A pro-biking group said cyclists should be going agog over a city plan to revamp the M15 bus route that includes laying down miles of protected bikeways up and down the East Side.

Transportation Alternatives, which has campaigned to close gaping bikeway gaps on the East Side for years, said the MTA's SBS, or Select Bus Service, program brings sober changes to improve safety.

"It's laying down some pretty innovative protected bike lanes where there's a desperate need for it," said Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for TA. "The East Side is bereft of bike facilities and it's dominated by these wide avenues dangerous to people and perilous to people on bikes as well, so, this plan is a huge step in the right direction."

The proposed bikeways would come as part of SBS that's eyed to replace the M15 Limited, which runs from City Hall to Harlem along First and Second Avenues, by this fall.

Transit officials have pitched SBS to speed up travel times with pre-paid boarding collection and overhauling the M15 route with new pedestrian traffic islands, bus-only lanes and protected bikeways as done on stretches of Broadway, Ninth Street and Grand Street.
And with transit officials booked through the month selling SBS publicly to community boards served by the M15, TA moved to hoist other elements of the plan beyond the bike-friendly component.

"It takes longer to get from Harlem to City Hall on the M15 then from Philadelphia to New York on Amtrak," Norvell said. "It's going to move people a lot more efficiently not just by car but by bike and by bus. As a whole, it's really wrenching First and Second Avenue out of the 1950s and bringing them to the 21st century. These streets haven't changed since the Robert Moses era."

With the bikeway gap, TA has fought to fill the spaces since the city began stitching up the Hudson River Greenway on the West Side from 2004 to 2005, Norvell said. (Community Board 6 also wants it sewn up.)
"The Hudson River Greenway brought the West Side together and that's when the East Side's shortcomings became very glaring," he said.
Consider the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway.

Locally, the marked bikeway on the path runs through Stuyvesant Cove Park before it merges northbound into a Waterside Plaza bus lane at East 25th Street. Then with little to no signage, cyclists ride under the FDR Drive to about East 34th Street where the marked bike path stops and the pedestrian walkway is cut-off by a fence.

Stuy Town illustrator Jill Pratzon who gave up on riding the waterfront north of Stuyvesant Cove said SBS would help her bike to work at a West Side studio.

"It would be ideal to have actual barriers between bicyclists and cars, trucks and buses, but anything will be better than nothing," she said.

"When I walk through the newly reformed Fifth Avenue-Broadway crossing at Madison Square Park, I see people in cars and on foot slowing down and looking, trying to navigate an altered path. Won't dedicated bike lanes along First Avenue cause that same caution?"

Physical elements of SBS may be installed beginning this spring and the service running by October.

Concerns remained over how street scape changes would affect local businesses that may get cut-off to curbside access for pick-ups and drop-offs and skipped stops at junctures by Bellevue Hospital and the Turtle Bay community.