Photo Courtesy of DOT
The new curbside protected lanes along Northern Boulevard have now permanently replaced moving lanes.
By Forum Staff
The addition of a bicycle lane—whether a protected lane or a conventional one—improves the safety of cyclists by one third; the addition of those lanes also increases the volume of cyclists by an average of 50 percent, according to a report recently released by the City Department of Transportation.
DOT Commissioner Hank Gutman released “Safe Streets for Cycling: How Street Design Affects Bicycle Safety and Ridership,” at a press conference at Northern Boulevard and 47th Street. Nearly four miles of Northern Boulevard in Woodside/Astoria has been transformed in the last year, including the addition of new protected bicycle lanes that connect the Queensboro Bridge to the larger Queens bicycle network.
This section of Northern Boulevard has been a Vision Zero priority corridor with a rate of death and serious injury rate that ranked it among Queens’ top 10 percent most dangerous corridors. Between 2014 and 2018, this part of Northern Boulevard had also been the site of three fatalities. With the completion of the bike lane, DOT has completed 15.1 miles of protected bike lanes this year, and should reach the goal of 30 miles of protected lanes by the end of the year.
The study sampled over 100 miles of on-street bicycle lanes in New York City, using new data to assess the risk of injury for cyclists. That risk is quantified by dividing bicyclist injuries per mile by estimated bicycle volumes—and compares data up to three years after project installation.
The study reports that protected bike lanes reduce risk of injury by 34 percent on streets where they are installed. On the highest-risk streets, cyclist risk of injury is reduced by over 60 percent. Meanwhile, conventional lanes also substantially lowered risk cyclist risk of injury by 32 percent where they are installed. The key finding of the report is that protected and conventional lanes work in tandem to reduce risk across the entire bicycle network to reduce risk by 32 percent. Protected lanes are ideal for installation in the “spine” of the network on wider and one-way streets, while conventional lanes feed into that network on slower, narrower local streets.
The study also concluded that cycling volumes along both new conventional and new protected lanes increased ridership by 50 percent. The study is released on the heels of this month’s Cycling in the City report, which among many findings reported that daily cycling in the five boroughs had increased 26 percent since 2014.
In September 2020, DOT fast-tracked a plan to add temporary protected bicycle lanes along Northern Boulevard and Broadway in Astoria and Woodside. The demand for such a corridor was partially fueled by high bicycle ridership along the adjacent 34th Avenue Open Street in Jackson Heights.
At community presentations in February 2021, DOT revealed its plans moved to make the new temporary lanes permanent, including through the addition of green paint and intersection markings. The new curbside protected lanes along Northern have now permanently replaced moving lanes while the previous delineator-protected lanes along Broadway installed last year were entirely replaced this year with parking-protected lanes. As recently as the summer of 2020, neither street had any bike lanes.
