The raised bike lane dates back to the Bloomberg administration. Hunter Armstrong, the executive director of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, said the city should not wait another decade-plus to extend hardened cycling infrastructure along Third Avenue.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s not wait another 12 years or 14 years for this to happen,\u201d he said. \u201cLet\u2019s keep pushing for this to move more move more quickly so we have safety, so we have clean and healthy ways to get through Brooklyn, and through Sunset Park, and to Red Hook, and across New York City.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Third-ave-rally-5-4.jpg\")
Community Board 7 Transportation Chair Katie Walsh and supporters rallied for a safer Third Avenue on May 4. Photo: Kevin Duggan<\/p>\n
In late 2023, DOT unveiled an ambitious vision<\/a> to overhaul more than 40 blocks of Third Avenue between Prospect Avenue and 62nd Street. One of the department\u2019s proposed options would have replaced a lane of traffic in each direction with a parking-protected bike lane.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the project would have shortened crossing distances for pedestrians, who currently must traverse eight lanes dedicated to the movement and storage of cars \u2014 while passing underneath the exceptionally noisy Moses-era expressway, which has another seven lanes. For those counting, that\u2019s a total of 15 lanes of private motor vehicles.<\/p>\n CB7 endorsed<\/a> a road diet and protected bike lane in early 2024, and city officials said they could implement it as soon as that summer. But opposition from groups<\/a> like the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation repeatedly delayed the project\u2019s timeline, most recently until sometime this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n Safety upgrades along the avenue are long overdue: More than 80 people died or received serious injuries in crashes over the past seven years, according to the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. That averages out to a life-altering crash\u00a0every single month.<\/p>\n Those deaths include 30-year-old cyclist Em Samolewicz<\/a>, whom a driver struck in 2019, and Clara\u00a0Kang<\/a>, 31 who was also riding her bike when a motorcycle rider slammed into her in 2020. After Adams stalled the project last summer, a speeding driver blew through a red light and killed two men crossing the dangerous roadway \u2014 two deaths that advocates said said were preventable.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThis is a street where children walk back and forth every day to get to and from school,\u201d said Rose Uscianowski, a Brooklyn organizer for Transportation Alternatives. \u201cHow can you allow Third Avenue to continue looking the way it does?\u201d<\/p>\n Brooklyn Chamber leader Randy Peers \u2013 who also fought against<\/a> a safety redesign on McGuinness Boulevard \u2013 personally showed up to dress down community board members two years ago after they backed the plan he slammed as the \u201cmost disruptive and radical option.\u201d The business group then bolstered its opposition by circulating a biased\u00a0web survey<\/a> that listed evidence-free concerns that the overhaul would worsen business operations.<\/p>\n However, empirical research<\/a> has shown time<\/a> and again<\/a> that bike lanes are good for businesses\u2019 bottom line \u2014 while owners routinely oppose them because they drive themselves to work. Road diets have reduced the number of people killed and seriously injured by around 30 percent,\u00a0according to DOT<\/a>.<\/p>\n DOT installed a\u00a0near-identical redesign in 2012<\/a> on nearby Fourth Avenue, and pedestrian injuries dropped by as\u00a0much as 61 percent<\/a>, according to city data.<\/p>\n Before becoming mayor, Adams had claimed that addressing the safety issues on Third Avenue was \u201cat the top of our list.\u201d<\/a> After he won, however, he caved to the business interests \u2014 forming a larger pattern<\/a> of outside groups interfering in street redesign work that eventually resulted in federal bribery indictments against his closest closest aide and two soundstage moguls<\/a> over a separate bike lane project on McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint.<\/p>\n On the campaign trail, Mamdani vowed to finish<\/a> the slate of street redesigns stalled by Adams, and he has relaunched some<\/a> of those, including McGuinness Boulevard<\/a>, Flatbush Avenue<\/a>, 31st Street<\/a>, Ashland Place, and a Fordham Road bus lane.<\/p>\n But the new mayor has yet to announce plans for Third Avenue, or for another contested project that would restore three blocks of protected bike lanes on Bedford Avenue<\/a> in Williamsburg. Adams ripped those out<\/a> to curry favor with Hasidic leaders in the area that opposed them.<\/p>\n DOT spokesman Vin Barone promised \u201cmore information to share soon\u201d on Third Avenue. He also touted the agency\u2019s completion of a protected bike lane on Court Street from Schermerhorn Street to Hamilton Avenue, a precursor to more work in Red Hook that will connect Court Street to the portion of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway that the city is finishing along Hamilton and Third avenues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Mamdani must fulfill his campaign promise to redesign dangerous Third Avenue in Sunset Park, one of many…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-220365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Third-Ave-cross-section.jpg\")
Third Avenue should get a road diet like this, Community Board 7 said in 2024. Graphic: DOT<\/p>\n