New Sunset Park Bike Lanes Approved By Community Board

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — A handful of new bike lanes are set to arrive in Sunset Park after the neighborhood community board voted overwhelmingly Wednesday night to approve them.

The lanes, proposed by the city’s Department of Transportation, are designed to connect the central part of the neighborhood with waterfront sites such as Bush Terminal Park and the Brooklyn Army Terminal.

Community Board 7, which represents Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace and the South Slope, voted 31-4 to approve the new lanes at its monthly meeting.

The bike lanes would run along 43rd and 44th streets in the north and 57th and 58th streets in the south part of the neighborhood. They will remove a total of five non-residential parking spots.

You can read the specifics of the city’s plan here.

David Strungis, a Sunset Park resident, told the board that the lanes would help people like him better travel to the new ferry stop at Brooklyn Army Terminal, a faster and more reliable way to get to Manhattan.

"As I’ve ridden in this neighborhood, people have passed me incredibly close and incredibly fast at speeds that I assure you are unsafe," he said. "I think it’s very important, as train conditions have gotten worse, people want to find new ways to get to work. The ferry is one of those ways."

CB7 Chair Daniel Murphy said most of the opposition to the bike lanes were not about the lanes themselves.

"The opposition usually has one sentence about bike lanes taking over, which is a general sort of position, and then there are the real complaints," he said. "The real opposition and the real problems are from the folks who live on these streets. It’s parking, it’s truck traffic, it’s the problems of living in a city moving too slowly to address transportation issues. It wasn’t really about these upland connectors.”

He said he wants to see more traffic-calming measures on some streets such as better signage and speed bumps.

Murphy also said concerns that the city was "secretive" in its planning process were misplaced. He pointed to the inclusion of UPROSE, a community group that advocates for sustainability, and the many public meetings held to take feedback about the lanes.

"I can’t look at this issue and say it was a secretive process," Murphy said. "Whenever someone says, ‘the community is opposed to this,’ without giving actual data behind it, I view a statement like that [as] a sham. You need to have numbers and actual information that goes along with these statements."

RELATED: More Bike Lanes Proposed In Sunset Park

Image via DOT