Greenways

We've got a few different bikeway-related reader submissions that have come over the wire recently. First up, Dave "Paco" Abraham sends this picture of a two-way barrier-separated bikeway going in on Furman Street by the downtown Brooklyn waterfront. Furman is on the route of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, and with Brooklyn Bridge Park opening piece by piece, it's already pretty common to see people biking in both directions on this three-lane speedway underneath the BQE cantilever.

Residents of Northern Manhattan and the west Bronx have been waiting more than three years for the re-opening of the bike-ped path on the lower deck of the Henry Hudson Bridge. When the moment finally came earlier this summer, however, cyclists got a nasty surprise: MTA Bridges and Tunnels still won't allow biking on the bridge.

The New York City Parks Department has come up with a striking new method to demean pedestrians and cyclists and disrupt the public right-of-way.

On Sunday, a group of city officials and East Side electeds made their case for a deal to close the gap in the East River Greenway, addressing a full auditorium at the Schottenstein Cultural Center on East 34th Street. The deal has several moving parts, but the major takeaway was that the Bloomberg administration and a large group of legislators want to make the greenway happen.

If you want to close the Midtown greenway gap, make your voice heard this Sunday. For 33 blocks in Midtown, Manhattan’s East River Greenway disappears, forcing cyclists to detour onto some of the most traffic-choked and dangerous streets in the city. That’s a major deterrent to cycling on the East Side. While bike lanes planned … Continued

Construction is set to begin on the first stages of the South Bronx Greenway this summer, marking the first tangible results of a community-based, bottom-up campaign for more livable streets. The project will bring safer walking and biking and much-needed green space to neighborhoods where people-oriented streets are in short supply.

The current concept for the Flushing Avenue segment of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway footprint calls for converting the street to one-way westbound traffic flow. Two-way vehicle traffic, say DOT planners, will create conflicts that endanger cyclists and pedestrians as trucks and cars turn left into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At Wednesday night's public meeting on the project, the one-way conversion didn't sit well with most people who showed up, prompting the DOT team to say they'll take a second look at how the street can be configured.

A full crowd of about 60 people turned out for NYCDOT's Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway workshop in Sunset Park last night. The meeting was the second of four sessions the city is putting on with the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative and the Regional Plan Association, as the years-in-the-making project of a continuous pedestrian and bicycle path tracing the Brooklyn waterfront moves from the concept phase to more detailed planning and engineering.

Is the city finally taking action on a citizen proposal to connect Manhattan's east- and west-side Greenways with a safer Dyckman Street?