Queens is the location of five of the nine worst maintained roads in New York City, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a city planning agency.
The report also said it found that 9 percent of the borough’s bridges are what it called structurally deficient and that Queens public housing developments are in the worst condition of any place in the five boroughs.
The center said the Jackie Robinson Parkway, the Shore Front Parkway, the Cross Bay Parkway, Hempstead Turnpike and Queens Boulevard were poorly maintained.
The report documents other “infrastructure challenges” in Queens, such as 29.7 percent of the borough’s streets were in fair or poor condition. This is worse than Brooklyn, where 27.2 percent of streets were in fair or poor condition, but better than Manhattan (42.7 percent), Staten Island (40.1 percent) and the Bronx (34 percent).
16 comments:
Tell us something we didn't know!
Same was true in the 1960s.
The root of the problem is that it costs to much to have city employees fix the roads.
Let private contractors in and they'd be done fast and efficiently.
Don't maintain the Jackie Robinson Parkway. Close it down and make it into a park. Not only does it go nowhere, it's so curvy it's really dangerous to drive on - even at speeds of 45mph.
This is a Robert Moses boondoggle that needs to go away. Once it's gone traffic will disperse instead of concentrate in that area. Local roads will absorb the increase and will initially become more crowded but then as people find other roads it will dissipate.
This has already been accomplished in other parts of the country as urban highways have been removed (Portland, San Francisco, Milwaukee). More urban highway removals are in the works as well in Cleveland, DC, Memphis and Buffalo.
The next step is to reinvest in mass transit. There used to be a bunch of trolley lines in this area before NYC got rid of all of them. Other cities have these all over the place. Why not NYC?
Highways make urban neighborhoods less desirable. Other cities have already figured this out. NYC currently lags behind a lot of other parts of the U.S. with this idea - not to mention places like Madrid, Toronto, Seoul, etc.
We need to rethink how we get around. Not only are highways inefficient and wasteful in a city, they make our neighborhoods smell of exhaust, make local streets less safe for pedestrians and make the whole urban experience much noisier than it needs to be.
We all already know the city lets infrastructure rot. By the way will the makers of this report tell us where the Crossbay Parkway is? Do they mean the Cross Island or Crossbay Blvd??
The trolleys were replaced with buses.
The city doesn't know how to maintain anything....just look at the courthouse on sutphin, I'm surprised that the building doesn't have asbestos in it! I just got off of jury duty from there and the jury room looked like it hasn't been maintenanced since the building first opened....I was surprised to see an air conditioner in there even.
Let's not just stop at roads, most of Queens is not well maintained with anything, especially quality of life.
How can one of the richest cities in the country have such a poor quality of life.
costs should not be a problem,despite claims of a lack of funds,we sure have a lot of scratch to give subsidies for developers and sports arenas for the past 10 years and even today with talks of building more malls and a stadium for soccer.
anon 2 makes a great point about the jackie rob highway.those roads look like it could pass for the legendary action park.
now excuse me,I have to get shocks for my bicycle,because these roads will never be repaved in my lifetime
to quote billy joel,
I'mmmmmmmmmmmmm movin'out
To the moron who says close the Jackie robinson. Do you really think traffic will disappear? I'm sure the thousands of people who use it to go back and forth to work will say oh well let me hop on a bike, and just bike 15 miles in snow to work or take a 2 hour bus ride.
Its because of rocket scientists like you that Robert moses was not able to complete the highway system in the city. If the highway system was completed and connected the way it was supposed to be and expanded traffic would not be as bad.
The Jackie was never designed to dump traffic off at Pennsylvania av. Because it was never completed you have that disaster.
But we have billions for baseball stadiums, developer subsidiaries, and to take care of every illegal that jumps the fence and ends up here.
I would love to have private contractors maintain the roads. Maybe they can do as good of a job as those contractors who were hired to plant trees but then royally ripped the city off and didn't do the work they said they did.
Anon. No. 9:
As originally planned, that's where it was meant to wind up, linking up with Eastern Parkway and Atlantic Avenue. It wasn't until much later on that plans were made to extend it further.
Anonymous said:
"The root of the problem is that it costs to much to have city employees fix the roads.
Let private contractors in and they'd be done fast and efficiently."
Private contractors leaves open the likelihood of bid rigging & corruption. Like we don't have enough of that already. Everything the City's electeds touch turns to a corrupt pile of stinking shit...
"As originally planned, that's where it was meant to wind up, linking up with Eastern Parkway and Atlantic Avenue. It wasn't until much later on that plans were made to extend it further."
In the 60's Moses wanted to extend the Interboro (Jackie) to the Belt Pkwy. If that was done traffic would be less congested in the area.
Also if I 78 and the Queens Interboro Expressway (which would run from the Belt along the current L train corridor, and then meet the BQE) were built it would have eased traffic as well.
When was the original parkway built? By the time that Moses came up with that plan (as well as for things like the Lower Manhattan Expressway) his power had lessened..
Lots of good books on unbuilt NYC: "Power Broker" (the bio of Robert Moses), "The City that Never Was" (all the unbuilt projects), and "Routes Not Taken" (the unbuilt subway lines)
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