NYC to widen protected bike lane on Sixth Avenue before World Cup
An example of a double-wide bike lane on Second Avenue. Credit: DOT
Sixth Avenue’s protected bike lane will be widened along one of its most congested stretches as part of a series of street safety projects launched by the Mamdani administration ahead of the World Cup this summer. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Wednesday that the corridor’s bike lane will expand from six to 10 feet between 14th Street and West 31st Street, removing one travel lane and allowing for safer passing and side-by-side biking, as first reported by Streetsblog. The project had previously been announced under former Mayor Eric Adams but was never implemented.
Sixth Avenue is designated as a Vision Zero corridor and ranks among the most dangerous in the five boroughs. According to the Department of Transportation (DOT), there were 29 traffic deaths and serious injuries between 13th and 35th Streets from 2019 to 2023.
The thoroughfare was the site of the city’s first on-street protected bike lane in 1980. Upon returning from a trip to China, then-Mayor Ed Koch directed the DOT to install a curb-protected lane in Midtown. The project was highly controversial at the time and was removed six months later.
In 2024, the DOT installed a double-wide protected bike lane on Sixth Avenue from Lispenard Street in Tribeca to West 13th Street in Greenwich Village, closing a major gap in the city’s bike network. The new project will extend the protected lane farther into Midtown.
Between 31st and 35th Streets, the project will maintain the existing five-foot protected bike lane and add nine feet of pedestrian space through a painted sidewalk extension. Similar redesigns have been shown to reduce deaths and serious injuries by 30 percent for all road users and by 31.7 percent for pedestrians.
The DOT intends to finish the project before the World Cup begins in June. The tournament, hosted at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, includes five group-stage matches on June 13, 16, 22, 26, and 27, a round of 32 match on June 30, a round of 16 match on July 5, and the final on July 19, as 6sqft previously reported.
“What better way to welcome the World Cup than by making our streets safer and more accessible for everyone who uses them?” Mamdani said. “From Sixth Avenue in Manhattan to Broadway in Queens and the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, we’re redesigning our streets to better protect pedestrians, cyclists and drivers alike.”
“Long after the sun sets on this summer of celebration, these improvements will continue serving New Yorkers every single day,” he added.
The initiative joins several other street safety projects launched by the Mamdani administration ahead of the World Cup. Last week, the city announced it would install a center-running eastbound bus lane along Broadway between 69th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, a busy corridor used by roughly 9,000 daily riders on the Q70-SBS, also known as the “LaGuardia Link.”
Other projects include the redesign of Ninth Avenue from West 34th to West 50th Streets in Hell’s Kitchen, and new bike and pedestrian entrances to the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan.
It also comes as bike ridership across New York City continues to grow. Daily bike trips over the East River bridges reached a record high of nearly 29,000 riders in 2025, almost 18 times the number recorded in 1980, when the city first began tracking bridge bike traffic.
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