City on the (bike) lanes to good intentions: Blaz

Mayor de Blasio boasted Tuesday that a record number of bike lane miles were laid down in the city in 2020 — even as he acknowledged a grim year for cyclists and pedestrians.

Some 28.6 miles of protected bike lanes were set up in 2020, helping to bring the city’s total bike lane network to 1,375 miles, de Blasio said.

But at the same time, 24 cyclists have died on city streets this year, NYPD stats show. That’s just five short of the 29 bike fatalities reported in 2019.

The city has counted 98 pedestrian deaths as the year closes, down from 123 in all of 2019.

De Blasio and Acting Transportation Commissioner Margaret Forgione blamed the sobering numbers on speeding vehicles.

“It has been a tough year for lives we’ve lost, including the lives we’ve lost on our streets,” said the mayor, who’s pushing to expand speed cameras’ operating hours. “We know there’s been way too much speeding. We know we have to crack down on that in 2021.”

Forgione said 2020 has been “a very bad year for Vision Zero,” de Blasio’s initiative to end roadway deaths. “We’ll be working to continue all of our lifesaving projects that we have seen do result in fewer injuries and fewer fatalities,” said Forgione.

Besides the new protected bike lanes, the city installed 35.2 miles of regular bike lanes and closed 83 miles of streets to cars as part of its Open Streets program, de Blasio said. The city also built 16.3 miles of new bus lanes, the mayor added.

Pro-bike group Transportation Alternatives called for more protected bike lanes, on the order of “50 miles, 100 miles a year.”

“We’re grateful for the work that’s been done and at the same time, New York City is facing an unprecedented bike boom and we need to be doing much more of it,” the group’s executive director, Danny Harris, told the Daily News. “We can no longer take a piecemeal approach to this infrastructure.”