Boylston Street in the Back Bay will soon get a new look: The city is installing a separated bike lane, putting in a bus-only lane and eliminating street parking on one side of the road for a few blocks.

Work is expected to begin this month, said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston’s chief of streets, who met GBH’s Morning Edition co-host Jeremy Seigel in Copley Square, having ridden his bike from City Hall.

When it’s done, Franklin-Hodge said, people standing near the Boston Public Library’s main branch facing toward the Public Garden will see a bike lane on the left, separated from the flow of car traffic by parking spots; two lanes for car travel; and on the right, a bus lane painted red.

It’s part of the city’s boarder safer streets plan.

“We know that for us to keep growing as a city, we need to find ways to move more people with the roads that we have,” Franklin-Hodge said. “And that means prioritizing the modes of transportation that can let us move folks more quickly, more efficiently, with this limited amount of space.”

The proposal has generated pushback, from drivers who fear traffic and businesses concerned about less parking. City Councilor Ed Flynn recently called for a pause on installation.

But bike riders and transportation advocates are excited. And so is Franklin-Hodge.

“Boylston Street is a unique street. It is extremely wide, and right now almost all of that space is devoted to people in private automobiles,” he said. “If you are one of those drivers, you will still be able to drive every day on Boylston Street. There will be two lanes through most of the corridor for folks to drive on.”

But most people who travel through the area didn’t get there with a private car, he said.

“They’re taking transit. They’re walking. They’re using the bus,” he said. “These are folks who are the lifeblood of the businesses here. And what we’re trying to do is build a corridor that can continue to allow them to come and move, to make it easier and safer and more comfortable for them, while still making sure that the folks who need to drive can do so, that deliveries can happen, and that what the businesses need will be taken care of.”

Boylston Street is a high-crash corridor for biking in Boston: According to city data, it’s in the top 3% of streets in crashes for both bicyclists and pedestrians city-wide.

“Even despite the lack of infrastructure, [Boylston Street] sees about 500 people a day riding their bikes,” Franklin-Hodge said. “What we typically see when we build bike infrastructure in places where there’s a lot of demand for biking, but it doesn’t feel safe, is that ridership goes up.”

“We’ve done the analysis on this,” he said. “We’re confident that that lane during those peak hours will be able to feed the intersection and keep cars moving through it. So we’ve really tried to engineer this to minimize any impact on vehicular capacity.”