Pick a Path

Urban planners call it “wayfinding.” Wayfinding is a bit of an art, by which pedestrians or vehicles can be intuitively guided through city streets or transportation hubs. A good example of bad wayfinding would be Manhattan’s Penn Station or Port Authority Bus Terminal, both of which assume that visitors will be familiar with their idiosyncratic floor plans. Pictured in today’s post are the street instructions governing bicycle and motor vehicle lanes at the corner of 39th Street and Skillman Avenue in Sunnyside, found on the southern extent of the truss bridge that overflies the Sunnyside Yards.

As my grandmother might have said – “Oy Gevalt.”

One does not envy the traffic engineers of the Bloomberg era, who were tasked with working bike lanes into a street plan that was designed solely for motor vehicles. As a dedicated pedestrian, I personally consider bicycles to be vehicles, and I spend an awful lot of my time expressing this viewpoint to sidewalk-bound bicyclists around Astoria and LIC – but there you go.

For most of the span, the bike lane hugs the curb, but when you get to the corner of Skillman Avenue, there’s suddenly a wayfinding indication for riders to either get out of the right turn lane and cross to the median one. Effectively, this merges the bicycle lane with the vehicle lane. Did I mention that this is a truck route?

Observation reveals that few, if any, bicyclists are foolhardy enough to actually use the bike lanes on these bridges over the rail yard, instead they prefer the safer alternative of riding on the sidewalk pavement. A growing issue here in Western Queens are the presence of both bicycles and those electric scooters favored by food delivery people being operated on the sidewalk. Just last week, my dog Zuzu and I were nearly hit by a delivery guy riding one at around 10-15 mph on the sidewalk of a local street.

Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.