NYC DOT
The West 72nd Street bike lane spent the spring surviving petitions, protests, and one of the most heated community board meetings the Upper West Side has seen in years. It cleared all of it. Now a single ruling has stopped the project cold, and it came from a place the fight had not yet reached.
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A judge has ordered the city to put the West 72nd Street redesign on hold, at least until a court hearing next month, amNewYork reports. The ruling directs the Department of Transportation not to begin building the two-way protected bike lane until the case is heard, freezing a project the agency had said it could start as early as this summer.The order follows a lawsuit filed July 11 in Manhattan federal court by a group of West 72nd Street residents with disabilities. They are represented by attorney Hartley Bernstein, the same lawyer behind recent challenges to bike lanes on Court Street in Brooklyn and 31st Street in Astoria. The suit asks the court to block the redesign and argues it would discriminate against disabled and elderly residents by making the street harder to navigate, singling out e-bikes, mopeds, and other motorized devices in the protected lane as an added hazard, according to Streetsblog. The complaint names the city and its Department of Transportation, along with the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, and seeks monetary damages on top of a permanent halt to the project.
The pause arrives just six weeks after Community Board 7 backed the redesign by a vote of 26 to 17, handing Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the DOT an advisory win after an hours-long, standing-room-only meeting. That vote capped months of back-and-forth, from the DOT redesign first proposed in April to opponents who rallied against the plan at Verdi Square. Community board votes are only advisory, and the agency had made clear it intended to move ahead regardless. This court order is the first move in the saga with the power to actually stop it.
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The redesign would convert West 72nd Street from four moving lanes of car traffic to two, using the reclaimed roadway for a center turning bay and a parking-protected, two-way bike lane along the north curb. DOT has paired the lane with metered parking, loading zones, pedestrian islands, curb extensions with shorter crossings, and raised bus boarding islands, plus a protected connection along Riverside Boulevard to tie riders into the greenway and Riverside Park. The agency has framed it as the neighborhood’s first continuous crosstown cycling link between the Hudson River, Central Park, and the East Side, and has pointed to a 39 percent drop in older pedestrians killed or seriously injured on streets with protected lanes.For now, both sides wait on next month’s hearing, which will decide whether DOT can pick up its paint and hardware or whether the project stays frozen while the lawsuit plays out. Across the park, the Upper East Side may be watching the outcome just as closely, since DOT has said it plans to bring a companion East 72nd Street redesign to Community Board 8.
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