Prospect Park West to Get Bike Lane
On the heels of the two-way protected bike lane in progress on Kent Street, the Department of Transportation is getting ready to install a similar bike lane along Prospect Park West, a recent post by Transportation Alternatives reminds us. (The Brooklyn Paper had a story on the project last April). The path will provide 1.8…
On the heels of the two-way protected bike lane in progress on Kent Street, the Department of Transportation is getting ready to install a similar bike lane along Prospect Park West, a recent post by Transportation Alternatives reminds us. (The Brooklyn Paper had a story on the project last April). The path will provide 1.8 miles of bike lane between Union Street and Bartel Pritchard Square, intended to provide a safe biking route as well as calm automobile traffic. The DOT report (PDF) says that Prospect Park West “traffic volume does not warrant three travel lanes” and this one-way road is prone to speeding and reckless driving. The new path is part of New York City’s 1997 Bicycle Master Plan. You can check out an elevation plan from when we first covered the topic.
New York’s Best Bike Lane [Transportation Alternatives]
The New York City Bicycle Master Plan [DOT]
Right now, due to traffic flowing south on PPW and flowing south on the approximately parallel Park Circle road, it is both incredibly dangerous to ride north on either of these roads and a pain in the rear. A lot of cyclists opt for riding north on the sidewalk, which cyclists hate doing and know is incredibly annoying to pedestrians. The only technically proper ways to get north from Bartel-Prichard to Grand Army are to ride the entire way around the park loop or to go down to 8th Avenue.
A buffer parking lane is a more progressive forward-looking and safer way to put in a bike lane, used in a lot of other world cities.
And PPW is *not* that full of traffic, just the traffic that it does have can be a bit aggressive compared to the rest of the neighborhood.
Wait, how is double-parked cars the fault of bikes? They’re in your car’s way? So get the traffic-violating double parkers out of the road, already, and stop hassling the bikes.
Love bike lanes, bike all time (or did until 3 months ago, when the kid showed up) but two-way bike lanes on a one-way street make me a little annoyed… last thing I need is more bikers thinking that biking against traffic is cool.
(Though getting them off the sidewalk is great.)
It doesn’t matter. Brooklyn is too full of rude drivers who are hooked on Mideast oil to make a difference. And these inconsiderate fools probably couldn’t locate Iran and Saudi Arabia on a map, yet still whine about it).
Put as many bike lanes in as you want, Brooklyn traffic is destined to get worse and worse with more hit and runs, road rage, parking problems, exhaust and horn-honking cretins. Think it’s bad now? Just wait for the new Markowitz/Ratner traffic plan at Atlantic and Flatbush!
Denton just came from Key Food and there’s a new bike lane in the canned ham section.
Drill baby drill was the outcry I remember.
i’ve been using the kent route daily and it makes me feel much safer to have a buffer lane of parked cars. at the same time it starts in the middle of kent so there’s no safe/easy way to get to the bike lane.
people complain that bikers act wild and erratic and therefore don’t “deserve” bike lanes- my sense is that if bikers have no safe place to be they are going to aggresively try to find the safest place- which sometimes means going on sidewalks when the car travel lanes are too thin and too populated by agressive bikers. I have also seen that when the bike lanes are put in place they quickly fill up with bikes- especially during rush hours.
build them and bikers will come.
“Seriously Gemini this place will look like Indonesia in 15 yrs. Bumber to bumber bike traffic and families of 4 sharing one bananna seat bike.”
Sounds good to me. If that happens we’ll be able to tell Saudi Arabia and Iran to stick their effin’ oil up their effin’ ass.
Seriously Gemini this place will look like Indonesia in 15 yrs. Bumber to bumber bike traffic and families of 4 sharing one bananna seat bike.
How come the double parkers are the bicycle lanes problem? Try enforcing the traffic rules and there’s plenty of car lanes.