Brooklyn has argued about bike lanes for so long that the arguments have their own geology: Prospect Park West in the early strata, Bedford Avenue somewhere in the middle, and on top, freshly deposited, the Bergen and Dean Street bike boulevard and a redesign of DeKalb and Lafayette Avenues. This fall, for the first time, the fight is also on the ballot.
Proposal 3, one of five charter questions on the back of the November 3 ballot, bundles three changes to the city’s charter, according to the city’s official voter guide. The one that matters on Atlantic Avenue concerns street safety reviews; the other two concern the sale of small city-owned lots and the leasing of city offices. Early voting opened Saturday and runs through November 1.
A rally at Barclays
On the eve of early voting, a coalition of 11 groups led by Brooklyn for All of Us and Our Communities Count called a rally for Saturday morning outside Barclays Center, the New York Post reported, to oppose the measure and to demand a halt to the Bergen and Dean plan, the DeKalb and Lafayette redesign and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Fast Bus Lanes.”
The coalition was careful about its framing. “We are not against safer streets,” the organizers said. “We are against decisions being made about our communities without meaningful participation.” Another line from their materials, “Our streets belong to everyone,” is the sort of slogan that both sides of this debate could print on a tote bag, and in Brooklyn probably already have.
The Department of Transportation’s response was conciliatory. “We look forward to listening to and working with the community,” a spokesperson told the Post.
What Proposal 3 would do
The street-safety piece of the proposal concerns what the charter calls major transportation projects. As the Hunters Point Ledger laid out, a project counts as major if it covers 1,000 consecutive feet or four consecutive blocks, or includes a bike lane of any length. Today, the DOT must notify local elected officials and the community board, present to the board on request, and consult the NYPD, the FDNY, the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities and the Department of Small Business Services. Proposal 3 would move those consultations to the commissioner level, bar a missed consultation or technical error from being used in court to stop a project, and let the DOT start work while notice is still under way when crash data show a risk of serious injury.
The Charter Revision Commission said the DOT designated 37 major projects in 2025, the Ledger reported, and 13 were delayed by the review into 2027; all but two of the delayed projects involved bike lanes. The commission estimates the change would speed such projects by at least 33 percent. The proposal’s other parts would let small city-owned lots be sold through a shorter review without a Council vote, and remove Council and City Planning Commission review of city office leases.
The coalition for the measure is the familiar coalition of the urbanist left and center: Transportation Alternatives, Riders Alliance, Open New York, the New York Housing Conference, the Regional Plan Association and the disability-rights group CIDNY. The opposition is smaller but not trivial. The Long Island City Partnership argued that the current consultation process has let the DOT balance cyclist safety against the needs of industrial businesses. The Municipal Art Society objected to bundling three unrelated changes into one question, and the League of Women Voters warned that dropping Council review of land and lease deals removes an independent check.
Those objections deserve more attention than they usually get. Whatever one thinks of bike lanes, the question of how much consultation a street redesign owes the people who live and work on it is a question about process, not about bicycles, and reasonable people, including people who ride, can disagree about it. So can people who would vote yes on one part of Proposal 3 and no on another, and who will not get to.
The streets in question
The plans the coalition wants halted are not hypothetical. In May, Mayor Mamdani rode with the Bergen Bike Bus to announce a bike boulevard on Bergen and Dean Streets, a roughly 10-mile pair of routes from Court Street to East New York Avenue, with design work later this year and a first phase installed in 2027. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said at the time, “When we make our streets safer for cyclists, we make them safer for everyone.” Council Members Shahana Hanif, Sandy Nurse, Chi Ossé and Lincoln Restler, and Rep. Dan Goldman, backed the plan.
The DeKalb and Lafayette redesign is the bus riders’ fight. In a September presentation to Community Board 3, the DOT said the B38 carries about 18,000 riders on an average day and that 62 percent of households along the corridor have no car. Since 2021, the department counted 841 people injured on the corridor, 47 of them severely, and one person killed, with hot spots at Bedford, Washington, Nostrand and Fulton and at Broadway. The median income of bus riders on the route was $30,000, the agency said, against $47,000 for drivers.
Those figures are the strongest argument for the redesign, and the coalition’s complaint, about process rather than outcomes, is the strongest argument against the way it is being done. Brooklyn has rarely managed to have both conversations at once.
What to watch
Design work on Bergen and Dean is due later this year, with a first phase slated for 2027. The DeKalb and Lafayette plan, presented to Community Board 3 in September, is the nearer-term test of how the DOT handles a neighborhood that wants a say. Proposal 3 is on the ballot through November 3. If it passes, the next fight over a Brooklyn bike lane will be shorter; if it fails, it will be longer. In neither case, one suspects, will it be the last.
Featured image: Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, then a City Council member, in 2018. Photo by Regional Plan Association via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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