City will cut Sunset Park's Third Avenue to four car lanes and add protected bike lanes after nurse's death

The city will put Brooklyn's Third Avenue in Sunset Park on a road diet, cutting car lanes, adding protected bike lanes and shortening the long walk across the street, the Department of Transportation and City Hall announced Wednesday. The corridor runs underneath the elevated Gowanus Expressway, and the DOT says 17 people have been killed in crashes on it over the past decade.

The plan covers 2.1 miles from 62nd Street to 20th Street. Mayor Zohran Mamdani was scheduled to present it at a noon news conference at P.S. 506 in Sunset Park, ABC7 reported.

What changes

• Fewer car lanes: the avenue, which now carries six to eight lanes of traffic depending on the block, will drop to four, according to Gothamist and Patch.
• Protected bike lanes in both directions. Streetsblog describes them as double-wide, 10-foot lanes on each side of the median, separated by a concrete barrier.
• Shorter crossings: new pedestrian islands and curb extensions at intersections. Streetsblog says the changes will cut the avenue's roughly 150-foot crossing distance in half.
• Parking stays on both sides of the street. Streetsblog reports the DOT will also meter the parking in the median under the highway.
• 60th Street: a new protected bike lane between Second and Fourth avenues will connect to the bike routes on both of those avenues.

Timeline

The work comes in two phases. The southern section, from 62nd Street to 43rd Street, is scheduled for 2027, according to Gothamist, ABC7 and Patch; Streetsblog puts the southern end of the first phase at 60th Street. The northern section, from 43rd Street to 20th Street, is slated for 2028.

Why now

The announcement comes two months after Jiayi Zheng, a 28-year-old nurse at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, was killed by a hit-and-run driver at Third Avenue and 55th Street while walking home from an overnight shift, a block from the hospital. Police said she had the right of way, ABC7 reported. In 2020, another NYU Langone nurse, Clara Kang, was killed while biking home on the avenue, and last year a driver killed two older pedestrians a few blocks from where Zheng died, Patch reported.

More than 270 Sunset Park residents signed a letter this month demanding a timeline, and residents and elected officials held a safety walk on Oct. 18, according to Patch. The DOT under Mayor Eric Adams brought several redesign plans to the local community board, including a 2024 version the board supported, but none moved forward after pushback from some business groups, Streetsblog reported.

"Seventeen people have lost their lives along this corridor in a decade. That cannot continue," Mamdani said in a statement. Council Member Alexa Avilés praised the decision to start with the southern section, which has several schools and the hospital, Streetsblog reported.

Third Avenue is the latest street project shelved under Adams that the Mamdani administration has revived, after McGuinness Boulevard, Ashland Place, Fordham Road and Tremont Avenue, according to Streetsblog.