the bike lane is on the left. there are cars illegally parked in it. The narrow strip is not the bike lane, its the door zone, a 3 ft setback between the parked cars and the bike lane.

The street redesign doesn't even reduce car capacity. It still has two lanes for cars, and parking on either side, it gets the space by not having unnecessarily wide lanes.

In the article there's the actual and the proposed structure of the road (https://lede-admin.nyc.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/48/2025/04/31st-St-diagram.png). What you see above is a buffer zone that divides parked cars (right) from the actual bike lane (left, even though there are cars parked).