Streetsblog New York City

Brooklyn and Queens residents walk over the shared path on the Pulaski Bridge yesterday at 3:30 p.m. With the G train out of service for over a week, North Brooklynites relied on the crowded path to access the 7 train. During rush hours, the crowding was worse. Photo: Clarence Eckerson Jr.

Over the past week, the long G train outage caused by flooding from Hurricane Sandy brought the need for changes to the Pulaski Bridge into starker relief. Streetsblog received multiple reports of extreme crowding on the bridge’s narrow bike and pedestrian path, which could have been relieved with a protected bikeway across the bridge.

Crowded conditions on the Pulaski Bridge’s shared path have long been an issue, and recently Assembly Member Joseph Lentol announced his support for adding a protected bikeway across the bridge to provide more space for cyclists and pedestrians.

200 bikes locked up within one block of the Vernon Boulevard - Jackson Avenue subway station in Long Island City. Photo: Clarence Eckerson Jr.

A temporary bikeway would have been especially useful in Sandy’s wake, when the city and the MTA set up temporary bus routes across the Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge, but failed to provide substitute bus service for straphangers who rely on the G train.

Without the train or a backup in place, North Brooklyn residents had to find different ways to get around, and many chose to bike or walk over the Pulaski Bridge to catch the 7 train to Manhattan. Conditions on the bridge path were crowded, especially during rush hours but during off-peak times as well.

Evidence of the spike in bike-to-7-train commuting was abundant at Long Island City’s bike racks. Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms counted 200 bikes locked up within a block of the Vernon Boulevard – Jackson Avenue station yesterday afternoon — many more than usual.

The G train resumed limited service this morning, but crowding on the path is likely to remain. A protected bike lane on the bridge was needed before Hurricane Sandy, during the G train suspension, and will be needed after the subway system returns to normal.

UPDATE: Assembly Member Joseph Lentol told Streetsblog that the G train disruption showed why a Pulaski Bridge bike lane is necessary. His office has only gotten positive feedback on the proposal since it was floated in October. “I expected to get outraged motorists complaining about taking a lane on the bridge, but I haven’t gotten that at all,” Lentol said, adding that he will soon follow up on his October letter to Commissioner Sadik-Khan with a phone call. “You always have the bureaucratic naysaysers who say why you can’t do it,” Lentol said. “I know they have the expertise to come up with a solution.” Lentol added that he plans to reach out to Assembly Member Catherine Nolan, who represents the Queens side of the bridge.

Thursday marked the first day of modest subway restoration. It also saw the return of limited ferries, as well as a full MTA bus schedule and Mayor Bloomberg’s emergency order declaring all vehicles crossing the East River Bridges must have at least three occupants.

In an encouraging sign, the number of people walking and biking has been huge. Streetfilms was up early in Queens near the Queensboro Bridge to see how people were using all the transportation options out there. Here’s the montage we got.

On Thursday, Queens Community Board 3 voted to support a more sophisticated way to price on-street parking on commercial streets [PDF], supporting DOT’s proposal to bring the PARK Smart program to Jackson Heights.

PARK Smart can be the most effective traffic-reduction policy in DOT’s toolkit. In some NYC neighborhoods, drivers cruising for parking constitute nearly half of all traffic. PARK Smart adjusts meter rates and extends hours in an effort to align the price of parking with demand, which makes it easier for drivers to find a spot and cuts down on cruising and double parking. Jackson Heights will be the first neighborhood in Queens — and one of only three in the city — to participate in PARK Smart.

New PARK Smart reforms will extend parking meter hours in Jackson Heights to 10 p.m. Map: DOT

The program’s specifics vary in each neighborhood. In Jackson Heights, the PARK Smart pilot will adjust metering on blocks of 37th Avenue, 74th Street, 82nd Street, Broadway, Roosevelt Avenue, 37th Road and Roosevelt Avenue. Meters on 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue had a one hour limit; under the new policy drivers will be able park for up to two hours. Along one block of 74th Street, meters that turned off at 7 p.m. are now extended until 10 p.m.

While the extension of meter hours will cut down on cruising in the evenings, the pricing in Jackson Heights is not going to change for stays under an hour, limiting the potential to improve parking availability and reduce traffic before 7 p.m.

For drivers who stay longer than 60 minutes, there are now two types of meters in the neighborhood. This is where the new pricing structure comes in. Meters on “progressive rate” streets will charge an increasing fee to discourage long-term parking and keep spaces available for shoppers on major commercial corridors. Meters on “value rate” streets will charge 50 cents for each additional 30 minutes after the first hour — the same rate as the first hour. If someone wants to park for two hours, a progressive rate meter would cost $4, while a value rate meter would cost half that.

The changes will be phased in over the winter, according to DOT, and the pilot is expected to last for about one year. It looks like this initial phase could produce data regarding the difference between “progressive” meters and “value” meters that may inform future PARK Smart phases in Jackson Heights.

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The intersection of Queens Boulevard and Hoover Avenue. Image: Bing Maps

At 6:05 this morning, a 37 year-old man riding his bike on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens was struck by a driver at the intersection of Hoover Avenue. The man was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. The driver fled the scene and NYPD’s Accident Investigation Squad is investigating the hit-and-run.

Gothamist is reporting that FNDY described the vehicle as a truck, but no further details are available.

Hoover Avenue is identified on NYC DOT’s bike map as a bike route and part of the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway.

Update: The New York Post has identified the victim as Alexander Martinez, 37, of Queens.

A proposed Major League Soccer stadium in the middle of Queens’ largest park might have some cheerleaders in Albany, but lots of questions must be answered before the first game can be played. Perhaps the biggest issue is the stadium’s transportation plan, the details of which — those that have been made public, at least — differ from what neighborhood advocates say MLS is telling them.

