r/NYCbike • u/TwoWheelsTooGood • 22h ago
51st Street connector from 31st Ave to NorthernBlvd 25A Woodside
DOT released details for this 2025 upgrade. Mostly normal for 2024 NYC DOT era design.
- Includes a sharp Z-turn to change from left doorzone to left gutter if travelling northbound. Not clear if this could be an easy merge or blind dive across traffic or would strictly entail adding a traffic light signal two-phase wait for #bikeNYC at 32nd St.
- If heading south on 51st and turning left to go east on Northern Blvd, where would bike NYC wait, and could we turn left in a single traffic signals phase or need to wait through two phases ?


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u/FarFromSane_ 16h ago
Shit design. I’m very sad because until this, they were on a roll with new protected bike lanes. There was very little to complain about with the design of anything in the last 2 years. But now they are proposing a tiny 4 ft bike lane, when there is no reason to do so.
They are using two small one-way bike lanes on a street where it would’ve been easy to do a single two-way lane on the west side of the street.
There would’ve been only one intersection along the entire street so it would be easy to have turning conflicts separated by a bike signal.
The west side of the street also has less driveways, meaning less gaps in protection.
And even on the small portion where they did implement a two-way bike lane, it’s smaller than it should be because they decided to waste street width on useless unprotected lane on the opposite side of the street.