NYC Outlines Plan For Chelsea Bike Lane

CHELSEA, NY — The city's transportation department outlined on Wednesday its plans to add a protected bike lane along Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, adding a designated corridor for cyclists in a particularly congested Manhattan biking area. (For more news from Chelsea and New York City, sign up for Patch news alerts here.)

The city plans to extend the bike lane along Seventh Avenue from W 26th Street to W 14 Street. Transportation department representatives presented the agency's plan to upgrade the street on Wednesday night at a committee meeting for Manhattan's Community Board 4, which includes Chelsea.

Community members and local leaders have repeatedly called for Seventh Avenue to be redesigned to make it safer. The city's transportation department designated Seventh Avenue as a "priority corridor" for its Vision Zero initiative, a long-term plan to reduce traffic injuries and deaths in New York City. Between 2011 and 2015, 38 people were seriously injured and one person was killed on the stretch of Seventh Avenue between Chelsea and Greenwich Village, according to transportation department data. The city has also highlighted the intersections between Seventh Avenue and W 14 Street and between Seventh Avenue and Bleecker Street as particularly problematic intersections along the corridor.

The transportation department found the Seventh Avenue corridor to be subject to heavy bike traffic. During a 14-hour period in July 2016, the department counted abut 2,350 cyclists riding down the avenue near W 20th Street.

The city's plan will add nearly 24 blocks of protected bike lane along Seventh, which is a one-way street with south-flowing traffic. The four vehicular travel lanes along Seventh will be reduced to three, according to the department's plans.

The transportation department plans to install split-phase signals, which give pedestrians a designated period of time to cross the street, at 14 and 23rd streets and mixing zones at other intersections. Mixing zones, which are areas of the road where a bike lane converges with a car's left turn lane, have been criticized by the cycling activists in the wake of cyclist Kelly Hurley's death earlier this month. Hurley was fatally injured in a mixing zone on April 5 when a delivery truck made an improper left turn, cutting across four lanes of traffic and slamming into her. In mixing zones, drivers are permitted to make left hand turns but cyclists are meant to have the right of way. The transportation department has denied the design of the intersection contributed to the collision.

In total, the transportation department wants to extend the bike lane along Seventh from W 30th Street to Clarkson Street in Greenwich Village, with possible later extensions of the bike lane to the north and south. The committee approved the department's plans on Wednesday evening.

Lead image via Shutterstock; secondary images courtesy of NYC Department of Transportation.