Greenpoint's redesigned McGuiness Boulevard wins some praise, though bike lanes still being blocked

The much-debated bike lane installed last year along Greenpoint’s busy McGuinness Boulevard might have taken some street space away from cars — but that hasn’t stopped drivers from illegally parking on green-painted parts of the street now reserved for cyclists.

The bike lane, which is supposed to be protected from vehicles, was filled with a half-dozen parked cars and trucks on Friday, requiring cyclists to weave in and out of traffic or take to the sidewalk. A construction site fully blocked one corner of the bike lane and sidewalk with vehicles and equipment. Still, anecdotal reviews of the new design collected by Gothamist have been generally positive.

A previous plan to redesign the boulevard between the Pulaski Bridge and Cayler Street was scaled back by Mayor Eric Adams' administration after pushback from local business owners . The city transportation department had initially proposed to remove a lane of traffic in each direction while adding a bike lane, but made a last-minute change last year to leave the car lanes untouched.

The transportation department this week said it plans to use the same approach for a redesign of the remainder of the street down to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Nonetheless, cyclists told Gothamist the scaled-back changes are a major improvement from the street’s previous setup.

“I know what it was like before and it was a nightmare,” said cyclist Axel Peemöller, 46, from East Williamsburg. “I personally would love to see less cars, but you know, what are you gonna do? But making the lanes a little smaller for the cars and adding a bike lane seems like a reasonable solution.”

The Department of Transportation reported that three people were killed on McGuinness Boulevard from 2012 to 2022, the year before the department began to finalize the redesign. A collection of business owners protested the department’s original plan, saying it would take away too much parking in the area.

But on Friday, most cyclists, drivers and business owners Gothamist found in the area said they approved of the city’s plan to extend the redesign south — even if that has already led to cars parked in the new bike lane.

“It's good for the people, safety for the driver, for the bicyclist, it's very good too,” delivery driver Franklin Casio, who works for the company Garda, said while picking up some boxes at an auto parts shop.

Cyclists said the bigger issue was the NYPD’s lack of enforcement against drivers parking on the bike lane.

“I almost daily see cars parked there and as a cyclist myself, that's the most annoying thing because then you have to pull out into traffic,” local resident Jackie Batruch, 49, said. “The point of the bike lane is so that you don't have to do that.”

And despite blowback from transit activists and some local elected officials over the mayor's decision to keep all the street's traffic lanes, most people interviewed by Gothamist supported his decision.

Caroline Bell, the co-owner of the popular Cafe Grumpy, considered the final redesign a decent compromise. She'd signed a petition last year calling for the removal of a traffic lane.

“Obviously, we have deliveries to do and people are concerned about the traffic, but also our customers love riding their bikes and walking,” Bell said.

Kai Maloney, 29, from Mill Basin was in the neighborhood trying to secure a studio to open a hair braiding shop on the street. She said she liked the bike lane — but didn’t want to remove a lane of traffic. She grew up near Linden Boulevard in Brooklyn, which she said is regularly gridlocked, and worried taking space from cars would cause similar problems in Greenpoint.

“Seeing the bike lane is definitely dope because in New York City there's a lot of people that use biking as a source of transportation,” she said. “So when you create lanes for people who are not in actual vehicles that are gonna like, probably hit you if you're in their lane, it's really dope.”

Not everyone in the area thinks it's dope to give street space to cyclists.

“They ruined the neighborhood. Bring back the roads,” said Bella Gelman, the secretary at G&S Truck and Auto Repair on the boulevard. “There's no parking, traffic, and there's not really bikes. There's no reason to have a bike lane on the main road between two bridges that have commercial [businesses]. They don't need it here. They could have done it somewhere else.”