Crescent, 31st Street In Astoria To Get Protected Bike Lanes

ASTORIA, QUEENS — Protected bike lanes could be coming to 31st Street and Crescent Street as soon as this summer, part of a larger plan to beef up Astoria's bike network.

The city's Department of Transportation is in the process of designing a new web of bike lanes to close existing gaps in the neighborhood's bike network and help riders safely get around Astoria and connect to other boroughs.

Highlights of the plan include new protected bike paths running along Crescent Street and 31st Street, both major north-south thoroughfares.

"That's really the kind of thing that increases bike ridership," said Juan Restrepo, a Queens organizer for the street safety advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, which has spent years lobbying for such changes. "I think people are jazzed about it."

Transportation Alternatives advocates have been particularly focused on getting city transportation officials to install a protected bike path along Crescent.

More than 300 people have gotten injured in crashes on Crescent Street since August 2011, when the tool NYC Crash Mapper started mapping city crash data.

"Crescent Street is like a residential highway," Restrepo said.

Protected bike paths are associated with a 15-percent drop in crashes that cause injuries, according to a Department of Transportation analysis of police data from 2007 to 2017.

But Department of Transportation planners first need to finalize designs for the protected bike paths on those stretches. For 31st Street, a two-way street that runs below the elevated N/W subway tracks, planners are looking to the streets of Chicago to figure out how to make the design work.

"We don't have an example that's exactly like that today," Alice Friedman, the agency's deputy director of policy and planning for the bike network, said during a Tuesday presentation on the plan in Astoria.

More than 120 attendees crowded into P.S. 66's cafeteria Tuesday to weigh in on the agency's bike network proposal, according to a Department of Transportation spokesperson.

"The map as you see it is a little bit here, a little bit there, and it's not enough," Rod Townsend, an Astoria resident and Community Board 1 member, said.

Attendees said they were particularly excited about the plans for the two north-south protected bike lanes.

"Many people are scared of Crescent Street," said Transportation Alternatives Queens committee chair Macartney Morris, who lives on Crescent and bikes along it every day. "Cars basically speed down the middle."

While the Department of Transportation's proposal calls for two protected bike paths running north to south, it would have drivers and bike riders share the road on streets going east to west, which Transportation Alternatives' Morris called a disappointment.

Cyclists at the Tuesday presentation also asked Department of Transportation officials for more signage about Astoria's bike network, to increase both ridership and visibility, and connections to the Queensboro Bridge and Astoria Park.

Planners will use the feedback from Tuesday's event to update the bike network proposal, according to the Department of Transportation.