A Downtown Brooklyn Bike Lane Has Come Back to Life

A Downtown Brooklyn Bike Lane Finally Opens The new protected bike lane on Ashland Place replaces a confusing design that got the block nicknamed “Crashland.” Photo: DOT More than three years after Eric Adams halted a plan to build a two-way protected bike lane on Ashland Place in Downtown Brooklyn, the lane has finally been completed. It’s one of several canceled Adams-era street-safety projects that the Mamdani administration has revived, including the McGuinness Boulevard bike lane, after they were killed in what Transportation commissioner Mike Flynn referred to as “backroom deals.” In this case, a developer and a cultural institution seem to have been the ones responsible for killing the redesign during the Adams administration. As Streetsblog reported in 2023, the protected Ashland Place bike lane was mothballed after private complaints from Two Trees, which has a luxury rental on the block with a parking garage that opens onto Ashland Place. A source said that Two Trees, which is also the developer of the Domino Sugar complex, wasn’t opposed to a bike lane per se but wanted to preserve the two-way functionality of the street. The Brooklyn Academy of Music griped about the plan publicly, writing in a letter to the community board that it did a lot of loading and unloading on the block and that operating costs would increase if “responsibility for safe streets is shifted onto us.” The Ashland Place lane, which runs for a block between Hansen Place and Lafayette Street, by the border of Fort Greene and Downtown Brooklyn, was the missing link in a 5.5-mile protected bike route that now stretches from Sunset Park to Dumbo. In recent years, bicyclists nicknamed this little strip “Crashland,” due to a confusing design that directed cyclists to cross oncoming car traffic on Ashland, then bike alongside two-way car and truck traffic on the block. Between September 2023 and the end of 2025, there were 27 reported crashes on the corner, resulting in nine people being injured, five of them on bikes, according to Streetsblog. In June, the Department of Transportation admitted at a community-board presentation that the design was “not intuitive.” Adams, who started off his term as mayor Citi Biking to meetings and promising hundreds of miles of new bike lanes, allowed top aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin to quash plans for bike-infrastructure improvements around the city. Some of the reversals involved abruptly ripping up projects the DoT had just completed, like the protected bike lane on Bedford Avenue that the city had installed a year earlier on a dangerous three-block corridor that had previously averaged about one fatality a year. So far, Mayor Mamdani hasn’t moved to reinstate that bike lane, citing “legal requirements” that needed to be met first. Some have taken the lack of action on Bedford as a sign of reluctance to take on the Hasidic Jewish community, which vigorously fought the lane for more than a decade and likely poses more of a political challenge than an arts institution and a developer. A Downtown Brooklyn Bike Lane Has Come Back to Life Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.