Humans of the Northeastern Queens Transit Desert
Kenny Zhou
Northeastern Queens (Bounded to the West by Flushing Meadows Corona Park, North by the East River, East by Nassau County, and South by Union Turnpike) contains only one Subway stop (Flushing Main Street, 7 Line) and seven Long Island Railroad stops (Flushing Main Street, Murray Hill, Broadway, Auburndale, Bayside, Douglaston, Little Neck) on the Port Washington line.
A transit desert is defined by not having access to rapid transit (train, subway, BRT, etc) within 1 mile of one’s residence. The analysis above shows a 1 mile walkshed from each of the Subway and LIRR stations in northeastern Queens, overlaid with population by census tracts. Surprisingly, there are many census tracts with heavy population spread throughout the analysis area outside of the 1 mile walkshed areas, and many census tracts within the 1 mile walkshed area don’t have as much population. Residents outside of these areas would have to rely on local buses that mostly act as feeder routes to go to the Flushing Main Street Subway station.
However, the Subway and LIRR are not created equal. Frequency is essential to keep public transit viable for people. The subway sees greater frequency of service (service every 4 minutes during rush hours, 5–20 minutes during off peak hours) as opposed to the LIRR (service every 30 minutes during rush hours, 1–2 hours off peak hours). Therefore it would make more sense for people farther away to use buses in order to reach the Subway than the LIRR.
The second analysis represents locations reachable by a 1/4 mile walk to the nearest bus stop, which are denoted in blue. There are more bus routes that connect outer-lying areas to the Flushing Main Street Subway station than routes connecting these areas to LIRR stations. Overall, the bus network here is decent [albeit slow due to heavy traffic] but can use some improvements to reach certain isolated pockets of population. Frequency of service is another question as not all routes see the most service, use the same equipment (capacity) and operate all hours, but for the next step, I will attempt to simulate the morning rush when many people commute to work in Manhattan.
Data sources
Census Population: ASC 2020 Population, all census tracts in Queens, NY
Transit network: NYC Mass Transit Spatial Layers
