Hi, I'm Ryan Russo from the New York City Department of Transportation and we're very
excited to show you the treatments we've made in our Phase 1 Queens Boulevard project.
Queens Boulevard unfortunately hasn't really felt like a glorious tree-lined livable boulevard.
It has been much more like a highway but it is where people live and work and walk and
shop and it has been a problematic street for us in the City of New York for many many years
and thanks to the vision of Mayor de Blasio under vision zero and the hard work of advocates
and community leaders we've had the opportunity to re-engineer redesign and transform the street.
The first phase of our project runs from here at Bruce Belt Avenue and Sunnyside into Woodside
it's 1.3 miles long and it's the result of a community planning process. We did workshops
with tables where we heard from the community all the issues that they had, whether it was
crossing the streets, problematic intersections, uncomfortable cycling. Here we are where Queens
Boulevard comes out from adjacent to Seven Train Viaduct. Queens Boulevard is a multi-roadway
boulevard with a main road and a service road and you see that starting behind us where vehicles
have to choose between the service road and the main road and the real problem was that both the
service road and the main road each felt like a highway and the design principle is that the
service road should really be the most livable, walkable, bikeable, really serving the land
uses and the people there. To encourage the motorists to use the main road we widened the
median here providing twice as much refuge for pedestrians than they had shorting crossing
distances and calming the service road and we bring the cyclist in from a side street and this
is the beginning of the Queens Boulevard bike lane. So you see behind us that we have our bike lane
and we really had a lot of choices on exactly how we would do the cross section of Queens Boulevard.
We could have put a traditional bike lane next to the park cars. We could have flipped the park
cars and put the bike lane near the land uses between the sidewalk and the park cars but what
we wanted to do here was have a very high integrity bike lane that wouldn't have any
interferences from parking maneuvers or loading and unloading and we also saw the opportunity
with widening this mall to really create a grand urban boulevard. The cross section behind us we
have the sidewalk, the park cars, the one moving lane for the service road, then we have a buffer
with flexible posts adjacent the bike lane, the bike lanes painted green and then we have our
epoxy gravel which currently widens out the median between the main road and the service road
to create the pedestrian space that will be upgraded with the hundred million dollars of
capital money we have budgeted to continue to transform Queens Boulevard. So here we are at
54th street and what we did when we looked at Queens Boulevard we saw that there were way too many
slip roads, slip transitions from service road to main road or vice versa and we found the ones
that were redundant which allowed us to claim a lot of space for the vision of the linear greenway
and really help us humanize Queens Boulevard while preserving access. So at this location we have
our new mall to mall crosswalks that we added with pedestrian signals. They provide a linear
connection for the pedestrian space and ultimately the greenway boulevard that we will build here
but they also provide choices for pedestrians crossing the wide boulevard itself if they're
crossing one direction and the light changes and they're going the other way they have a choice to
go the other way. So here at 56th street rather than have a crosswalk from mall to mall we actually
determined that we could close it completely, that the volume of traffic coming off the side
street that needed to get to the service road was very low it could turn on to the main line
and it allowed for there to be basically an intersection free experience for the pedestrians
and cyclists. So we talked earlier about closing the slip roads between the main line and the
service road wherever we could in vice versa but transitioning vehicles from the main line to the
service road not at intersections has the advantage of simplifying our intersections where most of
crashes happen and when we so if we have those transitions there's no conflicts for the through
bicyclists and the through pedestrians. So we still needed to get vehicles from the main line to
the service road and vice versa at some locations and what we did was we developed these stop right
turns that you see behind me. We have stop word message stop line and a stop sign we decelerate
the vehicles as they leave the main road as they approach the stop sign then we have a marked
crossing for both the cyclists and the pedestrians and what that also does is really emphasize the
transition from the main road which has regional and through traffic to the service road which
we really want to be a livable comfortable pedestrian and bike oriented place that's more
about access to the land uses. We're here in front of the big six apartment complex and shopping
center where previously we had to bring traffic onto the service road in two lanes because we
have an highway entrance ramp about a half mile down Queens boulevard and what that meant was the
regional and through traffic was on the service road going at high speeds and what we did was
we closed an entrance further upstream and built a whole new signal closer to the highway a new
entrance so that the main line traffic could access the highway and stay on the main line longer
that gave us this opportunity to continue our cross section of a widened median and the protected
bike lane to really try to achieve that livable comfortable crossable service road. So here up
ahead is the new signal that we built to transition main line traffic to the service road much closer
to the highway entrance we have flashing two o'clock arrow right turn juxtapose with a bicycle
signal to keep the cyclists safe and separated from the traffic transitioning. So one of the
challenges of Queens boulevard is that its cross section and configuration does not stay consistent
and it has to do things like access highway ramps it has railroad trestles that cross over it that
change the width and the configuration of the roads and we were really determined to do a project
as fast as possible and not wait for a capital project to try to figure out some of these things
so we're standing in some pedestrian space heading towards a crossing that we created and
enhanced across the highway entrance ramp and we tried to be as creative as possible in getting
the cyclists and pedestrians through really a tremendous complex of different types of infrastructure.
To my left is the entrance to the BQE and we did a couple of things before motorists just went high
speed across traditional crosswalk without any separation of control we now have a high visibility
crosswalk and a signal to allow the pedestrians to cross safely and then we also had this redundant
road behind me another opportunity to turn and go to the BQE that we closed with our operational
pallet to provide a full connection with no conflicts at all for pedestrians to try to connect
one neighborhood to the other because this infrastructure truly separated neighbors and
we're trying to really stitch these neighborhoods back together. So here it was a tremendous
challenge to try to get the bikeway underneath the railroad trestle in the before condition there
was really no room to try to get the cyclists underneath this trestle. What we ended up doing
was narrowing the moving lanes and pushing them up against the sidewalk curb and then extending
what was really a two-foot sidewalk next to the railroad trestle and widened it to create the
bikeway. One of the primary challenges with Queens Boulevard is just the large size of the right of
way and all of the intersections don't necessarily come in straight and that makes crossings quite
long. So we've always provided a large amount of crossing time with the signals for people to get
across but we try to shorten the crossing distances as much as possible and we've claimed whatever
space we could to widen median tips to reduce the amount of exposure and increase the comfort for
pedestrians. So this is another location where a highway entrance ramp and infrastructure like
the railroad trestle serve to divide neighbor from neighbor and we added a signal and a crossing here
where there had been none so that people could safely just walk to a store or walk and visit
their neighbor and connect those communities. Here in the westbound direction of Queens Boulevard
we have another location where to preserve the bikeway and to keep the through traffic on the
main road we had to provide another lane to enter the BQE and we had a barrier on the bridge the BQE
is actually under us right now that we had to remove and relocate and build a new barrier to
provide the new configuration and make 65th place a safer intersection and it really goes to epitomize
the amazing team effort that this whole project was at the Department of Transportation from our
roadway repair maintenance division our bridges division our signals division all of the operations
involved that had to work together and collaborate in order to provide the new safer configuration
and keep the integrity of the bikeway. The vision of Queens Boulevard is a linear greenway with a
mall that people walk and jog along and bike along may be seem a little crazy to some people
but you don't have to go far in New York City to see some precedents there's Eastern Parkway and
Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn designed by Frederick Law Olmsted where we do have people sitting in
benches meeting their neighbors playing chess walking biking and we really have that vision
and we're fortunate to have 100 million dollars budgeted to turn the operational materials you
see behind me into the Grand Boulevard that Queens Boulevard deserves to be.
