New York City has created more than 100 miles of bicycle lanes in recent years to encourage and accommodate the number of people who, compelled by a desire to preserve the environment or preserve their bank accounts, have taken to getting around on two wheels.

But the effort to turn the city into a place that embraces bicyclists has clashed with a long-entrenched reality  New York is a crowded, congested urban landscape where every patch of asphalt is coveted.

The latest illustration of this reality  and among the more contentious  is playing out on the Brooklyn waterfront, where bike lanes less than two miles long have set off a verbal battle among a growing cast of interested parties, including business owners, residents, bicyclists and their advocates, and politicians.

The city’s Department of Transportation painted 1.75 miles of bike lanes on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg last fall, the first step of an ambitious plan to create a 14-mile bicycle and pedestrian path stretching from Greenpoint to Sunset Park and separated from vehicles by medians filled with grass or shrubs.