The bus lanes on Woodhaven and Cross Bay boulevards are affecting just about every stage of life.
According to several sources, parents dropping their toddlers and children at VIP II Daycare Center on Cross Bay Boulevard have had to park in the curbside lane and run into the building to drop off their children.
“When I called the [Department of Transportation] and told them about it, they said, ‘We know about VIP Daycare,’” said state Sen. Joe Addabbo Jr. (D-Howard Beach).
And just a few steps away, according to several people, the hearse for James Romanelli-Stephen Funeral Home on Cross Bay has had to park on the sidewalk. Arlene Brown, from the office of Councilman Eric Ulrich (R-Ozone Park), said late last month she witnessed one such occasion.
The DOT in October implemented the curbside bus lanes on Cross Bay from Rockaway Boulevard to the Belt Parkway, which restrict parking during morning and evening rush hours Monday to Saturday. Other businesses on the corridor have complained of financial impacts from the move.
From the Queens Chronicle:
Life in the slow lane continues for nearly a dozen frustrated Queens Boulevard business owners who say the bike lanes installed along the thoroughfare by the Department of Transportation this summer are to blame.
After months of fuming to themselves about the lanes — specifically the removal of parking spaces to accommodate them — the entrepreneurs gathered at Tropix Bar & Lounge on Monday to share their personal horror stories and brainstorm ideas on how to fight back.
“Every time a customer calls me, says he’s circling the block for one hour looking for parking, then says he will return next time,” said Edward Nisimov, the owner of both Falcoln Imports at 95-42 Queens Blvd. and Mother Imports next door. “But in the furniture business, there is usually no next time.”
After months of public outreach, the DOT removed 198 spaces along a 1.3-mile stretch of the boulevard’s service roads between Eliot Avenue and Yellowstone Boulevard to make way for the bike lanes.
Simultaneously, the agency added a number of curbside delivery-only zones which ban parking from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day except Sunday.
Before the lanes were installed, Nisimov said, there were approximately 24 parking spots in the direct vicinity of his businesses.
Now, he said there are just four.
10 comments:
The operational word is "outreach". For whom and by whom? It's all BS!
DOT has millions of bright ideas. Just look at Liberty Av where it was severed at Crossbay Blvd preventing east -west flow of traffic and causing great hardship for dozens if businesses around there.
Perhaps if a bicycle rack were installed in front of all of these establishments the problem would be solved.
A Happy Christmas to you all...
I don't own a car and I know this is a bad and discriminatory idea.
I have been riding my bike on Cross Bay, Woodhaven, and Queens Blvd for 4 decades and I know this is a bad idea.
As for racks, that's what the parking sign poles are for.
It’s been said before but bears repeating. This is the mayor retaliating for Queens residents calling him out on his bullshit regarding the homeless shelter hotel fiasco. The fact that he is ruining people’s lives and livelihoods only proves how personally he took it. He is a very dangerous and destructive being.
Costly and very dangerous. See Northern Blvd. bike lane in Douglaston.
These vile communist, socialist scumbags need to go to jail.
As i have said before, the loss of business is a feature, not a bug.
I'm a senior and an avid bicyclist and I've been on all the Greenways in Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx and Staten Island and I don't see many people on bikes except in Manhatan.Maybe in a perfect world protected bike lanes are a good idea but if they are taking away parking spots and hurting businesses they have to go.To me a marked space in the street is good enough,it let's drivers know that they share the road and it gives bikers a space that they should bike in.As a biker and a pedestrian I am more concerned with bikes running red lights than cars.When all the traffic is stopped there's always the possibility of a bike going thru a red light and even going in the wrong direction.I'm amazed that more bikers aren't killed with he way they ride,Manhattan is like the wild west for bikes.
As a former member of Transportation Alternatives I agreed with their ideas on making our streets safer for pedestrians and bicyclists but their agenda has taken an anti vehicle angle at all costs and Polly Trottenberg of the DOT seems to be following their agenda to the letter.
You do not see these problems anywhere to this degree except, as you could expect, in Queens. The communities in Manhattan and Brooklyn are very vocal about bike locations, and unlike Queens, their elected officials actually listen to them.
The problems in Queens can be traced, as almost always, to the Party machine that controls every aspect of our civic lives.
Most of the civics in Queens, those that are not toothless, are Party mouth pieces (and that includes Queens Civic Congress that lavishes a reception for party hacks and little else of substance except a small list of annual retread statements), the community boards (which are filled with mostly officious non-entities and unknowns), and city services (both civil and uniformed agencies) that lethargically go about their duties with the Golden Rule not to make waves for the Party or its hirelings holding political office, and the media that broadcasts state vetted issues with the same level of enthusiasm (not) that you would find in a late Soviet Bloc poster.
In short, Queens has the same sort of vibe to it that you would find in any out of the way fly bitten dusty middle Asian "Crowleystan" where even the dogs seek shade as they vacantly eye the occasional bike.
And, like in any other 3rd World country, this blog increasingly points to the same solution as those other god-forsaken spots on the globe : REGIME CHANGE.
But considering the ground down state of the local body politic, our only real hope is that the other boroughs to come in and carve us up - the west to Manhattan, the south to Brooklyn and the east to the Bronx.
Wipe the spawn of the legendary fictitious Queen Catherine off the map.
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