Here’s an early traffic warning: The Big Apple has more bike lanes than any city in America – but is pushing for four times as many.
Mayor Bloomberg‘s goal is to reach 1,800 miles of city bike lanes in the next 20 years – establishing about 50 miles of new lanes per year.
Many of the currently planned lanes are outlined in the city’s 2008 bicycle map. Among them are a lane on Broadway from the northern tip of Manhattan to 59th Street, one on Fifth Avenue from East 120th to 61st Street, others on First and Second avenues, and several on crosstown streets, including 51st and 48th.
When Bloomberg’s plan is complete, he will have built enough bike lanes to stretch from Manhattan to Albuquerque, NM, dwarfing similar efforts in San Francisco and Chicago.
They vary in style from those set off with bright-green paint to those protected by medians or concrete barriers, like the one under way on Eighth Avenue south of 14th Street and another already installed on lower Ninth Avenue.
The city plans to continue the Eighth Avenue project in the spring, bringing the lane north to 23rd Street.
“It’s become an unmitigated disaster,” Sean Sweeney, the director of the SoHo Alliance, said of the bike-lane proliferation.
He said the removal of a traffic lane on Grand Street to create a bike lane had caused congestion and horn honking, and made it difficult for large vehicles, including firetrucks, to make turns.
The Department of Transportation insists the majority of its future projects won’t sacrifice traffic lanes or parking and that it will install protected bike lanes only where they fit.
And while the mayor included $8 million toward bike lanes in his executive budget last year, the DOT insists it is keeping costs down by designing the lanes in-house.
The bike lane on Ninth Avenue from 23rd to 31st Street cost $560,000, with 80 percent of that reimbursed by the federal government, said DOT officials.
The template for much of the work is a 1997 bicycle master plan, drafted after a street-by-street examination of the best place for bicycles.
The number of bicycle commuters grew 35 percent between 2007 and 2008, the DOT says.