An honest-to-goodness bike lane network is developing — in Eastern Queens, of all places!

There were already some bicycle lanes in the area of Kew Gardens Hills and Pomonok, Queens, but it has been buffed up with new lanes in all directions. The demand is real; in particular, people want to bike to college in easy and safe ways. (As you will see shortly, the new bike lanes lead to two big colleges.)

First, I will praise the developing network; then I will challenge it to see how it can be even better.

New Bike Lanes

Two weeks ago when I detoured to the Q64 bus, I saw the new painted bike lanes on Parsons Boulevard and 150th Street. They were looking good. 👍

A bunch of new lanes aside from these will supplement all the existing painted lanes on 164th Street, Jewel Avenue, and 73rd Avenue. The bike map there will soon look like a hashtag!

Okay, it looked like a hashtag in my mind. Bolder lines distinguish the new lanes from the existing ones. Image and data by DOT

How useful are they?

For once, these lanes are following some useful desire lines; they are on actual important corridors that take people where they want to go. Jewel Avenue, for example, is the most direct way through Flushing Meadows, into the park itself, and to Forest Hills and beyond. Parsons Boulevard is similarly central and leads straight into downtown Jamaica (where York College is nearby). Although a few bigger streets are left out (which could do with safety improvements), and despite the remaining gaps, I’m grateful that they’re not detouring bicycle users away from direct (a.k.a. useful) routes.

They’re taking advantage of and building on a network that has existed for years. So contrary to what I would usually say in a situation like this, these bike lanes aren’t useless.

On the flip side, painted bike lanes are obviously not the safest and are falling out of favor. But we’ll get to that later.

Now Let’s Make ’em Better!

There are some wide streets in the area which, in my opinion, are readily suitable for protected bike lanes — the kind that’s safe enough for all ages and abilities and increases ridership — because there is excess vehicular capacity.

At this point in time, we should be beyond repurposing scraps of space for safe, sustainable transport, but since people still fear the loss of parking and basically automotive capacity, I understand why some want to tackle it little by little and a bit more peacefully. I’m guilty of this thinking, hence these suggestions.

Ideally, there ought to be a few north/south and east/west quality bike routes running all the way through, rather than just what geometry tolerates without disturbing traffic capacity too much. But oh well.

164th Street

This street is, in my opinion, the best north/south bike route in the area today, stretching from Kissena Park all the way down almost to downtown Jamaica. Even with the new bike lanes coming in, it’s a very solid route.

Not that traffic volume should define cycling safety, but 164th Street will survive with one less travel lane in both directions. The AADT is just below FHWA ‘s guidelines for a “road diet”. (A road diet is most often a conversion of a 60 foot-wide road from four lanes to two with a turning lane.)

The NYS Traffic Data Viewer shows an AADT of 14,298 vehicles — and reveals a decrease in traffic in a decade.

The Q65 bus runs along this street. Admittedly, the Q65 Limited will be at a disadvantage; its effectiveness depends on overtaking local buses to make it the faster option across town. But both local and limited supposedly arrive every 10 minutes anyway. With all-door boarding, signal prioritization, stop rebalancing, and not having to pull back into traffic with bus stop islands, we can have faster local buses that run every 5 minutes instead. A win for everyone!

Jewel Avenue

The road dieting was already done here a decade ago and still carries light traffic. These buffered bike lanes should be switched with the parking lane to create a ½ mile-long protected bike lane linking three north-south bike routes, a school, and a shopping center.

It’s not an unprecedented request; “flipping things” has become a frequent one, actually. Such as Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan, shown below:

The Q64 doesn’t have a Limited service, so with the dense ridership it carries, the Q64 will only benefit from having bus stop islands, which also gives more space to wait for the bus. (Off-board fare payment and all-door boarding will do the most to improve this route, however.)

Kissena Boulevard

A similar mileage of Kissena Boulevard distinguishes itself from the other stretches of this same street, having two travel lanes (per direction) which then narrow back down to one lane. This widened stretch is between 71st Avenue and Horace Harding Expressway — the highway overpass, confusing as they normally are, could count, but the street is narrow again immediately after.

Excess capacity? I think so.

The NYS Traffic Data Viewer shows an AADT of 12,144 at that widened section. Note how north of the highway, the AADT explodes to over 20,000.

In other words, the one-lane section carries way more traffic than the two-lane section (and more than 164th Street, too). That alone should be convincing!

The Q25 Limited will also suffer some inconvenience the same way that the Q65 Limited will. But if anything, the stretch proposed here is much shorter.

A Little Green Does Everyone Some Good

With these ideas, the bike map should then look like this:

Image and data by DOT; annotations (green) mine

Parking shall not be touched at all — other than eliminating both the possibility of illegal double-parking, and the requirement of crossing the bike lane in order to park a car (meaning parallel parking should be easier 😉).

Meanwhile, an important north/south route gets further solidified; another is created right in front of a college while tackling that street’s most daunting part (not including downtown Flushing); and an east/west route is likewise enhanced, connecting the above two.

How would college students benefit?

Queens College students riding by bicycle would have it easier when they reach Kissena Boulevard, especially coming from the south and east, where there will now be more fully protected options. The bike lane network unfortunately would end abruptly right at the highway, but should anyone come from the north, they can slip right into the protected bike lanes and not worry about being mixed with vehicular traffic on a wide street. (Those coming from the west also have the option of 150th Street, basically another campus entrance, but if they need or want to, they can roll around onto Kissena Boulevard and reach the main entrance.) Those not on a bicycle will find it much easier and safer to cross Kissena Boulevard to reach college. 🙂

St. John’s University students have it harder. Those coming from the southwest would still have to use indirect routes, because Union Turnpike isn’t quite safe. Frankly, there isn’t much of an improvement, other than the full protection of 164th Street and a near seamless connection to Queens College. These suggestions will most benefit people riding from the north and the west. But the new east/west bike lanes should help and augment 73rd Avenue.

(Anyone coming from the east? Utopia Parkway, although outside the scope of this blog post, might as well be 164th Street’s sister, and people are already demanding improvements.)

The End!

I’m not in this area often, so understanding desire lines would help a lot, and I may come back with bigger ideas. In the meantime, how would safer streets help you in this area? What am I missing? Feel free to share below!

When I originally wrote this post in April 2018, I approached it with the mindset of “put bike lanes without destroying the status quo” instead of “change the status quo so that cars are not dominant”. I had politics in mind, where it’s easier to calm low-volume streets than it is to take away parking and where the incremental approach is the default.

I acknowledged then that I was going against my own convictions, but this post was refreshed in June 2019 with a stronger conviction than ever that we have until 2030 to reverse the most catastrophic effects of climate change — and I didn’t even touch on traffic injuries and fatalities: according to Crash Mapper, there has been 11 fatalities and over 1,000 injuries within five years in the entire city council district (24). I find this an urgent call to undo the prioritization of the most inefficient and dangerous transport mode, the private automobile, and develop more sustainable modes, which includes cycling infrastructure for all ages and abilities.

So is this proposal the best it can be? No way! It’s just a start. We must work our way to a grid. Kew Gardens Hills lies surrounded by popular people areas, so quality cycle routes needs to reach every single one of them. In short, Kew Gardens Hills needs a green hashtag on that map. The sooner, the better.