City Plans to Connect Lower Manhattan and Central Park
The City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) is planning to create a new link within its existing network of Manhattan bike lanes that will enable cyclists to pedal directly from the Financial District to Central Park within protected paths.
Currently, this section of the Lower Manhattan bike lane network extends northward along the left side of Church Street and onto Sixth Avenue, but abruptly disappears three blocks later at Lispenard Street. The new plan will extend the lane for slightly more than a mile to West Eighth Street, where it will connect with a segregated lane that continues uptown all the way to Central Park.
DOT officials tout the safety benefits of this plan, noting that there were more than 20 injuries of cyclists at three intersections with Sixth Avenue (Canal Street, Watts Street, and West Houston Street) between 2019 and 2023. They also note that the installation of a protected bike lane typically yields safety dividends for all street users, resulting in a decline in injuries for cyclists and drivers of 15 percent each, and a falloff in injuries to pedestrians of 21 percent. In terms of usage, the creation of protected bike lanes increases bicycle volumes by an average of 50 percent.
The design for the new bike lane envisions moving the path to the right side of Sixth Avenue between Lispenard and West Houston Streets, to avoid conflicts with vehicles turning left from Sixth Avenue to approach the Holland Tunnel. After Houston Street, the bike lane will move back to the left side of Sixth Avenue all the way to Central Park South.
DOT officials estimate that construction on the new bike lane will be completed by the end of this year. Even after this plan is implemented, however, Lower Manhattan will have multiple missing links in its bike network. Chief among these is a connection between the West Street cycling lane along the Hudson River and the Church Street lane. Community leaders have advocated for years for a connection between these two north/south routes — ideally along Vesey Street, which is closed to vehicular traffic as a security measure for the World Trade Center. But their argument has thus far failed to move officials from the DOT and the Port Authority (the agency that has jurisdiction over the Trade Center campus).