Business & Tech

Bike Lanes Cripple Sales For Rego Park Businesses, Owners Say

Rego Park business owners along Queens Boulevard complain their sales have tanked since new bike lanes took away customer parking.

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Danielle Woodward, Patch StaffVerified Patch Staff Badge

REGO PARK, QUEENS -- Gary Taylor is used to sales at his bar on Queens Boulevard roughly breaking even each month, so he was surprised - and alarmed - when September yielded a 10 percent sales loss for his bar that tanked even further into the red by October.

Taylor, who owns Tropix Bar and Lounge at 95-32 Queens Blvd., realized sales at the Rego Park bar dropped shortly after the city installed new bike lane along Queens Boulevard in July, replacing 198 parking spaces on the service road medians from Eliot Avenue to Yellowstone Boulevard, Patch previously reported.

He is among a handful of business owners along Queens Boulevard who suspect the parking spaces lost to the bike lane have cost them customers and money. Taylor, who's owned Tropix for 13 years and previously worked in sales, said he's convinced there's no other way such a steep loss adds up.

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"If you see a sale loss, normally it’s gradual," he told Patch. "That’s understandable, but when you go from breaking even to all the sudden having a double digit loss, there has to be a reason for it, and the reason is parking and traffic flow. All these things combined have impacted business."

Taylor realized he wasn't alone in those losses when he began talking to neighboring business owners and realized they saw it, too. In an attempt to organize their voices, he hosted a meeting at Tropix on Monday, where 14 local business owners showed up with similar complaints.

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"Every time i go into a business and talk to a manager or owner, they all have the same story - It's not like just one or two," Taylor said. "Businesses are suffering big time."

Among the suffering business owners was Jay Parker, owner of the famed Ben's Best deli just down the road from Taylor's bar. The pastrami - featured on the Food Network's "Diners, Drive-In's and Dives" and Travel Channel's "Food Paradise" - saw sales tank by 17 percent in what's usually its "busy time" after the bike lanes were installed, Parker told the Queens Chronicle in November.

“I’m spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing to get people to come here. But my city is inconveniencing them and they’re going to go somewhere else," he told the Chronicle.

The group decided to draft a petition and bring it before the next Community Board 6 meeting in hopes of reviewing the space designated to the bike lane and discussing different layouts that could provide "a happy medium" for cyclists and business owners.

The city's Department of Transportation, which oversees the bike lanes' installation, did not immediately return requests for comment.

"We're not necessarily against bikes or bike lanes, but we're against the loss of the parking that's in this area," Taylor said. "We're trying to bring awareness to this and hopefully open some eyes and ears on how we are suffering as far as business goes."

And Taylor said business is suffering. His block alone lost 14 parking spaces to the bike lane, which he said has resulted in some of his longtime patrons frequenting the bar less, or being ticketed for parking in bike and truck loading areas that didn't used to be there. Taylor suspects newer customers see his bar has no nearby parking and simply move on to another place that does.

"What we're hearing is they (customers) want to stop by and spend money but they can't find parking," Taylor said. "People tell me all the time, they were going to come in but they couldn’t find parking or it took too long and they got frustrated and left."

But Taylor said he's not so much worried for himself as he is for some of the smaller, less established neighboring businesses who can't shoulder such a steep loss of revenue month after month.

"There will be businesses that go out because of this - There's no doubt in my mind," he said. "I look at some of these ma and pa shops who don't have the traffic flow I do and these people are desperate."

Each business owner left the meeting Monday night with their own copy of the petition to pass around the neighborhood in hopes of having 5,000 signatures gathered when they make their case to the board on Jan. 10. Taylor said his sheet alone so far has garnered around 100 signatures.

Taylor knows the petition may come as too little too late, now that the bike lanes are in place. In some ways, he wishes he'd been more involved in the issue when he first learned the bike lanes were coming to Queens Boulevard.

"I knew the bike lanes were coming but I really wasn't aware we were going to lose all this parking, so I didn't feel threatened by it," he said. "The only thing I can do at this point is make some noise and see if we can change something."

Lead image via Gary Taylor.

Caption: A cop tickets a cars parked in the newly installed loading zone in front of Gary Taylor's bar, Tropix.

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