The year’s first business breakfast of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation (LICBDC) was a respite from a cold and wet February morning and provided interest and information that attendees would want in any weather. Speaking at the Riverview Restaurant on 2nd Street were Maura McCarthy, Department of Transportation’s commissioner for Queens; Paul D’Amore, Department of Parks & Recreation deputy chief of operations for Queens, and Lieutenant Philip Aversano of the 108th Police Precinct.
McCarthy drew most of the audience’s attention at question time. The commissioner began with a few words that would qualify as a motto:  “Safety drives almost everything we do.”  In going over recent projects involving the DOT in the Long Island City area she began with a worthy safety issue: the Queens exit of the Pulaski Bridge, where formerly, pedestrian crossings at 51st Avenue might have looked ridiculously funny if they hadn’t been so hazardous. The crossing was changed extensively and improved, and a bus stop moved. A few blocks up Jackson Avenue, the avenue itself and Queens Plaza “will be utterly transformed”, the commissioner promised, by the rebuilding and redesign that have already begun. A less glorious duty for DOT is making adjustments in response to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s   “huge downsizing”, which, among other things, involves improvement of bus routes. 
Recent winter weather reminded McCarthy that it’s pothole season, leading her to talk about new types of asphalt DOT is working with to repair streets, and also about recycling asphalt. She urged her audience to use 311 to report potholes or non-functioning streetlights, after praising an innovation that allowed DOT to decrease the power used in a streetlight from 350 to 250 watts with no decrease in illumination. She brought out a copy of Street Design Manual, saying it contained many innovative ideas about street lighting, permeable pavement and swales. In the redesign of Jackson Avenue, she said, plants are being installed that are especially pollutant absorbent. She said she encourages developers to look at the manual to see how it might be useful when they build.
D’Amore also had a battery of facts and plans to recite. He said that a quarter of the city’s parkland is in Queens and in Queens, as well as in the rest of the city, parks are going through the largest building boom since the 1930s. Part of that boom, of course, is the Million Trees Project, which in turn is part of PlaNYC (Plan for New York) and aims at planting that many trees long before the plan is supposed to be completed in 2030. In Long Island City, there are significant projects at Court Square and in Queens Plaza, where there is a strip of plants in front of the MetLife building and, in the northeast corner of the plaza, a 1.2-acre park that is currently being created. In Astoria, a skateboarding park, long promised, is at last in production, as is a kayak launch at Hallets Cove, on the East River. Whitey Ford Field, a baseball field, has been completed.
Aversano read off several statistics pointing to the great decline in the crime rate in recent years. These positive statistics have become so familiar that their significance had to be emphasized by the lieutenant, who told the breakfast audience that the total crime rate in the city has gone down by 79.6 percent since 1994.
Came the questions, the first one and most thereafter for McCarthy. A man complained that the new median on Jackson Avenue in front of the Supreme Court building makes it nearly impossible to make a left turn on Jackson at Court Square to get to the parking garage behind the courthouse. McCarthy said a judge had called her about that, and to him and the man at the breakfast she said that DOT is indeed trying to impede left turns there. She said anyone headed for the garage by coming south on Jackson should take a long way round that will wind up coming north and turning right at Court Square to get to that destination.
Another issue, bicycle lanes on Vernon Boulevard, is far more touchy, McCarthy admitted. She said bike lanes were long planned and taken so seriously that she personally assisted in putting flyers on windshields in Hunters Point announcing the coming of the lanes and why they were being installed. A man at the breakfast had previously written her a letter saying that the bike lanes and the new alternate side parking directive had cut the number of parking spots in half. She said she had the letter and would follow any possible changes in the pattern of bike traffic that might lead to restoring some parking spots. Alternate side parking is the Department of Sanitation’s responsibility. The man’s suggestion that cleaning by Sanitation at night instead of in the daytime might alleviate the alternate parking burden was one McCarthy said might suit the man but was one she knew to be displeasing to several other local residents. Another man said the actions of some bicyclists are frightening to both drivers and tourists. Aversano said they are governed by traffic laws, the same as drivers. The 108th Precinct has a traffic unit to enforce such laws.
D’Amore was questioned about tree planters by a man who had inspected one, found it full of construction rubble and replanted it with soil. The deputy chief said that contractors are contractually obliged to keep the trees they have installed alive for two years. Planters are already a big part of Jackson Avenue and Queens Plaza redevelopment.
McCarthy was asked about 12-hour meters, which make up a third of the 1,100 meters installed in Long Island City. She defended them and their use by commuters, saying that areas closest to Manhattan must accommodate commuters who park there and pick up mass transit into the main business area. She also said that the Borden Avenue Bridge, too long closed because of reconstruction complications, should be open again by September and that the huge building project at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Queens Plaza South would, when completed, include a garage incorporating municipal parking, though it will not be a municipal garage.