Western Queens to get more bike lanes

Make way for the cyclists.

Residents and members of Community Board (CB) 5 have been brainstorming where to install bike lanes.
The Department of City Planning (DCP) met with CB 5 and residents of the neighborhood on Saturday, May 11.

“A lot of western Queens is tough for bike routes, but we’re going to try to do the best we can,” said CB 5 District Manager Gary Giordano.

The industrial area already has accomodation for bikes in Highland Park, Cypress Hills Street, Cooper Avenue, 78th Avenue, 79th Street and Forest Park. DCP is planning to install bike lanes in both directions along the Cooper Avenue underpass from 69th Drive to 74th Street.

Community members at Saturday’s meeting mooted areas along Dry Harbor Road, 80th Street, Elliot Avenue, Fresh Pond Road and Metropolitan Avenue. Some of those spots are major arteries congested with trucks, making it a challenge for CB 5 to accommodate bicyclists there. DCP is targeting areas where bikes will have minimal conflict with vehicles including trucks and cars.

With summer coming up and more people hopping into the saddle, Giordano said he hopes the community will have a better idea of where the bike lanes are going within a few months.

“You have more and more people riding bicycles these days,” he said.

Officials said the bike lanes are perfectly feasible and the routes will even be attractive. They added that lanes can be installed on both one- and two-way streets. They will either be shared lanes that put bicyclists on the road with vehicles or separate lanes to the side of the road.

For people going on longer rides, DCP and CB 5 are considering a connection from Grand Street to the Williamsburg Bridge in western Queens and a route from 62nd Road to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in the east.

Now that the community has voiced its requests, DCP will study the feasibility of proposed routes and receive community board input. It will be up to the Department of Transportation to actually implement the routes. A timeline has not been established.

“We need to increasingly be concerned about the safety of the cyclists, the pedestrians and the drivers who have to look in all sorts of directions,” Giordano said.

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