Brooklyn's Bike Boulevards Are Built for the 90 Percent Who Do Not Drive

Photo: Jim Henderson / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

On Tuesday night, the Department of Transportation held its first public workshop for Mayor Zohran Mamdani's planned bike boulevards on Dean Street and Bergen Street in Brooklyn. The plan would remake two busy east west corridors, running from Boerum Place to East New York Avenue, around the people who actually use them. And at that workshop, one skeptic waved community board credentials and offered the familiar claim that everyone in the neighborhood has and needs a car.

The city data says something completely different, and it is not close. Just 10 percent of residents around the project drive to work alone, according to the American Community Survey figures for the area. Across the census tracts covering Dean and Bergen, about two thirds of households report not owning a vehicle at all, and in Community Board 8, 69 percent of homes have no car while 27 percent of residents work from home. In plain terms... nine out of ten people living around these streets get to work without driving. The streets, though, are still designed as if the one in ten who drives is the only person who counts.

That gap is the whole argument in one set of numbers. For decades, New York street design has handed space, speed, and safety to the driving minority, while the majority who walk, ride, and take transit squeeze along the edges. Kids ride the Bergen Bike Bus to school on these streets, escorted by parents, through traffic that treats their route as a shortcut. Mamdani rode with those families in May and promised them the boulevard would be finished to keep them safe. Tuesday's workshop was the city finally starting that work in public.

Why it matters is bigger than two streets. Every city in America has a version of this fight... a loud claim that everyone drives, used to block any change, while the data quietly shows most people do not. Designing for the 90 percent is not radical. It is designing for reality. Slower car traffic, safer crossings, and room for bikes mean fewer injuries, cleaner air, and streets that belong to the neighborhood instead of to through traffic cutting across it.

There is a catch, and neighbors named it. The transportation department has not installed a single piece of the redesign yet, and installation will not begin until next summer at the earliest. A promise a mayor makes to schoolchildren in May should not take over a year to touch the pavement. Voters along the route backed the ballot measure that speeds up transportation project timelines by two to one and four to one margins... the mandate is there, and the delay is a choice the administration should have to explain.

What happens next is design, and then delivery. The workshops will shape what Dean and Bergen actually become, and residents who use these streets every day without a car should show up and be counted as loudly as the skeptics. Then City Hall has to build it, on a timeline a kid on a bike can believe in. Streets for the majority who do not drive... that was the promise, and Brooklyn is watching to see it kept.

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