(Susan May Tell)
Sen. Chuck Schumer may be an avid cy clist, but he’s no fan of the bike lane the city installed along his Prospect Park West street last summer.
Sources said Schumer — who has yet to take a public position on the 19-block bike corridor — shared his feelings privately with some members of the City Council.
“He’s asked legislators what they’re going to do about [this and other] bike lanes,” said one source.
A Schumer spokesman declined comment.
The state’s senior US senator is in a tough position.
He’s a longtime cyclist himself and doesn’t want to come off as the heavy in a battle with green-friendly constituents.
But he also has to deal with a prominent opponent of the bikeway who carries a lot of clout in the Schumer home — his wife, Iris Weinshall.
A former city Department of Transportation commissioner, Weinshall is part of a well-heeled organization lobbying to get rid of the bikeway. Other members include former Sanitation Commissioner Norman Steisel and Brooklyn College Dean Louise Hainline.
Weinshall has turned down requests for interviews. But she’s not shy about attaching her name to the cause.
“When new bike lanes force the same volume of cars and trucks into fewer and narrower traffic lanes, the potential for accidents between cars, trucks and pedestrians goes up rather than down,” she and her allies wrote in a letter to the editor last year.
Weinshall’s DOT successor, Janette Sadik-Khan, vigorously defends the bikeway project and has lined up her share of supporters in bike-friendly Park Slope.
Figures released by her agency show that the number of speeding vehicles along Prospect Park West, where the Schumers live, decreased from 75 to 20 percent after one lane of traffic was removed to accommodate the two-way bike lane.
Weinshall’s group has filed a Freedom of Information request for the data, claiming the city is “cherry-picking” the numbers to achieve the most favorable result.