New York City is making an about-face on Brooklyn’s McGuinness Blvd., returning to a plan to reduce traffic lanes on the southern section of the deadly road and install protected bike lanes.
The plan, announced by the Department of Transportation on Wednesday, will reduce the southern section of the four-lane, north-south thoroughfare to two lanes of motor vehicle traffic, replacing one lane in each direction with parking.
Those parked cars will then serve as a protective barrier for bike lanes in both directions running between the parking lane and the sidewalk.
The changes will go into effect from Calyer St. to Meeker Ave.
“This administration is committed to making our streets safer for all New Yorkers, no matter how they travel around our city — by car, by bike, or on foot,” Meera Joshi, the city’s Deputy Mayor for Operations, said in a statement.
“I am grateful to DOT for its commitment to McGuinness Boulevard and willingness to adapt to community and elected officials’ feedback, and of course to New Yorkers for their candor,” she added.
The design comes a little more than a month after the DOT announced it was going ahead with a reduced version of the plan that would have installed unprotected bike lanes and left all four lanes of traffic. A similar setup was installed earlier this year for the section of McGuinness Blvd. north of Calyer St.
The two-lane reduction announced Wednesday for the southern section had initially been part of a more comprehensive redesign, drawn up after the 2021 hit-and-run killing of beloved Brooklyn teacher Matthew Jensen.
That plan got axed by Mayor Adams’ administration in 2023, making McGuinness one of several bike-lane, traffic-calming flash points between the administration, street safety advocates and local elected officials.
A consortium of local Brooklyn elected officials slammed the scaled-back August proposal in an open letter at the time, saying it “fail[ed] Greenpoint by preserving the most dangerous elements of this roadway that runs through the middle of our community.”
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who was among those who signed onto the letter, said Wednesday that he was grateful to Adams and Joshi for agreeing to the compromise.
“When this goes through, the community will be deeply grateful to the administration for taking a step back [and reassessing],” he said.