Parked cars sit in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park during the recent U.S. Open. Photo: Clarence Eckerson Jr.

On Monday, a coalition of groups known as the Queens Coalition for Fairness, including Make the Road New York and Queens Community House, hosted a meeting in Corona. Donovan Finn, an urban planning professor at Stony Brook University, explained to the crowd of hundreds why the current MLS proposal is a bad proposition.

MLS is proposing a new, 25,000-seat stadium at the current site of the Fountain of Industry, more than a half-mile from the Mets-Willets Point subway station. That’s twice as far from the subway as the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and eight times farther than Citi Field.

The league says it will build an undisclosed number of parking spaces beneath the adjacent Van Wyck Expressway, but that none of the currently-estimated 13 acres of park land taken for the stadium would be used for parking.

Instead, MLS says that most attendees arriving by car are expected to use existing parking at Citi Field, an arrangement that’s likely subject to negotiation with Mets ownership. One potential problem Finn identified with this plan is double-booking Citi Field parking lots and overloading the 7 train, since soccer and baseball seasons occur at the same time of year.

Citi Field parking is up to three-quarters of a mile away from the proposed MLS site. The league says shuttle service to the subway or Citi Field parking lots is not currently part of its transportation plan, though community activists including Finn say MLS has told them otherwise.

Before and after: The Northern Boulevard bridge path entrance in Willets Point gets a makeover. Left photo: Google Maps. Right photo: Clarence Eckerson Jr.

Riders in the NYC Century Bike Tour last weekend might have noticed a recent upgrade on the bike/pedestrian path on the Northern Boulevard bridge as they navigated from Flushing to Willets Point.

The solid green line is the Flushing Bay Promenade. Connecting to the Northern Boulevard Bridge, to its east, just got easier. Image: DOT Bike Map

There is now a traffic signal where the path crosses a ramp from the Van Wyck Expressway, as well as a two-way connection beneath the Whitestone Expressway connecting to the Flushing Bay Promenade.

Before the upgrade, the location was a hostile one for cyclists and pedestrians. Drivers on the ramp received little indication that the bridge path crossed the roadway. Cyclists who exited the bridge had no bikeway to guide them to the promenade. And cyclists wishing to access the bridge from the west had to illegally ride against traffic.

Now, westbound cyclists are directed to use a new sidewalk, while eastbound cyclists have a contra-flow bicycle lane

In October 2011, DOT presented the proposal to Community Board 7′s transportation committee. The improvements were requested by Queens Borough President Helen Marshall and introduced in conjunction with a new DOT asphalt plant adjacent to the path.

Something special is happening in Corona, Queens. Last week, Streetfilms visited Corona Plaza — the city’s newest car-free space, next to the 103rd Street stop on the 7 train — and found it already packed with families, children, and shoppers.

This plaza has been in the works for many years, and the local community has taken ownership of it immediately. Volunteers help in locking up the tables and chairs at night and assist in cleaning the space themselves.

The area previously had no public seating whatsoever, which is astonishing considering the dozens of restaurants nearby. Now it is a magnet for people, especially kids, who give the place a vibe that feels different than most other pedestrian plazas. To watch parents sit calmly while their children play would have been unheard of before the street was reclaimed from traffic and parking.

Here’s a screenshot from a snippet of video taken by an eagle-eyed reader at Northern Boulevard and 82nd Street in Queens. The construction workers who programmed this display look to be unknowingly putting themselves in danger by allowing motorists an extra five miles per hour. They have company at the top: None other than NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly flubbed a question about the city’s speed limit while testifying before City Council in 1993.

New parking garages, in the top left and top right of the image, would add 500 parking spaces to Flushing Meadows park. Image: United States Tennis Association via Parks Department

When New York City played host to the 1939 World’s Fair, the most influential attraction in Flushing Meadows was General Motors’ Futurama, a miniature vision of a future with highways crisscrossing through cities and mass ownership of the personal automobile. A science fiction vision at the time, it wasn’t far off from what ultimately happened.

Today, Flushing Meadows is a beloved park for the many Queens neighborhoods that border it, but one that retains an unusual degree of accommodation for the automobile. Residents are cut off from the park by two highways, the Van Wyck Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway, while the Long Island Expressway effectively cuts the park in two. Like the World’s Fair itself, all are Robert Moses creations.

And unlike in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where decades of activism have steadily reduced the amount of space and number of hours where cars are allowed in Central and Prospect Parks, in Queens’ premier park, the city is moving in the other direction. There are no car-free hours on Flushing Meadows’ park drives, for example.

And now, the desire to expand the park’s use as a site for major sports stadiums could bring hundreds or even thousands of new parking spaces inside the park, drawing new automobile trips on park roads.

As first reported by the Daily News, the United States Tennis Association wants to build two new parking garages as part of its proposed expansion of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. The expansion, which is focused on adding capacity during the U.S. Open, would turn two existing surface lots into structured garages, adding about 500 parking spaces in the process.

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Photo: Clarence Eckerson, Jr.

Clarence files these photos of a dual-purpose street reclamation in Queens.

In Woodside at the intersection of 39th Ave and Woodside Avenue they have put in a massive traffic calming/bioswale-ish extension of the sidewalk! It looks like a standard Portland-style bioswale for water runoff.

We have queries in with the city for more information, but as Clarence says, it looks like this is another in a series of joint ventures between multiple agencies — DOT, DEP and Parks — designed to absorb runoff while taming traffic. The initiative is a product of PlaNYC.

Though this one looks mostly complete, says Clarence, “It looks like they haven’t removed the sharrow just yet, which will put you right into a curb.”

Photo: Clarence Eckerson, Jr.

More shots after the jump.

Barring any major breaking news, this will be our last post until Thursday. Happy Independence Day, everyone.

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