Last summer, Regional Plan Association released The Five Borough Bikeway report - our vision for a comprehensive network of protected bike lanes in New York City. We’ve updated the maps from this report to track the construction of protected bike lanes in the city and measure this progress against our original 425-mile concept.

Cycling in the city increased sharply during the worst days of the pandemic last year and it has not slowed down since. Cyclist counts on the East River bridges climbed to an average of 25,431 per day in June, 11.4 percent higher than June 2020, which was higher than pre-pandemic numbers. In 2020, the city constructed a total of 63 bike lane miles, 28 miles of which were protected bike lanes. The city has nearly completed the construction of a high-profile protected bike lane on the Brooklyn Bridge, while Citi Bike, the nation’s largest bike share system, continues to expand in the five boroughs.

Despite this progress, at the current rate of less than 30 miles of protected bike lanes per year, it will be over a decade before the network of protected lanes is stitched together to connect neighborhood to neighborhood and borough to borough. Now that car traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels, we urgently need more street space for transportation alternatives. We will continue to track the city’s progress and encourage this administration - and the next - to take an all-city approach to bike lanes.