf of two area residents and Transportation Alternatives.
"DOT itself said in court that reverting to the old [painted bike lane] design would make the street less safe, and what we are already seeing just days after the protected lane was ripped out gives credence to that prediction, placing everyone at greater risk."
He promised to sue if anyone is seriously hurt or killed, citing a precedent in New York State that a municipality is liable when someone is injured on roadways whose unsafe conditions are known to officials.
Jon Orcutt, a former DOT official who now advocates for the cycling group Bike New York, saw pictures taken by Streetsblog reporters and was aghast.
“These images are a travesty, but not unexpected," he said. "The Adams Administration doesn’t care if people are hurt or killed in traffic.”
Believe it or not, it's not even that simple, said the 13-year-old man who sued the city to protect the bike lane.
"This has nothing to do with public safety — and everything to do with the mayor choosing to ally himself with an extreme, 'fringe' ultra-Orthodox view that banned bicycles over a century ago because [a child] got his tzitzis [religious garb] caught in bicycle spokes," said the young Hebrew scholar Rafael Herzfeld. "The decision to remove the bike lane is an abomination — for cyclists, for Hasidic children, and for pedestrians. It’s a colossal waste of public resources that panders to a tiny minority opinion. The truth is, 98 percent of Orthodox Jews — including most Hasidim in Brooklyn — believe biking is perfectly kosher. It’s dumbfounding that the mayor is siding with an extreme 120-year-old ban rooted in a tzitzis accident from the 1800s."
There's evidence that the bike lane removal is connected to the mayor's race, in which Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo are competing for the votes of Orthodox Jews, who typically vote in a bloc. Gothamist recently connected Adams's removal of the bike lane to his recent rightward turn and his courting of Hasidic voters.
It's obviously top of mind for Hizzoner. On a recent podcast, Adams described the City Hall press corps as "lefties," and cited bike lanes as evidence that local news media focus too much on his shortcomings: "They get happy ... if I don't do something they like about bike lanes," he said. "They enjoy it. [They say], 'We're going to rip him apart.'"
On Wednesday, one cyclist, who gave the name Adam, declined to attend the mayor's pity party: "It’s bullshit. It was an awesome bike lane, and now they got rid of it.”
The mayor's press shop at City Hall, which took over media requests about the Bedford bike lane once it entered the legal realm, declined several requests for comment for this story.
The car-filled painted bike lane — which prompted Ben Furnas of Transportation Alternatives to remind the mayor, "Paint is not protection" — was to one cyclist a horrific only-in-New-York moment.
“I come from India where there are no bike lanes, but there’s still more respect for cyclists than there is here in New York,” said Aashman Goghari. "It’s the car culture."
No, in this case, it's the mayor.
