A bike lane grows in Brooklyn

City officials on Thursday unveiled a new protected bike lane on Brooklyn’s busy Flatbush Ave., the latest move in an decadelong effort to make the streets around Prospect Park safer for cyclists.

The ribbon-cutting came roughly 10 years after city Department of Transportation officials debuted another protected bike lane along Prospect Park West.

That lane sparked outrage and lawsuits from some Park Slope residents.

The new Flatbush Ave. bike lane (pictured) hugs Prospect Park’s eastern edge, from Empire Blvd. north to Grand Army Plaza.

Brooklyn Borough President

Eric Adams — whose office helped fund the new lane — suggested during a news conference that city officials discriminated against poor neighborhoods by adding a bike lane to the park’s wealthier west side a decade before adding the newly opened lane to its east side.

“That is not a signal of doing things successfully. It’s a signal that we have to view our city in a different fashion,” said Adams, a 2021 mayoral hopeful.

“Multimillion-dollar homes and tenement buildings want the same thing.”

The new bike lane ought to give cyclists a safer journey on Flatbush Ave., where the city also reduced speed limits earlier this year.

But the DOT has a long way to go to make good on a plan laid out by Mayor de Blasio’s “Green Wave” initiative, which last year promised an interconnected network of protected bike lanes across the five boroughs.

The “Green Wave” plan includes designated areas for cyclists along Flatbush Ave. all the way up to Tillary St. next to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.

The stretch of Flatbush Ave. between Grand Army Plaza and the bridges is menacing for cyclists in its current state — but Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg advised cyclists to simply avoid the area by instead heading north on Vanderbilt Ave., which does not have a protected bike lane. .

“I ride it all the time,” Trottenberg said of her proposed route.