City's Bike Lanes Are Going Green - Literally

Residents of a Brooklyn Heights street opened the doors of their elegant brownstones this week to see what many described as a green blemish smeared across their tree-lined avenue.

A fresh coat of nuclear-green paint had appeared, unannounced, on a bicycle lane on Henry Street between Amity and Clark streets — the first phase of a new city initiative to discourage vehicles from encroaching on lanes reserved for cyclists.

"It's fairly ugly, considering the neighborhood," a graphic designer who lives in Brooklyn, Claire Benson, said of the pigmented lane. Most of the city's bike lanes are delineated by more understated white stripes and symbols of cyclists, but the city is planning to "green" roughly five miles of curbside bike lanes where vehicles and bicycles are most likely to clash. Painting the lanes green costs the city about $100,000 a square mile, a spokesman for the transportation department said. While residents of the street raised their eyebrows at what they felt was an abrasive hue, cyclists lauded the more visible lane as a triumph in their ongoing clash with motorists over limited street space.

"It makes it impossible for drivers to ignore bike lanes and it creates a more protected space for cyclists only," a spokeswoman for Transportation Alternatives, Caroline Samponaro, said.

Motorists can be fined up to $115 for parking or driving in a bicycle lane.

Ms. Samponaro said the advocacy group would ideally like to see all of the city's 200-miles of bicycle lanes separated from automobile traffic flow by physical barriers, but that colored lanes have proved successful at making urban cycling safer in cities such as Philadelphia.

Six years ago, the city experimented with a blue bike lane on Henry Street as a part of a project to relieve traffic in downtown Brooklyn. With a growing number of New Yorkers traveling on bicycles, the city is now moving forward with brighter, greener lanes, a spokesman said, noting that contractors now have to maintain the colored lanes when they slice open the streets for construction projects.