Park Slope's Fourth Ave Will Get New Bike Lanes This Month

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — A long-awaited plan to put protected bike lanes on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue will finally start this month, transportation officials said.

The city's Department of Transportation announced on Tuesday that it will start adding bike lanes, along with other safety improvements, to Fourth Avenue between 1st and 15th streets in April.

The new bike lanes will be the second step in a plan to add lanes from 65th Street all the way to Dean Street, which the department first announced a few years ago after deciding to explore redesigning the Fourth Avenue corridor in 2011.

Bike lanes were already added last year to the southernmost blocks in the plan, between 60th and 64th street, but transportation officials ran into delays from continuing the patch because of MTA work going on in the same area.

But the plan to connect Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Park Slope and Downtown Brooklyn will continue now that the work is wrapping up, a DOT spokesman said. The 1st to 15th street bike lanes started to go in this week and will be installed from 15th to 38th street this summer.

"Next year, we plan to extend the bike lanes further north from 1st Street, but we are still working on analyzing the traffic and finalizing the designs," the spokesman said.

The improvements between 1st and 15th street will include the curbside parking protected bike lanes, new painted pedestrian islands, updated parking regulations and expanded meter parking.

The MTA work, which started last July, includes reconstruction of the Fourth Avenue express tunnel for the N and R lines and the installation of an elevator at 59th Street station.

MTA officials said that the work on the tunnel will likely be done this summer and that the elevator at 59th Street, which they started to install earlier this year, is expected to be done by 2021.

Repairing the express tunnel for the N and R lines, which runs between 36th Street and 59th Street, includes replacing more than 310 steel columns, repairing 100 tons of structural beams, repairing 3,500 cubic feet of deteriorated concrete and putting in water mitigation, the agency said.

Both projects are meant to improve service on the N and R lines for Bay Ridge and Sunset Park riders, the official said.

“Once these projects are complete, thousands of N and R customers will benefit from increased service reliability and mobility,” MTA said in a statement.