If your bike commute to work has been thwarted for the past three days by snowy lanes, it won't be for much longer.
The Department of Sanitation was working on clearing them Wednesday, an agency spokesperson said Wednesday afternoon.
"After snow storms, we work to clear the 6,000 miles of city streets first to open them to emergency vehicles, and then work on bike lanes," DSNY spokesperson Belinda Mager said in an email.
As of Tuesday afternoon, 99 percent of city streets had been plowed after Saturday's record-setting blizzard, the city agency told PIX 11. Altogether 1,726 snow laborers had cleared away 99.5 million cubic yards of snow, weighing 7.25 million tons.
But the city's bike lanes, a network the city has extended in recent years to service thousands of commuting cyclists and reduce traffic deaths, remained clogged with snow and slush the next morning.
Here are some of the bike lanes that were in need of shoveling or plowing in Brooklyn Wednesday morning:
The lane leading from Flushing Avenue to Sands Street and feeding onto the Manhattan Bridge is a "major #bikenyc artery," according to Ian Sinclair, a city planner at the NYC Department of City Planning.
Here are some in Manhattan:
Here's one in Queens:
"I think people are willing to be patient in the immediate aftermath of a storm," said bicycling advocate Doug Gordon, who commended the mayor's office and the sanitation department for "getting the city up and running Monday morning" after a historic snowfall.
But his patience was running thin Wednesday, when several key routes for cyclists riding to and from work were still unusable four days after the snow had stopped.
Said Gordon, "There's kind of no excuse at this point for not getting it done."
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