DOT Will Install Protected Bike Lane On Key Bklyn Bridge Connection This Fall

The city will create a new protected link to and from the Brooklyn Bridge bike lane this year by repurposing part of the highway-sized Adams Street and Boerum Place in Downtown Brooklyn.

In a presentation to the transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 2 on Thursday night, the Department of Transportation said the protected bike lane will run between Johnson and Bergen streets and link to an existing short bike lane to create a full north-south route.

The project will be built in two phases: the protected bike lane north of Atlantic Avenue will go in this fall after a road resurfacing project, and the shorter piece south of Atlantic Avenue will be installed in 2027 after a pair of residential construction projects in the area finished, according to Hayes Lord, a senior transportation manager in DOT’s Cycling & Micromobility Unit.

The project will have several pieces:

Between Johnson and Fulton street, which is technically the Adams Street piece of the stroad, DOT will build a barrier-protected two-way bike lane on the east side of the existing median, which will connect to the shared cycling/pedestrian path that already exists on the medians between Johnson and Tillary streets. The bike lane will be built where there is currently a yellow-striped painted median, as you can see in the rendering below:

The bike lane will continue between Fulton and Schermerhorn streets, where DOT will cut the number of northbound travel lanes down from four to three in order to accommodate it.

Between Schermerhorn Street and Atlantic Avenue the bike lane will switch to the west curb, where it will become a parking-protected bike lane. The bike lane will shift in this piece in order to provide a direct connection for cyclists south of Atlantic Avenue. Currently, that west side of the street has a parking lane, a right-turn lane, a lane for straight travel and two left-turn lanes. DOT is cutting that down to a parking lane, a right turning lane, a combination straight travel and left-turn lane, and a left-turn lane. DOT will also remove two parking spots on each block of this stretch to daylight the intersections.

South of Atlantic Avenue, DOT will install a two-way protected bike lane all the way to Bergen Street, where Boerum Place ends. This piece of the project will be put in in 2027 once construction in the area is done, and will remove 24 parking spots between Atlantic and Bergen.

The area around the Brooklyn Bridge has seen a huge uptick in cyclists and cycling infrastructure in the 2020s, with protected bike lanes on Schermerhorn Street, Ashland Place and Navy Street joining the Tillary Street and Jay Street protected bike lanes, as well as the on-road Brooklyn Bridge bike lane which has seen over one million cycling trips per year since it was installed in late 2021. This protected bike lane project is a continuation of all of that work, Lord told the committee.

“We’ve seen a great increase in the number of cyclists now accessing the Brooklyn Bridge since 2021 when we took the bike lane off of the Promenade and put it into the roadway, but also even before then, what you saw on Tillary, as well as a portion of Adams Street,” he said.

Right now, cyclists who come south off the Brooklyn Bridge or approach it heading north don’t have a rational, connected option for their trip. A service road on Boerum Place and Adams Street has a painted bike lane to the north of Joralemon Street that in theory should separate cyclists from drivers headed towards the Brooklyn Bridge. But in practice it is nothing more than a parking lot for placard abuse.

Northbound cyclists on Jay Street have to turn across four lanes of traffic to get to the Tillary Street connection to the bridge, or they can try to use the frequently blocked contraflow Johnson Street bike lane.

The Johnson Street bike lane also connects to a short bike and pedestrian path on the existing median south of the Tillary Street. But cyclists coming off the Brooklyn Bridge heading south have just a single block on the median before the path just ends at Johnson Street, and are then forced to turn into oncoming traffic to reach Johnson and then Jay Street.

One member of the public at the meeting endorsed the new design since it will eliminate the need for the turn.

“I love this very much,” said Navera Asghar. “I just biked the median yesterday, and you have to cut across traffic all together, which is very scary.”

Once the piece south of Atlantic Avenue can be finished, the bike lane will also link up with the Bergen and Dean street bike boulevards, which DOT is also currently planning. When everything is finally finished, cyclists will have a calm and protected route from Crown Heights all the way into Manhattan (and all the way to the West Side Greenway … if a Chambers Street protected bike lane is built).

DOT will be removing some legal parking spots, but the agency made specific mention of the fact that the piece of the bike lane between Johnson and Schermerhorn streets will not remove any legal parking. But placard abuse on the painted piece of the median is so common that a satellite view of the area shows a line of illegally parked cars in the yellow paint.

The bike lane’s design has a champion in Council Member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn Heights) specifically because it will help fight this very obvious instance of placard abuse.

“This stretch of Adams in front of the Kings County Courthouse consistently has dozens of illegally parked cars there every day,” said Restler. “Our office did a study last year that identified on average 500 illegally parked cars in downtown Brooklyn on a daily basis, and this stretch was the number one hot spot. This redesign will make it impossible for court officers and judicial staff and people running in and out of the courthouse and other city officials to illegally and dangerously park their cars along Adams Street, so I am thrilled that this redesign is moving forward.”

Restler said that he has been asking DOT to install something like this for the last four years, given that the Brooklyn Bridge bike lane has invited so much cycling activity in the area. The work will no doubt calm some traffic patterns in the area, where there have been 104 crashes in the last three years that have injured 45 people.

“I bike that stretch every day and I feel like I am putting my life at risk every single time. That block of Boerum from State Street to Atlantic Avenue is one of the most scary places to bike in Brooklyn so I’m thrilled that we’re doing this. The goal of street redesigns like this is to ensure that we’re effectively and fairly sharing the road, and that’s what this plan does. Right now almost all of Adams and Boerum are dedicated to cars and everybody else who uses the street is a third-class citizen,” said Restler.