The city has completed safety upgrades to a 14-block stretch of 10th Avenue in Manhattan, including a 10-foot-wide bike lane, officials said Wednesday.
The new features installed between West 38th Street and West 52nd Street in Hell’s Kitchen aim to address the growing number of cyclists, e-bike riders and other micromobility users, the Transportation Department said. The city built new concrete pedestrian islands, new bike racks and redesigned intersections to slow turning vehicles.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi said it’ll make life easier – especially for people who make deliveries in the area.
“These are their office spaces, the places they spend hours each day and night, through every season, and even more so in bad weather when so many of us want the world brought to us instead of having to venture out,” Joshi said.
The bike lane is 10 feet wide for the majority of the stretch, except for a select few stretches, where it is 8-feet wide in part to accommodate dedicated turning lanes, the DOT said. Though it’s twice as wide as a typical bike lane, it was still dwarfed by the space dedicated to car traffic on the avenue.
On Wednesday, Citi e-bikers, deliversitas and scooters were seen zipping up the northbound bike lane on 10th Avenue, protected from vehicle traffic by parked cars.
Yahel Perez has been working as a delivery driver for Uber for three years. He was picking up an order from a restaurant when he said the wider bike lane was a welcome change.
“Last time, there were a lot of potholes. Now, most of this is perfectly fine, so it’s way better now,” Perez said.
But with more space, Perez said, comes more people — and they’re not always on wheels.
“Sometimes there’s more people walking on it,” Perez said.“Sometimes there’s issues with that too, that the wider lane brings. But other than that, the lane has been really great and it being wider is better.”
Delivery driver Brayan Yat said he…
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