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Mamdani plans redesign of Brooklyn's Third Avenue after nurse killed in hit-and-run
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
Published Oct 28, 2026 at 4:00 a.m. ET
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Liam Quigley/Gothamist
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
Published Oct 28, 2026 at 4:00 a.m. ET
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A deadly stretch of Third Avenue in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood is slated for a major overhaul that will replace traffic lanes in each direction with bike lanes and shorten the street's pedestrian crossings, the city transportation department announced Wednesday.
The plan for the redesign comes two months after 28-year-old Jiayi Zheng was killed by a hit-and-run driver on the avenue at 55th Street while walking home from her shift as a nurse a block away at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn.
The changes to the corridor, which travels underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, will cover 2.1 miles from 62nd Street to 20th Street. The plan adds new pedestrian islands to the street's intersections in order to make it safer for people to cross the road, which city officials said is currently around 50 yards wide.
It’s the latest in a series of moves by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration to advance major street redesign projects that were stalled by previous Mayor Eric Adams. The transportation department under Adams presented the local community board with several plans to make the street safer, but never moved forward with any of them.
City transportation officials plan to implement the changes to the section of Third Avenue between 62nd and 43rd Streets next year, and will also add bike lanes on 60th Street between Second and Fourth avenues. Officials said the department will begin work on the rest of the corridor from 43rd Street up to 20th Street in 2028.
The city transportation departmetn plans to add protected bike lanes and eliminate space for car traffic on a dangerous stretch of Third Avenue.
Courtesy NYC Department of Transportation
“We know what keeps New Yorkers safe on our streets: calmer intersections, shorter crossings, protected bike lanes and ambitious redesigns that put people first,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement. “Starting next year, we will transform Third Avenue to protect pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.”
The avenue currently has between six and eight lanes for car traffic, as well as a parking lane on either side. The new design will pare the number of car lanes to only four, and add two bike lanes in each direction that are protected by barriers. The parking lanes on both sides of the street will remain in place.
Mamdani faced pressure from street safety advocates over the summer after Zheng and at least three other people were killed by hit-and-run drivers over the course of a single week.
As of Tuesday, the NYPD said the driver who killed Zheng still hasn’t been found and no arrests have been made.
The city transportation department reported 17 people have been killed in crashes along the stretch of Third Avenue in the last decade, more than half of whom were either pedestrians or cyclists.
Last year, two elderly pedestrians were also killed by a hit-and-run driver just blocks away from where Zheng was killed. And in 2020, another nurse at NYU Langone, 31-year-old Clara Kang, was killed by a motorcyclist after an overnight shift while riding her bicycle on the avenue. Officials reduced the speed limit on the Third Avenue corridor to 25 mph after Kang’s death, but didn’t pursue a larger redesign of the roadway.
Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn said in a statement that the city’s “most dangerous streets” will get some sort of safety improvement in the next three years and that “we cannot wait for the next tragedy to strike.” That includes exploring future redesigns of Third Avenue to south to 65th Street and north of Prospect Avenue to Carroll Street in Gowanus.
Tagged
brooklyn
new york city
public safety
transportation
Ramsey Khalifeh
Ramsey Khalifeh is a transportation reporter on the NYC Accountability desk covering the largest transit system in the country. He was previously a general assignment reporter at Gothamist and worked on the Boston Globe's metro and copy desk. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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