The “new” Court Street after 6-plus months: A business survey and traffic study

The Carroll Gardens Times checked in with dozens of businesses, and spent hours closely observing how traffic is moving on the redesigned street and bike lane.

The redesign of Court Street, which created a protected bike lane and removed one lane of vehicle travel (among other changes), was rolled out over the course of October 2025—which means the “new” street has now been in place for more than six full months.

The Carroll Gardens Times, a local newsletter on Substack, marked the milestone by checking in on the street in two ways:

• Business survey: Several businesses filed a lawsuit (eventually dismissed) in opposition to the redesign soon after implementation began last October. In an attempt to gauge the current sentiment of the entire Court Street business community, I delivered a survey to 100 storefront businesses on Court between Degraw and Hamilton—45 responded.
• Traffic study: Over the course of a week, I spent six hours closely observing different blocks on Court Street at different hours of the day, monitoring traffic flow in the street and the protected bike lane.

Business Survey
The survey asked business owners and managers to compare the new design of Court Street to the old design in five categories: overall sentiment, customer foot traffic, safety, deliveries, and worker commute.

The results: Among the 45 businesses who responded to the survey, the majority consider the new design of Court Street to be worse than the old design in all five categories.

The survey was anonymous. Some business owners and managers said they were wary to speak about the redesign, having received backlash after criticizing it previously.

But in conversations with owners and managers along the street, two concerns emerged as the most common.

First, many owners and managers said they have lost business from customers who previously arrived by car.

Second, many reported safety issues in the new bike lane, such as collisions or near-misses between cyclists and pedestrians.

Traffic Study
Over the course of a week, I picked six different locations along Court Street and stationed myself on the curb for an hour each. I attempted to count and/or make note of the following:

• Number of bikes using bike lane (I included scooters and skateboards)
• Inappropriate bike lane use, such as wrong-way riders or street-legal motor scooters
• Amazon cargo bikes in bike lane (they are legally allowed, and an expanding element of Amazon’s operations)
• Significant traffic backups in vehicle lane (I defined this as stopped cars taking up more than three-quarters of the block)
• Collisions or close calls in bike lane or vehicle lane

Here’s what I saw.

Bike lane usage of more than 60 bikes per hour
I counted an average of 62.17 bikes using the bike lane per hour—which struck me as a pretty high number.

“Inappropriate” uses such as wrong-way riding (three per hour) or street-legal motor scooters in the bike lane (2.33 per hour) were relatively rare, by my count. Amazon cargo bikes (2.67 per hour) also made up a small portion of the total.

I observed one (1) well-known actor/comedian riding the wrong way in the bike lane.

Significant traffic backups in the vehicle lane were very rare
I counted two (2) total significant traffic backups—otherwise, vehicle traffic flowed smoothly.

One backup occurred at rush hour between Huntington and 9th Streets, nearing the main thoroughfare of Hamilton Ave.

The other occurred in the 10 a.m. hour between Third and Fourth Place, and appeared to be the result of multiple violations of NYC rules.

A grey SUV was parked in the middle of the curb area across from Prospect Market that is restricted for “commercial use only” at that time of day. This forced two delivery trucks to park closer to the end of the block—and the second truck was a full-sized semi, which I believe is not allowed to make deliveries in NYC.

The semi was not able to pull fully parallel to the curb, which meant that a passing box truck had to slow to a crawl to squeeze through—eventually causing a significant backup.

This all occurred directly in front of the B57 bus stop, which fortunately (or unfortunately, if you were waiting for the bus) did not arrive while the delivery trucks were there.

A few close safety calls in the bike lane
I observed three (3) incidents that I would call “close-ish” calls in the bike lane. Two came between vehicles and bikes at the left turn onto Luquer Street.

In the first, a driver was making the left turn by running over the plastic speed bump rather than turning wide around it. An Amazon cargo bike was coming down the bike lane at fairly high speed, causing the driver to slam their brakes and squeak their tires.

In the second, a driver took the left turn, running over the speed bump, seemingly without looking at the bike lane at all. Two cyclists were approaching, and they hit their brakes and rang their bells.

(It seems that many drivers don’t realize there is room to pull entirely out of the travel lane, and come to a complete stop before crossing the bike lane, if they take the turn wide around the speed bump.)

The third “close-ish” call came on the same block when a woman stepped off the curb to cross Court at Nelson against the light, without looking at the bike lane. A cyclist was approaching but had plenty of time to hit their brakes.

Study executed on Court at the following times and locations:

• 4 p.m. on April 27—Between Carroll and First Streets
• 8 a.m. on April 28—Between Degraw and Sackett
• 10 a.m. on April 29—Between Third and Fourth Place
• 1:40 p.m. on April 29—Between Luquer and Nelson Streets
• 12:15 p.m. on May 3—Between Union and President Streets
• 5:05 p.m. on May 4—Between Huntington and Ninth Streets

Updates to come
I asked the NYC Department of Transportation if they have any safety stats for the new street so far—safety, after all, was the stated goal of the DOT’s redesign of the street. A spokesperson told me they would wait until a year post-implementation to determine the redesign’s effectiveness, in order to gather more representative data.

DOT also said that street users need time to adjust to the changes. As someone who walks along or across Court Street just about every day, I believe this process is well underway, with still further to go (for example, the speed bump left turn at Luquer).

I also asked Michael Freedman, creator of crashcount.nyc, to look at crash data from November to April of this year compared to the same period last year.

“My unscientific analysis is that it’s too soon to tell,” he said. “It’d be a difficult comparison anyway, since the protected bike lane would bring more cyclists.”

“That being said, anecdotally, there were fewer moderate injuries [five before, four this time] and serious injuries [one before, zero this period] than before, and fewer injuries involving cyclists [three before to one this time],” Freedman said.

Per New York State Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon’s office, DOT is also analyzing the new parking rules on Court, with results expended at the end of May.

I reached out to the MTA to ask about average bus speeds on the B57 route—they, too, are “still analyzing the data.”

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