![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/8f1d5f2f1f1625e47f681401bd41cdf0b0-DOT-260901-Ashland-Place-Redesign-Press-.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n The new protected bike lane on Ashland Place replaces a confusing design that got the block nicknamed \u201cCrashland.\u201d
\n Photo: DOT\n <\/p>\n
More than three years after Eric Adams halted a plan to build a two-way protected bike lane on Ashland Place in Downtown Brooklyn, the lane has finally been completed<\/a>. It\u2019s one of several canceled Adams-era street-safety projects that the Mamdani administration has revived<\/a>, including the McGuinness Boulevard bike lane, after they were killed in what Transportation commissioner Mike Flynn referred to as \u201cbackroom deals<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n In this case, a developer and a cultural institution seem to have been the ones responsible for killing the redesign during the Adams administration. As Streetsblog reported in 2023<\/a>, the protected Ashland Place bike lane was mothballed after private complaints from Two Trees, which has a luxury rental on the block with a parking garage that opens onto Ashland Place. A source said that Two Trees, which is also the developer of the adaptive reuse Domino Sugar complex, wasn\u2019t opposed to a bike lane per se but wanted to preserve the two-way functionality of the street. The Brooklyn Academy of Music griped about the plan publicly<\/a>, writing in a letter to the community board that it did a lot of loading and unloading on the block and that operating costs would increase if \u201cresponsibility for safe streets is shifted onto us.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ashland Place lane, which runs for a block between Hansen Place and Lafayette Street, by the border of Fort Greene and Downtown Brooklyn, was the missing link in a 5.5-mile protected bike route that now stretches from Sunset Park to Dumbo. In recent years, bicyclists nicknamed this little strip \u201cCrashland,\u201d due to a confusing design that directed cyclists to cross oncoming car traffic on Ashland, then bike alongside two-way car and truck traffic on the block. Between September 2023 and the end of 2025, there were 27 reported crashes on the corner, resulting in nine people being injured, five of them on bikes, according to Streetsblog<\/a>. In June, the Department of Transportation admitted<\/a> at a community-board presentation that the design was \u201cnot intuitive.\u201d<\/p>\n Adams, who started off his term as mayor Citi Biking<\/a> to meetings and promising hundreds of miles of new bike lanes, allowed top aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin to quash plans for bike-infrastructure improvements around the city. Some of the reversals involved abruptly ripping up projects the DoT had just completed, like the protected bike lane<\/a> on Bedford Avenue that the city had installed a year earlier on a dangerous three-block corridor that had previously averaged about one fatality a year. So far, Mayor Mamdani hasn\u2019t moved to reinstate that bike lane, citing<\/a> \u201clegal requirements\u201d that needed to be met first. Some have taken the lack of action on Bedford as a sign of reluctance to take on the Hasidic Jewish community, which vigorously fought the lane for more than a decade and poses more of a political challenge than an arts institution and a developer.<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n