City begins planning 16-mile Queens waterfront greenway
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The city’s Department of Transportation announced plans for several workshops to begin development on the 16-mile Queens Waterfront Greenway. Photo via the Department of Transportation
By Ryan Schwach
Queens’ waterfront will one day be connected from Long Island City to Fort Totten in Whitestone, according to the city’s Department of Transportation.
Officials with the DOT said this week that plans to build the 16-mile “Queens Waterfront Greenway” are now underway. The agency plans to hold a handful of public feedback sessions in the coming weeks as it begins to craft the concept and design of the borough-spanning path meant for cyclists and pedestrians.
“Come one, come all Queens residents and New Yorkers, make your voices heard about the future of this greenway at one of our inclusive and multilingual workshops,” DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said.
The DOT will hold five events – the first three to discuss individual sections of the greenway – starting on Oct. 8.
Then on Oct. 29, DOT will hold a virtual meeting to discuss the project as a whole.
The greenway intends to introduce new paths for cyclists and pedestrians along the waterways of Queens.
“A waterfront greenway in Queens will better connect residents to the East River and Long Island Sound through new bike paths and pedestrian space and create a critical commuting corridor for riders,” said Rodriguez. “We look forward to developing our historic greenway expansion hand-in-hand with local residents.”
The Queens Waterfront Greenway is just one portion of a citywide greenway initiative rolled out nearly a year ago that hopes to bring six new greenways to the five boroughs.
Queens is also supposed to get a seven-smile greenway from Spring Creek to Brookville Park, which will connect with existing greenways along Jamaica Bay and parks in Southeast Queens.
"This historic expansion of our city's greenways in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island will transform the ways New Yorkers live, work, and get around,” Mayor Eric Adams said last October. “And with more New Yorkers biking than ever, it will connect every corner of our city with this safer, greener mode of transportation."
The plan to move forward with the greenway comes as bike ridership continues to grow in the city, and in Queens, in particular.
According to new data from the DOT, ridership across the city’s bridges increased significantly in the last year.
On the Queensboro Bridge – which has its own troubled bike infrastructure – bike ridership was up 19 percent in September compared to September 2023. That month, there were 218,000 trips across the bridge, and there have been more than a million since April.
On the Pulaski Bridge, which connects LIC to Greenpoint in Brooklyn, bike ridership went up before the G train took its summer break. But the uptick has remained even after the train has returned. September’s ridershop was 26 percent higher than it was last year.
“We know that there's more demand,” said Laura Shepard, the Queens organizer for the transportation advocacy organization, Transportation Alternatives. “It's really important that we give every community access to this kind of infrastructure.”
Shepard said she finds the greenway project exciting, especially as someone who grew up riding along the pre-existing lanes along Queens’ waterfront.
“I used to ride it and had to stop at the edge of Little Bay Park because that was where the infrastructure ended,” she said. “There are some really beautiful views along the water, really great places to look at the water, the bridges and see a sunset.”
“This project has a lot of potential to undo the damage that a lot of highway construction has caused, really cutting us off from our waterfront and making it harder for people to both enjoy it but also steward it,” she added.
Queens Councilmember Julie Won, who’s district will be home to the greenway’s westernmost point, said she was all in.
“DOT’s Queens Waterfront Greenway plan affirms our community’s need for a continuous, publicly accessible waterfront from Queensbridge Park to Gantry Park," said Won in a statement to the Eagle.
Won said the greenway plan also plays a part in the massive, ongoing effort to rezone portions of Long Island City, called OneLIC
"This works in conjunction with the OneLIC project to help achieve our mutual goal by mandating an updated Waterfront Access Plan and my community’s efforts to reclaim the waterfront from [the area’s] dirty power plants,” Won said.
Although, not everyone is quite so sold on the greenway going through their neighborhood.
Republican Queens Councilmember Vickie Paladino vowed on X on Tuesday that “there will be no North Queens Greenway through these parts of my district.”
“It's not happening,” she wrote.
The Queens Waterfront Greenway aims to bring 16 miles of new paths for Queens’ cyclists and pedestrians. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
In a lengthy statement to the Eagle, Paladino – whose district includes the eastern third of the proposed greenway – said she “will do everything I can to stop it.”
“I cannot imagine a more disruptive and unnecessary waste of money and space,” Paladino said.
Paladino’s concerns center around a potential path through some of the busier areas of College Point, Whitestone and Beechhurst, and areas that aren’t right on the waterfront.
“We cannot ask the people of that neighborhood to bear yet another burden,” she said, noting her concern that the greenway may affect parking and car traffic.
Paladino’s opposition was somewhat surprising to Shepard, since greenways are often a supported piece of infrastructure, helping not only cyclists but pedestrians as well.
“I don't think Councilmember Paladino truly understands what a greenway is,” she said. “Typically greenways are pretty non-controversial, win-win pieces of infrastructure, because they're not just for cyclists. They're for people walking their dogs, they're for runners, joggers, families.”
In a conversation with the Eagle, Queens Community Board 7 Vice Chair Chuck Apelian – who wasn’t aware of the plan – expressed some similar concerns.
“We need to see the diagrams,” he said.
While the proposed route for the greenway includes some paths that move away from the coastline and make their way inland, the specifics of the plan are not yet set in stone. That’s what the upcoming public meetings are for, the DOT said.
The first of the workshops will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 8, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria. The first workshop will cover the route from Gantry Plaza State Park to Bowery Bay.
The second workshop, which will focus on the route from Bowery Bay to Willets Point, will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Glow Cultural Center in Flushing.
The third workshop will be held at Alley Pond Park and Environmental Center in Douglaston on Thursday, Oct. 24, from 6 to 8 p.m. Those in attendance will discuss the route from Willets Point to the greenway’s end at Fort Totten.
