“If You Build It, They Will Come”: Bike Boom Continues in Astoria’s Crescent Street Bike Lane

Screams "graphic design is my passion" just as much as some of their "protected" bike lanes scream "safe street design is my passion"

Yesterday was the last day of what NYC DOT calls “Biketober”. From which PR agency this moniker came (and how much they were paid), I do not know. While I’m usually in favor of anything celebrating New Yorkers riding bikes, it’s disheartening that the transport agency seems to find it easier to spend time and energy on branding schemes than they do on building actually protected bike lanes. Take Fifth Avenue in Manhattan or Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park: in both places the agency deferred to the local bourgeoisie and shelved plans for protected bike lanes. Or look at Northern Boulevard in Queens: the agency celebrated the return of its “paint-and-post protected” bike lanes, trying to gaslight bike riders to the fact that it’s already overrun with cars and trucks and that husband and father Thomas Panto just died in a similar “paint-and-post protected” lane on Honeywell Street just off Northern. “Happy Biketober!” indeed.

There are, of course, competing interests and agendas that NYC DOT must balance—and no one has ever said managing the streets of a sprawling metropolis is an easy task. But there should be core competencies undergirding the agency’s output and, just as with any business, making sure people don’t die when they use your product is one such core competency.

Refusing to redesign streets to make them safer (or redesigning in a knowingly subpar manner) harms the city in more than just future lives lost or bodies injured: it also actively discourages folks from riding their bikes, reducing mode share before it’s even begun.

The reverse is also true: when you make a street safer for walking and biking and (mostly) deliver a top notch product, people are more likely to use it those ways. As is clear on the (mostly) wonderful two-way protected bike lane on Crescent Street in Astoria.

I’ve been counting bike/scooter traffic on Crescent for almost a year, and while seasonal temperatures and weather play a big part, ridership continues to soar. Over the winter, there were almost 700 rides per day on average. That increased to almost 1,200 rides per day on average this Spring and just over 1,600 rides per day on average this Summer. As that Kevin Costner baseball movie would say: NYC DOT built it and #bikeNYC came.

These numbers are even likely underreported, as my camera ran into some technical problems (a tree grew too luscious and interfered with the software resulting in it missing bikes; the camera went offline for several days, maddeningly, while I was out of town during the high volumes of late August and early September). Nonetheless, even with this known under-sampling, bike and scooter traffic on Crescent has boomed.

More than three times as many people rode in the Crescent Street bike lane each day this summer as they did last winter. Almost 1,000 rides took place in each direction. We set a new record for daily ridership of 2,358 rides on Friday, September 10, 2021. That’s an average of almost 2 bikes every minute of the day.

While there is steady traffic volumes throughout the day (excepting the overnight hours of 1-5 am), peak traffic remains the evening hours between 4-9pm, with those five hours accounting for almost 40% of the day’s volume. Southbound traffic (to the Queensboro Bridge) is fairly steady throughout the day, but the evening hours is when north-bound (contraflow to the Triboro Bridge) bike traffic dominates.

Now, when you’re using models to design a street or using spreadsheets and charts to map data, it’s easy to forget that numbers represent actual human beings. It’s easy to forget that each ride counted here is a New Yorker working, headed home from work or school, exercising or just tootin’ around town. That each ride counted here is someone made safer because NYC DOT ignored the (internal and external) naysayers and chose to actively reduce automobile LOS, to remove parking spots, and to redesign the street to make it more walkable/bikeable.

A selection of riders in the Crescent Street bike lane from 5:52-6:29pm on Thursday, October 14, 2021.

Sometimes when I’m watching people ride by out my window or when I’m walking in and out of my house, I’m stopped in my tracks because there are just so many bikes. Sporadically on the weekends, bike traffic on Crescent Street even exceeds car traffic! In the weekday evening rush hours, pedestrian and bike traffic combined regularly exceeds car traffic.

For instance, as captured on the below video on Thursday, October 14, 2021, there were 131 cars, 74 bikes/scooters, 2 joggers and 80 pedestrians in the 15 minutes from 6:26-6:41pm. That’s 131 cars to 156 non-cars. Take a moment to let that sink in: there were more people biking and walking on Crescent Street than there were cars and trucks driving.

• On one of the main arterial roads for toll shopping in western Queens

• During rush hour

• During record levels of pandemic-related congestion

It’s car armageddon on almost every street in New York City and yet a bike boom grows on Crescent Street. Because NYC DOT stepped up to the plate and moved forward with a (mostly) high quality design.

The two-way bike lane on Crescent Street in Astoria is truly one of the greatest success stories out of NYC DOT in the last few years and should be Exhibit 1 in their efforts to build more bike lanes, not just here in Astoria (cough east west protected routes cough) but throughout the city. We don’t need to guess what works: we have evidence of what works right in front of our faces.

May 16, 2020

October 14, 2021

Just over a year ago, Crescent Street was an over-wide, two-lane, one-way highway for cars (mainly non-local traffic toll-shopping). Now, it’s not only the high-trafficked spine of an Astoria bike network, but it’s also safer for all users, slowing auto speeds and narrowing pedestrian crossings. It’s not perfect and there’s still work to be done, but any way you look at it, this street improvement project has been a major success and has proven that in western Queens the demand for high-quality cycling infrastructure is strong and the need for slower, safer streets is endless. In fact, the only thing that could be called a “disaster” is that Crescent Street is the only street in central Astoria that has been given these life-changing, life-saving improvements. At least so far…