The City Is Doing to Prospect Park What It Needs to Do to All Parks

One leg to go — to set a model for the rest of the city.

Prospect Park will be surrounded by protected bike lanes on its entire perimeter except for one leg once the city wraps up construction of a sidewalk-aligned bike lane on Ocean Avenue — setting a new standard for safe biking and walking infrastructure on park perimeters across the city.

Protected bike lanes around parks help take pressure off the parks themselves by giving non-recreational cyclists a safe alternative for the trips, Department of Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn said.

“I think we see tremendous benefit in having protected bike facilities around parks, especially with a lot of what we hear from parks users, with all the different competing needs on the parks drives,” Flynn Streetsblog on Friday after breaking ground on the Ocean Avenue project.

“The more that we can provide alternative routes, especially for working cyclists, delivery cyclists — folks who don’t necessarily need to be going through the park — we think that holds a lot of potential,” Flynn added.

The project that broke ground on Friday will renovate the Parkside Avenue entrance to Prospect Park — with a monument to legendary Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm — and an at-grade two-way bike lane on Ocean Avenue between Empire Boulevard and Parkside Avenue.

When the $15.5 million project wraps up in Fall 2027, DOT will have one last leg of the park to fill in with a protected bike lane: Prospect Park Southwest, between Parkside Avenue and Prospect Park West.

The Ocean Avenue bike lane will connect the Parkside Avenue protected bike lane and the Flatbush Avenue protected bike lane, filling in a gap on the east side of the park. Residents of the west side of the park have enjoyed the fruits of the Prospect Park West bike lane for 15 years, but east side residents didn’t see any action until the Flatbush Avenue bike lane opened in 2020.

Prospect Park Southwest, meanwhile, lacks a painted bike lane, or even “sharrows” to at least indicate to drivers that cyclists exist and might be near the park. Flynn said the city is already thinking about closing the loop.

“We’re looking closely at [Prospect Park Southwest],” he said. “We’re working through some considerations around the bus service, but we’ll definitely have more to share on that soon.”

Safe access around parks shouldn’t be limited to Prospect Park, however. All across the city, parks and green spaces — most notably in Central Park — streets are still full of car-first design. That leads to dangerous outcomes outside of parks, as cyclists headed in and out of them put their lives in dangerous. It also lead to conflicts in the park between people on e-mobility devices, people on person-powered vehicles and runners and walkers.

In 2018, a private trash hauler killed 23-year-old Australian tourist Madison Lyden on Central Park West. DOT installed a protected bike lane on the strip after Lyden’s death, but it only goes one-way. The city hasn’t installed any subsequent protected bike lanes on Central Park’s borders in the years since.

Later this year, the Mamdani administration will implement plans to surround Wingate Park in East Flatbush with protected bike lanes, reviving a proposal that former Mayor Eric Adams proposed but never saw through.

The Landmarks Preservation Committee approved the Ocean Avenue back in 2019. New state stormwater pollution regulations further delayed the project. The two-way bike lane will be separated from the sidewalk next to the park by a strip of grass and trees, according to official renderings. It will not eliminate any car lanes on Ocean Avenue, but will still provide a level of traffic calming by narrowing the existing lane widths to 10 feet.

Everyone who lives near the park deserves safe ways to access it by bike and foot, Flynn said.

“Having safe access and safe streets shouldn’t depend on whether you live on the east or west side of Prospect Park,” he said.

Of course, DOT has a part to play there beyond its design and construction efforts. On Friday, one neighborhood resident spotted multiple DOT vehicles parked in the Flatbush Avenue protected bike lane — mere feet from Flynn’s big announcement. (An agency spokesman said the staff who parked in the bike lane “moved the vehicles and were reminded to never do this, even momentarily.”)