Today I spied this upcoming project on the NY DOT website. Estimated to be completed in late March or early May, it attempts to address the unfriendly conditions bicyclists traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge face upon arrival in Manhattan (PDF). If you are not familiar, the area around the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge is a nightmare – the bridge lets bicyclists out on the middle of six lanes of aggressively moving vehicles on Delancey. Sidestreets are mostly one-way and routinely dead-end.
The solution to this is clearly to create a separated bike lane on Delancey for at least a few blocks to give bicyclists a chance to choose a north or south bound route that is comfortable and not too confusing. By creating a separated bike lane on Delancey, bicyclists could follow car directions to the Williamsburg Bridge, and wouldn’t have to consult the bike-map to figure out how to connect up with a safe bike route. It would be intuitive and minimize the need for bicyclists to go out of their way to ride in bike lanes.
But that apparently isn’t on the table. Instead, the DOT has decided to install bike lanes and route markings on Clinton Street north to Houston and south to East Broadway. 
The project involves converting a portion of Clinton below Delancey from one-way to two-way traffic. Depressingly, this section only gets class 3 route markings – no actual bike lane. The portion north of Delancey to Houston is nice enough; it is curb side and painted green, but it dead-ends at Houston, which is an unsafe and pointless place to end, notwithstanding its bike-route classification. Hopefully improvements on Houston are planned for the future.
So am I right in seeing this as a small, perhaps meaninglessly small, step in the right direction?
