Brooklyn’s New Bike Boulevards Will Benefit the 90 Percent of Residents Who Don’t Drive To Work
Regular attendees of the city’s transportation project-focused community board meetings and workshops are familiar with a number of tropes that opponents of bus lanes or bike lanes deploy to preserve their car drivers’ iron grip on road space.
On Tuesday night, at the Department of Transportation’s first public workshop for Mayor Mamdani’s planned bike boulevards on Dean and Bergen Streets in west-central Brooklyn, one skeptic of the redesign waved around his community board credentials and offered another fake trope: everyone has and needs a car here.
“[This is] a rapidly changing neighborhood, but one that still has a very much working class character to it,” said Hardy Fischer, who identified himself as a member of Brooklyn Community Board 8 during a breakout session during the workshop. “People use their cars to get to work, to get to doctor’s appointments.”
Well, about that.
The thing about a virtual workshop is that when someone drops a gem like “people use their cars to get to work,” you don’t have to wait until you get home to take advantage of the enormous amount of city-provided data to see exactly how many people actually drive to work or the doctor. I’ve seen a lot in my seven years at Streetsblog but what I found in the city’s Population FactFinder surprised even me.
Just 10 percent of Fischer’s neighbors in CB8 drive themselves to work alone, according to the latest data the government collected in the American Community Survey. That’s less than half of the 27 percent of residents who currently work from home in the bounds of the community board. As for using their cars to get to the doctor, 69 percent of homes reported not owning a single car in CB8. Also: The “working class” neighborhood has a median household income of $92,718 per year.
This is consistent across the entire boundary of the proposed bike boulevard project, which will run from Boerum Place to East New York Avenue on each street. Across 34 Census tracts that include Dean and Bergen Streets and its surrounding blocks, haphazardly running north to Atlantic Avenue and south to Sterling Place, the song remains the same: 10 percent of people drive to work alone and 67 percent of households report having no vehicle at all.
This reality has not yet broken through, at least in the media coverage of the bike boulevard. Lazy reporters would rather just write a “neighborhood divided” piece with no context, or quote people comparing the plan to the industrial-scale slaughter of my cousins.
I don’t doubt that Fischer actually believes that huge numbers of his neighbors are getting around in cars, or that his neighborhood is a blue-collar bastion instead of a hotspot of people with email jobs they can perform in their pajamas. And I’m sure he really does believe, as he told the breakout room, that “the community” opposes the bike boulevard as a concept because the people he knows on the community board are opposed to it. But a community board is its own self-selecting subset of the neighborhood. It exclusively comprises people who have decided they can spare hours on end every month on meetings after work.
And outside of the community board, the neighborhood yearns for bike lanes. 450 cyclists per hour ride on sections of Bergen Streets at peak times according to DOT, and Bergen Street has become renowned for the kid-friendly Bergen Bike Bus, in which parents chaperone children to school on their bikes.
Voters along the bike boulevard route voted for Ballot Question 3, which speeds up major transportation project timelines by 33 percent, by two-to-one and four-to-one margins. The democratically elected Chi Ossé, who represents Bergen and Dean from Bedford Avenue to Rochester Avenue, effusively praised the project when Mayor Mamdani announced it back in May. He celebrated the bike boulevard as a crucial development that he and Council Member Crystal Hudson “fought hard to make … happen through the Atlantic Avenue Mixed Use Plan negotiations, because redesigns like this one are exactly the kind of action this city has needed for far too long.”
Another nearby bike boulevard also received the amateur plebiscite treatment — and it turned out people loved the boulevard, not the reactionary campaign to destroy it. In 2023, former mayor Eric Adams abruptly halted work on the Underhill Avenue bike boulevard in Prospect Heights, in order to conduct a literal door-to-door survey to ask residents how they felt about the project. The survey found 60 percent of Underhill Avenue residents approved of the bike boulevard — a humiliating result for Adams, who refused to publish the survey’s responses. Someone eventually leaked them to Streetsblog in 2025.
DOT has yet to install a single traffic reversal or roundabout, even after Mayor Mamdani surrounded himself with a bunch of adorable children and promised them he would complete the bike boulevard in order to keep them safe — a heartbreaking and infuriating act of civic restraint. The 6,700 people who live on or around Dean and Bergen Streets and drive to work every day will enjoy another year as kings and queens of the road. DOT will not commence installation until next summer at the earliest.
That’s one more year for opponents to willfully misunderstand their own neighborhood and one more year of everyone else having to hear about it.
