Neighborhoods in southern Brooklyn like Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and Gravesend — with higher than average car ownership rates when compared to the rest of New York City — aren’t traditionally thought of as cycling hotspots. But as the city adds more and more bike infrastructure, and elected officials call for an ambitious bike network buildout, a new generation of activists is working to get southern Brooklyn its fair share of bike lanes and let the world know that bikes are welcome south of 65th Street.

“I think [southern Brooklyn’s attitude towards bikes] is actually more positive than people have been led to believe,” says Brian Hedden of the recently formed organization Bike South Brooklyn. “When you get to talking to individual people, you realize that there’s actually a lot of support from people who are expressing interest in wanting to be able to cycle. They just don’t do it right now because they don’t feel as though the roads are particularly safe or comfortable.”

The group grew out of Transportation Alternatives organizing that had been going on in Bay Ridge since the summer, when the neighborhood saw a series of demonstrations centered on street safety. Now, Bike South Brooklyn has 115-person email list (the great majority of whom live in Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights), whose members can be relied on to represent the cyclist view at community board meetings. The group is committed to expanding the area’s bike infrastructure with the addition of safe north-south and east-west routes.

Before the Department of Transportation held a visioning session devoted to placing bike infrastructure in Bay Ridge, the group was able to get itself heard at a meeting of Community Board 10’s Transportation Committee, which Hedden says was a breakthrough for bike-friendly residents.

“It was the first time that the board had heard from 25 cyclists at one time in at least seven or eight years, possibly ever,” says Hedden, who has lived in Bay Ridge for five years, and Bensonhurst for seven years before that. “Certainly for the new people on the board, it would have been the first time that they had had heard too many cyclists at once.” While there was one suggestion from a board member to just build a velodrome to make cyclists happy, Hedden says “it was my perception that the committee members were receptive to the message that they were hearing”—one that was about people using bikes as everyday transportation and tools to get around the neighborhood.

Pitched battles with community boards over bike lanes are, of course, nothing new in the city. But the fight over a proposed, then abandoned, Bay Ridge Parkway bike lane in 2010 put a damper on efforts to add more than sharrows a few years later, leaving cyclists in Bay Ridge wirh no options for a protected ride, aside from the Belt Parkway path along the water. The 2010 bike lane was opposed by Vincent Gentile and Dominic Recchia, the City Council members who represented Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst during that time. The fight was contentious enough that one member of CB10 claimed he wasn’t reappointed to the board over his support for the Bay Ridge Parkway lane, though Gentile denied it.

(Bill de Blasio, who was then the public advocate, applauded DOT dropping the bike lane as well, suggesting it was a correct time to listen to the community.)

But today’s politics are different. Neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, and Borough Park were the focal point of the rage over the state Senate’s inability to renew or expand the city’s speed camera program, a flub that helped cost state Senator Marty Golden his job. City Council Member Mark Treyger, Recchia’s successor on the council, was a visible presence at demonstrations outside of Golden’s office, and Golden’s successor, Andrew Gounardes, has continued to make street safety a part of his agenda in Albany. And City Council Member Justin Brannan has made no secret of his contempt for unsafe drivers in Bay Ridge, as crashes have reached ridiculous heights (there were 17 separate crashes on a single day in January).

Still, that change isn’t a silver bullet in Hedden’s eyes.

“I think that helps bring awareness to road safety overall, but I don’t know that everyone necessarily makes the connection between bike safety specifically and safety for all road users,” Hedden says. “I don’t know if there’s always going to be a natural progression towards someone who is supporting speed cameras going all the way to supporting Bay Ridge bike infrastructure, but it’s certainly got to help more than it hurts.”

At DOT’s visioning session, many attendees seemed open to some kind of expansion or addition to the neighborhood’s bike infrastructure. Going from table to table, you could hear familiar gripes with bike lanes, like how they go unused or how cyclists break traffic laws. But for the most part, bike lane proponents and opponents sat at the same tables and tried in earnest to hash out how to share the road.

After 45 minutes or so of breakout tables, where each table determined how participants got around and where they thought bike lanes could go, the groups presented their ideas. Four tables brought up bringing bike lanes to Fourth Avenue (a roadway already slated for an “uninterrupted, four-mile protected path from 65th Street in Sunset Park to Atlantic Avenue”) and reviving the once-defeated Bay Ridge Parkway bike lane as an east-west route to get to different neighborhoods. A table led by CB10 Chair Doris Cruz—who urged people to go to the meeting by warning that cycling advocates were “out in force” and “well-networked”—called Bay Ridge Parkway too congested and suggested 83rd Street as a westbound bike lane, although it’s a street that gets cut off at Fort Hamilton Parkway after Fifth Avenue.

