Brooklyn’s Flushing Avenue is seeing continued growth in pedestrian and bicycle traffic as the partially-constructed 14-mile Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway continues to gain in popularity and use.
According to a commuter-count taken by the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative (BGI) and nonprofit advocacy group Right of Way on June 20, 2014, 2,966 bicyclists and 1,030 pedestrians traveled along Flushing Avenue, which encompasses the southern border of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This accounted for 25 percent of overall traffic that day.
The new numbers follow a 2010 installation of bike lanes, including protected bike lanes, on the avenue and nearby Williamsburg Street West, which connects Kent and Flushing Avenues.
“Each time new improvements like this occur and new connections are made, we see a jump in Greenway user volumes,” said Milton Puryear, co-founder of BGI. “We anticipate another big jump when the Flushing Avenue capital project is completed.”
That project is a “Class 1” portion of the Greenway that will bring green landscaping and foot/bicycle traffic to the entire length of the Navy Yard.
The Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway and its advocates in the BGI have come a long way since the first public workshops in 2004, with portions of the 14-mile route stretching from Pulaski Bridge in Greenpoint down to Owls Head Park on the border of Sunset Park and Bay Ridge now complete and others in various stages of construction.
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