'It allows us to go faster': Manhattan’s 10th Avenue gets wider bike lanes

The city has completed safety upgrades to a 14-block stretch of 10th Avenue in Manhattan, including a 10-foot-wide bike lane, officials said Wednesday.

The new features installed between West 38th Street and West 52nd Street in Hell’s Kitchen aim to address the growing number of cyclists, e-bike riders and other micromobility users, the Transportation Department said. The city built new concrete pedestrian islands, new bike racks and redesigned intersections to slow turning vehicles.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi said it’ll make life easier – especially for people who make deliveries in the area.

“These are their office spaces, the places they spend hours each day and night, through every season, and even more so in bad weather when so many of us want the world brought to us instead of having to venture out,” Joshi said.

The bike lane is 10 feet wide for the majority of the stretch, except for a select few stretches, where it is 8-feet wide in part to accommodate dedicated turning lanes, the DOT said. Though it's twice as wide as a typical bike lane, it was still dwarfed by the space dedicated to car traffic on the avenue.

On Wednesday, Citi e-bikers, deliveristas and scooters were seen zipping up the northbound bike lane on 10th Avenue, protected from vehicle traffic by parked cars.

Yahel Perez has been working as a delivery driver for Uber for three years. He was picking up an order from a restaurant when he said the wider bike lane was a welcome change.

“Last time, there were a lot of potholes. Now, most of this is perfectly fine, so it’s way better now,” Perez said.

But with more space, Perez said, comes more people — and they’re not always on wheels.

“Sometimes there's more people walking on it,” Perez said.“Sometimes there's issues with that too, that the wider lane brings. But other than that, the lane has been really great and it being wider is better.”

Delivery driver Brayan Yat said he appreciated whenever a street has a bike lane — especially when they’re as wide as the one on 10th Avenue — because driving on the road with cars can be dangerous.

“It benefits us because it allows us to go faster,” Yat said. “We don’t take too long on orders when they’re wide like this,”

Mayor Eric Adams has been criticized for coming up short on his campaign pledge to be the “bike mayor,” previously saying he planned to install 300 miles of protected bike lanes and 150 miles of bus lanes in four years.

The NYC Streets Plan, a document the City Council passed in the waning days of the Bill de Blasio administration to ensure the DOT meets annual targets, calls for 50 miles to be built each year. According to street safety advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, which tracks the city’s progress, the city installed 20 miles last year, and 29.6 miles so far this year.

Last week, the officials announced the completion of a similarly wide bike lane on Third Avenue. On 10th Avenue, the DOT said it hopes to expand the redesign all the way down to 14th Street by next year.