Bus and bike riders in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill are about to get much faster and safer rides, thanks to the Mamdani administration’s decision to place bus and bike lanes on two major crosstown streets that link the leafy Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Beginning this fall, the Department of Transportation will install bus lanes and protected bike lanes along the length of Lafayette and DeKalb Avenues from Broadway to Flatbush Avenue. The project will speed up buses for the 18,000 daily riders on the B38 bus, and give cyclists a crucial east-west protected route through the borough.
The in-progress street redesigns will bring a combination of curbside bus lanes that operate from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., a 24-hour offset bus lane, and parking-protected and barrier-protected bike lanes to almost six miles of city street.
The specifics of the plan are as follows:
- On DeKalb Avenue between Malcolm X Boulevard and Cumberland Street, DOT will install a curbside bus lane and a parking-protected bike lane, with a general travel lane between those.
- On DeKalb Avenue between Cumberland Street and Flatbush Avenue, DOT will install an offset bus lane which will operate 24/7 and a barrier-protected bike lane, with a general travel lane between those.
- On Lafayette Avenue between Patchen Avenue and Marcy Avenue, DOT will install a curbside bus lane and a jersey barrier-protected bike lane, with a general travel lane between them, since the street is only 34-feet wide in this section compared to 40-feet wide everywhere else on the project.
- On Lafayette Avenue between Marcy Avenue and Classon Avenue, DOT will install a curbside bus lane and a parking protected bike lane, with a general travel lane between those.
- On Lafayette Avenue between Classon Avenue and Adelphi Street, DOT will install a curbside bus lane and a parking protected bike lane, with a general traffic lane between those.
- On Lafayette Avenue between Adelphi Street and Fulton Street, DOT will install a parking-protected bike lane.
- On Lafayette Avenue between Fulton Street and Ashland Place, DOT will install a barrier-protected bike lane.
The curbside bus lanes will operate for just 12 hours on weekdays. The MTA’s ridership data show that ridership in both directions surges between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and slows down at other times of the day.
The bus and bike lanes will go a long way towards making DeKalb and Lafayette Avenues useful for everyone, regardless of their chosen mode of transportation. They will also reflect the actual demographic makeup of New Yorkers who live and use these streets…