Merchants on Beach 20th Street in Far Rockaway continue to face headaches with the new raised-bike lane on their street, creating a tripping hazard and making their day to day ability to function their business far more difficult.
According to several business owners and observed by Wave reporters, cars park on the bike lane, which the businesses owners say bike riders don’t use anyway. When cars park on either side of the street it creates a bottleneck, creating more traffic. Also, many businesses on the block do not have loading docks, and with people parking on the bike lane, they have nowhere to handle deliveries.
“This is dangerous,” said Jose Santana, owner of Unisex by Santana Salon on Beach 20th. Santana recently spoke at the September Community Board 14 meeting, and has helped draft a letter to the Department of Transportation, signed by most of the merchants on the strip.
Businesses say that since the bike lane was constructed in July, they have seen few bike riders actually utilize it.
“There’s no bicycles,” said Ming Liu, owner of Sunny’s, a mix Hibachi and Mexican restaurant. “This is 20th Street, there’s so many cars…A lot of people park on the bike lane,” he said.
Like other owners, Liu called the raised-lane “dangerous” and that he’s seen people fall down.
Odali Rodriguez, owner of Green Village Meat Market, has experienced this first hand.
“I tripped, I was going across the street and I tripped,” he told The Wave. “It’s very dangerous, I’ve seen incidents, including myself.”
Rodriguez is one of the few stores on the block with a loading dock in the back, so he is more worried about the danger of tripping.
“When you walk there you think everything is flat, there’s no indication that it’s not flat,” he said.
Other merchants agree that the bike lane is dangerous, Seon Maynard who owns a West Indian Market says he has seen at least ten people trip.
“They should be suing the city,” he said.
Some owners have received $115 tickets for loitering while loading goods, like Enrique Perez from Valencia Cakes & Flowers.
“We should be able to load and unload, we shouldn’t be getting a ticket if we take too long,” Perez said. “It’s hard for us because people are parking there,” he said.
Speeding, traffic jams and dangerous crossings are all the problems one street in Queens is causing neighbors.
Rego Park’s 62nd Drive is identified as a “high crash corridor“ by the New York Department of Transportation (DOT). More than a dozen people have been seriously hurt on the road over the last five years.
The DOT’s solution was to add a bike lane on the side, with parking in the center. Unfortunately, neighbors say it came with new problems.
“My main concern is people’s health,” neighbor Arsen Gurgov said.
Gurgov has lived on 62nd Drive in Rego Park for the past 25 years. He says the new bike lane and parking configuration have made things worse than ever.
“My son was having an allergic reaction and I called for an ambulance. It took them too long to get here because they were stuck in a jam,“ he said.
Speeding in the Rego Park area is also still a big problem. A very big problem.
Year to date, police have written more than 3.5 times as many speeding tickets as they did in the same time last year; 1,577 speeding tickets compared to just 434 the previous year.
Moving violations are also up 40%.
A DOT spokesman says they presented the idea about the bike lane to the community board a year ago as a way to fix the dangers.
“These bike lanes improve safety for all road users, providing much-needed traffic calming while adding important protected bike lane connections between Queens Boulevard and Flushing Meadows Park,” spokesman Vincent Barone said.
Rego Park neighbors disagree with the DOT. Nearly 100 of them have signed a petition to have the bike lane and center parking adjusted or removed altogether.
“It’s either or,” Gurgov said. “They either get rid of the side parking, or they get rid of the bike lane. You can’t have both. It’s too narrow of a street.”
Vincent Barone is a bike zealot idiot. These two stories confirm that the DOT is forcing bike lanes on communities to drive them crazy and they are being weaponized as tools for gentrification.
8 comments:
Bike lanes are anti-immigrant.
Transportation alternatives advocates for bike lanes as a "Traffic Calming" method. In other words put bicyclists and pedestrians at further risk by using their presence in the hope that cars will slow down and proceed cautiously. Transportation Alternative membership is comprised by people newly arrived from the hinterlands and believe what ever bullshit traffic laws they were used to in their shithole municipalities will work here in NYC.
They're absolutely lunatic shitheads...
Troll alert - Klaus van Schnitzel TA commie is here again....
These store owners are busy exploiting illegals anyway. Who cares if they don’t like bikes.
I’ve enough issues like raised car lanes taking up too much space all over Maspeth. Ya can’t walk any safely now.
Get on yer bike and ride ya bunch so lazy ass fat slob’s!
Amazing how all these business owners suddenly have an issue with tripping over a bike lane. I’m sure they had no worries about people getting run over by car totalitarians.
@“ Troll alert - Klaus van Schnitzel TA commie is here again....”
Take a hike weirdo …
They only have a problem with the bike lanes when the black
And brown people began using them. So what if you can’t hear the electric bikes bearing down on you? Stop blaming the POC! Only 13% of the US population.
Not paying attention is racist.Getting hit by an e-bike is racist.
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