Bicycle advocates have dubbed Houston Street the Boulevard of Death, after two bicyclists were killed last month on the cross-town thoroughfare, a morbid reference to the moniker given to Queens Boulevard, where scores of pedestrians have been killed.

Though the comparison may be unfair – more than 100 pedestrians have died over the years on Queens Boulevard – the recent deaths have led to a feeling among bicyclists that the creation of bike lanes on roads and greenways, but not along major cross streets, has led to an incomplete bike network and a dangerously false sense of security for riders.

“With the increase in cycling, it’s leading people to slaughter,” one transit advocate, Paul Steely White, said of the lack of crosstown bike lanes.

Mr. White, who is the executive director of the bicycle advocacy organization Transportation Alternatives, said the group plans to address the recent spike in bicycle fatalities and the lack of designated bike lanes on crosstown streets, among other issues, at a meeting specially convened today with the commissioner of the Department of Transportation, Iris Weinshall, and the police department’s chief of transportation, Michael Scagnelli.

The death in late June of Andrew Ross Morgan, who collided with a furniture truck at the corner of Elizabeth and East Houston streets, brought the number of bicycle fatalities to 10 so far this year, compared with six through this time last year, according to police figures.

Mr. White said that, unlike Queens Boulevard, whose streets have been narrowed to slow traffic, leading to a marked decrease in fatalities in recent years, Houston Street is void of signs and markers that could separate drivers from bicyclists, though the street has been part of the city’s proposed 909-mile network of bicycle-friendly routes since 1994.

While the city’s Department of Transportation has created more than 182 miles of bicycle-friendly streets, spurring an increase in bike traffic, almost all of the improvements have come along the city’s north-south axis, making crosstown travel especially harrowing.

“Any transit system needs to be a network,” one transportation consultant, Bruce Schaller, said. “If you have isolated corridors, it makes it harder for people to use. It also creates a more dangerous situation.”

The police department, which would not comment on the meeting, has said as much as 75% of bicyclist injuries and fatalities are a result of “cyclist error,” a designation that has befuddled bike activists. The four most recent fatal crashes have occurred on streets recommended as bike routes on the Department of Transportation’s city bike map. All of them lack bike-lane striping and other signs that alert cars to share the road with bicyclists, “forcing bicyclists into dangerous competition for street space with cars and trucks,” Mr. White said.

Citing a recent study by the Department of Transportation on the effects of creating bike lanes on Oriental Boulevard in Brooklyn, Mr. White said narrowing the traffic lanes and painting signs on Houston Street would slow cars, create space for bikes, and lead to an increase in bike traffic and fewer injuries.

According to the Transportation Alternatives Web site, using statistics culled from the Department of Transportation, the group designated the corner of Bowery and Houston, where 23 cyclists were injured between 1995 and 2001, as the most dangerous corner in Manhattan.

A spokesman for the department, Craig Chin, said the agency would not comment on the safety issues raised by the recent spate in fatalities on Houston Street until after the meeting today.

Like most American cities, New York has slowly relinquished the once commonly held notion that streets are the exclusive domain of cars, cabs, buses, and trucks.

The creation of a bicycle master plan in 1994, along with the production of greenways along the city’s waterfronts, has helped spur a steady increase of riders, to 113,000 bicyclists daily, up from 70,000 12 years ago, according to the city’s Department of Transportation.

But unlike other major cities like Chicago and San Francisco, both of which have larger staffs and have completed a greater portion of their bicycle networks, the city has completed less than 25% of its master plan.

Transit advocates also point out that under city law, bike lanes must be approved by local community boards, who must give up parking spaces in return for bike lanes. Such approval could be bypassed if the transportation officials deem the creation of signs and specialized lanes for bikes a matter of safety, as bike advocates contend.

The president of an association representing taxi drivers, which often battle cyclists for space in the city’s streets, said his group favored measures that would narrow street lanes, arguing that keeping bikes and cars separate would reduce the strain on taxi drivers. “We need to respect the fact that communities are growing and more people are cycling,” the president of the New York Federation of Taxi Drivers, Fernando Mateo, said. It would help, he said, if “cyclists, instead of driving in the middle of the street as they do now, would have a lane to drive in” on Houston Street.

Bike advocates will call on the transportation officials to complete the bike network by 2012.