John Murphy, a 30-year Bay Ridge resident, says he’s seen “a reluctant acceptance” of bike lanes. “Over the last number of years there’s been a direction towards bike lanes that never existed,” he explains. “Sixth Avenue, 72nd Street, there’s been great improvements.” And while the visioning session was non-binding and will only provide guidance to DOT, Murphy said public meetings about bike infrastructure serve a purpose.

“I think you just have to have more meetings, and convince people it’s the right thing to do,” Murphy notes. “Even the seniors—when they drive, if someone’s riding a bike, it’s one less car that’s in their way, so it cuts down on the actual traffic and congestion.”

“In these conversations here, it’s about respecting the generation of people that have lived here for 30 years and try to help them understand that biking is a beautiful thing in New York City,” says Kerrin Stokes, a bike lane supporter who grew up in Marine Park and eventually moved to Bay Ridge. “It’s coming, and you should listen to the bikers who want to build the network.”

Even though Stokes says Bay Ridge has “a strong car culture,” she thinks the neighborhood would benefit from an expansion of the current bike network. “I’m finding more people who are biking,” she says. “I think this neighborhood’s missing out on keeping people in the neighborhood by bike, and buying coffees here and shopping by bike. It’s a beautiful community by the shore, and people would visit if they could bike here more.”

And unlike the previous generation of local representatives, cyclists have some support from the political establishment. Though Brannan did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the question of bike lanes in Bay Ridge, Hedden said that the council member’s chief of staff has stayed in contact with the organization, and he “is generally pretty supportive of cyclists in his district.”

Yes, it's about focusing on particular corners and corridors but its also about correcting a pervasive car culture where, to some, people are merely obstacles. Having a candid community conversation about pedestrian safety is important. This is about saving lives. #VisionZero pic.twitter.com/TO5E3k3j3M — Justin Brannan (@JustinBrannan) February 19, 2019

Treyger, meanwhile, gave a full-throated endorsement of bike lanes in his district next door.

“We need to understand that we are sharing space together—we’re sharing the road, and no one has a monopoly on the road, on the street,” says Treyger, who also recently announced a million dollar repair job for the Ocean Parkway bike lane (the nation’s first dedicated bike lane). “We are in this together. I think it’s a matter of necessity for us to have a very serious conversation about greater connectivity to bike infrastructure throughout the borough and the city of New York.”

Treyger, who represents an area that also includes Coney Island, believes the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy was a turning point for how people in his district viewed the relative utility of the humble bike.

“My sense is that Superstorm Sandy was a game changer in many ways for many residents in southern Brooklyn,” he explains. “During and after the storm, the fact that many cars were underwater, and their engines were destroyed, made cars really have no use. There were many people that I would see on bicycles carrying supplies in and out of the neighborhood, because their cars were destroyed, or some the roads were still not accessible for a variety of reasons. And so I just remember saying, you know, thank God for bikes, you know, thank God for someone who had a bicycle to get certain basic supplies in and out.”

Beyond the environmental problems caused by a car-reliant transportation network, Treyger says that he feels like extending the city’s bike network is exactly the kind of connection to the city at large that southern Brooklyn has asked for and deserves. “Many of us insouthern Brooklyn have argued historically—and rightfully so—that we feel like we’re the outer-outer boroughs, that we’re very disconnected from the rest of the city,” h says. “But we can’t argue that we’re disconnected from the rest of the city and at the same time, oppose reasonable bike lanes in our neighborhood; you can’t have it both ways. We do need to be connected to the city, we do need more modes of transportation in and out of our neighborhood.”

And while Treyger didn’t commit to specific routes (his district is home to L&B Spumoni Gardens, which a number of the visioning workshop participants pointed to as a good destination for a bike lane), he did lay out his terms of engagement for any proposed routes that would run through areas he represented.

“We need to understand that we are sharing space together. No one has a monopoly on the street.”

“If the only thing we’re hearing is just emotional arguments that some folks just might not like bicycles and just like cars, that to me, is just not substantive,” he says. “We need to have a substantive conversation about transportation in a growing city where space is becoming more more scarce and in a city that’s vulnerable in so many ways to the impacts of climate change.”

He also said that his experience growing up in the district taught him the folly of trying to squeeze more cars into the increasingly populated and popular area.

“I have seen where historically, in Coney Island for example, the DOT would try to come up with ways at the request of folks from the neighborhood to try to accommodate more cars,” Treyger says. “It doesn’t work. Any time that they’ve tried a plan to accommodate more cars, it just it led to more congestion, it led to more traffic, it led to more double parking, triple parking.”

As for the future of southern Brooklyn’s bike network, it will have to wait until at least the spring for the next chapter, which is when the DOT is set to go back to CB10 “to present projects and discuss next steps,” according to a department spokesperson. Whatever the DOT proposes, Hedden says that cycling isn’t just some passing trend in southern Brooklyn, and that bike riders are going to continue to press and make themselves heard.

“Contrary to popular belief, cyclists do exist in this part of the borough,” he says. “They have the same needs and concerns for safety and for transportation that anyone else does.”