Ferdinand NYC

Queens is actually not bad to bicycle in. Of course we don't have many bike lanes, which is a shame. But there are plenty of great streets that are bike-friendly.

Queens Blvd., however, is not one of them; and neither, really, is Woodhaven Blvd. I live at Woodhaven Blvd. and Jamaica Ave., so I often have to take Woodhaven Blvd. for some short distances. But I use alternatives whenever possible. The best alternative to Woodhaven Blvd. is 80th St., which runs from Myrtle Ave. up to Grand Ave.

You mentioned that you'll be living in Long Island City. While Queens Blvd. runs through LIC and Sunnyside, my advice is to just forget about it unless you are riding in the overnight hours. It's much more pleasant to go a little out of the way to the north and hit 31st Ave. This extremely useful avenue goes east-west, parallel to Queens Blvd. for quite a long way, from the East River all the way to 103rd St. There is a bike lane on 34th Ave. east of 60th St.; but that won't help you in Long Island City. So I'd say that 31st Ave. is the better choice.

Access to both bridges, the Queensboro and the Triborough, is very good via bike-laned and bike-friendly streets. To get to the Queensboro Bridge, the best option is 21st St. Where that street crosses Queens Plaza N., there is an on-sidewalk bike lane. You take that lane east a couple of blocks, and then U-turn onto the bridge.

Getting on the Triborough Bridge is just as easy. The idea is to get to 27th St. and Astoria Blvd., and go north from there. So, coming from LIC, you can take any northbound through street up to Astoria Blvd. and go either right or left (depending on the street you have chosen) to get to 27th St. Then go north on that street one block to the bridge entry at Hoyt Ave. Taking the Triborough Bridge requires the use of stairs at three different locations on the crossing from Queens to Randall's Island. (Also, be aware that the official rule is that riding on the bridge path is prohibited; though I have never seen nor heard of enforcement of this.) The crossing from Randall's Island to the Bronx is not far from the landing from Queens, and is very short. The crossing to Manhattan is a little tougher to find; it's also short.

Another street to avoid in Queens, along with the aforementioned Queens Blvd. and Woodhaven Blvd., is Northern Blvd., which runs the entire width of Queens. However, in Flushing there is an entry to the Flushing Bay bike path on Northern near Main St. I also recommend skipping Metropolitan Ave. (despite its useful trajectory), as there is very little shoulder room on much of it

Hillside Ave. is good from its inception in Richmond Hill up to about the Van Wyck Expressway; and then again from Hollis out through the City line. But the section of it in Jamaica is very packed with buses, which makes it frustrating.

In the western portion of Queens near the Brooklyn border, Linden Blvd. is very bad, almost highway-like; but the section of it east of Aqueduct Racetrack is actually an excellent bike road.

Hills are generally not a problem in the western sections of Queens. The ridge called the Terminal Moraine (the furthest extent south of the ice sheets in the last Ice Age) runs east-west through Queens parallel to and north of Jamaica Ave. (This answers the question that I had as a kid growing up in Queens Village just south of the Moraine about why every street was uphill going north.) The only very large hills in Queens are found in the northeast corner, in Douglaston and Little Neck.

Major roadways which are very good for bikes are Francis Lewis Blvd. north of Hillside Ave., 108th St. north of Queens Blvd., 73rd Ave. east of Flushing Meadow Park, Springfield Blvd., and Bell Blvd.

There aren't many real separated cycle tracks in Queens. Worth mentioning is the Belt Pkwy. (Shore Pkwy.) Greenway, which begins at 84th St. in Lindenwood near the Brooklyn border, and extends about six miles along the southern coast to Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn (the segment west of that is still closed due to hurricane damage), where you can go south over a bridge back into Queens to get to Riis Park, which is on the Rockaway peninsula.

From the centre of Rockaway there is a bridge up to the island of Broad Channel, which is mainly a wildlife preserve, but which is inhabited only at its southern tip. (The houses are on stilts and are extremely rickety-looking. Many years ago Mayor Lindsay tried, but unfortunately failed, to relocate the residents, both for their benefit and for the good of the wetlands-dwelling wildlife. One supposes that Mother Nature will ultimately succeed where Lindsay failed.) After you pass by this (eminently pass-by-able) residential area, you find approximately two miles worth of straight riding with no lights on the only road through the preserve. Then there's another bridge back to "mainland" Queens.

Another good bike path is the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway (so called because of its origin as one of the first paved roads in the U.S., built by a bratty Vanderbilt kid as a place to race his cars), which extends a couple of miles between Cunningham and Alley Pond Parks, but which connects on its western end with the bike path through the parks of Kissena Corridor, adding up to about a five-mile ride. And if you're a real hotshot who likes to go round in circles on a racetrack, there is a velodrome track in Kissena Park near the Parsons Blvd. entrance along Booth Memorial Ave.

So, I hope you have fun riding in Queens. I will admit that the best thing for a bicyclist about being in Long Island City is the proximity to the great bike lanes of Manhattan, and also to Brooklyn, both of which are much better for biking than Queens is. But Queens is not a total wasteland. Actually, you'll find that the small local streets are generally very pleasant to ride on.