Why the Traffic Lights Have Slowed Down on 3rd Avenue

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out what is different about a two-mile stretch of Third Avenue these days.

Something unusual happened on a 36-block stretch of Third Avenue at the end of January. The traffic lights were slowed down.

Traffic signals had been timed for cars and trucks at 25 miles per hour. The city reset them to 15 m.p.h.

The change had nothing to do with congestion pricing, which took effect earlier in the month, and was the latest step in an experiment that the city’s Department of Transportation began five years ago.

The agency calls that plan the “green wave.” It involves redesigning streets that have been dominated by cars and trucks for generations, and assigning the priority for green lights to bicyclists. Officials say the change will make the two-mile stretch of Third Avenue between 60th and 96th Streets safer.

It is a corridor where “we have seen far too many crashes,” Ydanis Rodriguez, the transportation commissioner, said. Between 2020 and 2023, there were 59 crashes with injuries a year, on average, and there were five fatalities. Last year there were 41 crashes with 46 injuries there and no fatalities.

The Transportation Department said that, in 2024, 20 people in cars and 18 cyclists were injured in crashes in the two-mile stretch now covered by the green wave — down from an average of 35 people in cars and 16.3 cyclists in three previous years.

Rodriguez and other transportation officials expect the traffic flow to be steadier with the retimed traffic lights. They say that setting the lights to 15 m.p.h. reduces the potential for drivers to accelerate to beat the next light, especially drivers who like to blast away from the last one almost before it turns green.

The retiming makes it harder for drivers to reach dangerously high speeds, a concern at night, when the Transportation Department says the crashes on Third Avenue are more frequent.

But the retiming is not just directed at drivers. The Transportation Department says that the change — and other recent modifications along Third Avenue — addresses the surge in e-mobility that began with the coronavirus pandemic. The idea is that the retimed lights will keep e-bikes moving along at reasonable speeds. Retiming the traffic lights involved sending engineers to make changes in the control panel at each intersection and then synchronizing them all from a central traffic management center in Sunnyside, Queens.

New York is not alone in recalibrating traffic signals to favor cyclists. Chicago; Portland, Ore.; and San Francisco have also done so. The idea had long been used by traffic engineers to move cars through urban streets until Copenhagen adapted it in the early 2000s for cyclists.

The green wave arrived in New York in 2019, a year when 25 cyclists were killed in the first 10 months of the year, 15 more than in all of 2018.

Ben Furnas, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a group that promotes cycling, said that retiming the traffic signals “makes it extremely comfortable for folks on bicycles to travel longer distances up and down the corridor.”

“It’s never OK for people on a bike to run a red light,” Furnas added, “but this dramatically reduces the temptation to do so because you’ll be able to hit greens all the way up.” The change also encourages drivers to “take it easy,” he said, improving traffic safety without markedly affecting travel times. “You’re driving slower,” he said, “but you’re hitting all the greens, so your trip takes about the same length of time.”

The city retimed the lights a little more than a year after it completed a separate project that involved redesigning every intersection along Third Avenue and widening the bus lanes. The city, working with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the buses, installed “transit signal priority technology” on Third Avenue. That enables a bus to speed up a red light, making it turn green sooner, or to hold a green signal until the bus had gone through it.

That system works invisibly. More visible were the new and wider protected bike lanes along Third Avenue. Between East 64th and East 66th Streets and between East 80th and East 82nd Streets, two uphill sections, the bike lanes are 11 feet wide, three feet wider than on the rest of Third Avenue. And the eight-foot-wide lanes are twice as wide as the standard protected bike lanes on other streets.

Sarah Kaufman, the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, called the changes “a good move in the direction of making New Yorkers safer.” Third Avenue, she said, is “a major thoroughfare with a variety of traffic that demands more space for bike riding. The demand for space, for kids riding to school as well as for e-bike delivery riders, far exceeds the space allotted before.”

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Today will be sunny with light wind and a high near 36. Tonight the sky will turn partly cloudy with a low around 23.

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Mesmerized

Dear Diary:

It was a damp evening in March 1966 when the charter bus I was on pulled into Midtown Manhattan. The rain had stopped, and the air was heavy.

I was 15 and part of a group of teenagers on a visit to New York City from central North Carolina, accompanied by several chaperones. The trip was to include visits to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, an Easter show at Radio City Music Hall and a day at the U.N.

Tired after a 12-hour ride, we hurried off the bus and into the hotel lobby. Remarkably, after we had unloaded our bags, we were allowed to go out for an hour to explore the area, bound only by the admonition to stay with a tour mate.

It was an hour of sheer magic. As I walked outside through the hotel’s revolving door, my senses were deluged by the sounds, the smells, the lights.

The sidewalks were crowded. People hurrying by spoke in melodious foreign languages. Cars and taxis sped past, sounding their horns. Street vendors hawked goods displayed on blankets spread on the sidewalk and sold steaming hot chestnuts from carts.

The traffic lights and pedestrian crossing signals were reflected in the wet pavement. Neon signs blinked from storefronts. Window displays teemed with jewelry, garish clothes and souvenirs. Restaurants and diners beckoned with the aroma of freshly made food.

Mesmerized, I vowed that someday I would live in New York City.

Time passed, life happened. Occasional visits to the city reinforced its charms.

Finally, on March 1, 2016, retired, downsized and decluttered, I got off an Amtrak train at Penn Station and caught a cab for my new home in the West Village, fulfilling a dream 50 years deferred.

— Dianne Reid

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.