Mitigation Actions Title
Cross Island Parkway Flood Mitigation and Resiliency: Reconnecting Communities by Reconnecting Wetlands.
Mitigation Actions Description
The New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) seeks to develop a suite of actionable options to mitigate flooding along a total of 12.84 lane mileage (2.14 linear miles) on the Cross Island Parkway (CIP) in Queens, New York encompassing three lanes in each direction, from Crocheron Park to Northern Boulevard and from 50th Avenue to the Long Island Expressway. NYC DOT proposes to undertake a planning project that will provide local, State, and Federal stakeholders, community members, and decision-makers with a viable selection of options to mitigate the effects of current and future flooding facing the CIP, to protect the safety of New Yorkers while improving the health and ecosystem services of the surrounding wetlands. The project will conduct comprehensive data collection and analysis, a resiliency assessment, and an alternatives analysis to advance a schematic geometric level of design for three alternatives, as well as grant application development for the preferred alternative to advance toward implementation.
Description Problem
Existing conditions both within and surrounding the Cross Island Parkway (CIP) make it vulnerable to routine flooding during high tides and rain events, causing hydroplaning, ice, and lane closures, and severely reducing service lives of pavements and drainage hardware. As climate change contributes to more frequent extreme weather, closures due to highway flooding and flood-induced accidents are becoming more frequent. The highway’s construction on filled marshes, with 100% direct drainage into these marshes, means that there is no separation between the roadway and adjacent coastal and riverine wetlands. Further, the local ground water table and sea level have risen substantially since the highway’s grades and drainage were designed and constructed eighty years ago. All of these factors, and the continuing rise of ground water and tidal elevation, add to the highway’s vulnerability to natural hazards and intensify risks to motorists.  Moreover, the Project Area directly contains 3 census tracts, and services commuters from a wider 119 tracts, designated as Disadvantaged by the White House Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). The CIP is the principal link for underserved residents in these areas between East Queens, the South Bronx, and Southeast Queens. In this corridor, a lack of public transportation options or alternate vehicular routes magnifies the impact of any closure.
Lead Agency
New York City Department of Transportation
Support Agency
Department of Parks and Recreation,Department of Environmental Protection
Action Category
Coastal and Natural Resource Protection,Property Protection
Action Status
Proposed or Not Started
Action Status Date
2024-12-11T00:00:00.000
Hazards Addressed
Flooding, Coastal Erosion, Coastal Storms, Winter Weather
Estimated Start
2026-01-01T00:00:00.000
Estimated Finish
2029-04-01T00:00:00.000
Description Of Social Vulnerability Addressed
The project area directly intersects three census tracts that are classified as Disadvantaged Communities under the White House Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), primarily due to the high linguistic isolation and low educational attainment of the tracts’ residents. However, the CIP in the project area also provides critical transportation service to a much larger geographic area beyond the immediately adjacent neighborhoods that includes 119 census tracts qualified as Disadvantaged Communities under CEJST. Residents throughout Queens and neighboring boroughs are particularly vulnerable when it comes to both housing and transportation. These commuters are especially vulnerable to detours and delays due to flooding on the CIP that can impede access to employment, school, and critical services. The CIP is a critical community asset serving as a major thoroughfare for these vulnerable populations, connecting them to their jobs, community assets, and essential services like hospitals, schools, and grocery stores.
Description Of Critical Facility
The Cross Island Parkway is a principal highway serving the eastern Queens and Nassau region with direct connections to three interstates and access to six truck through routes. The proposed Project is located along a segment of the Cross Island Parkway (CIP) in eastern Queens, New York. The CIP carries three lanes of traffic each in the NB and SB directions and runs from the Whitestone Bridge (I-678) in Whitestone to the Belt Parkway and Southern State Parkway in southeast Queens. The Project Area currently serves nearly 140,000 passenger vehicles per day according to NYSDOT Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) data, connecting local traffic directly to and from the MTA’s Throgs Neck Bridge, linking Long Island and Queens to the Bronx, Upstate NY, and New England. For travel locally, to the Bronx, or out of state, the CIP is the eastern Queens community’s principal mode of access to homes, jobs, schools, and communities, and to the surrounding region as the region has no north-south rapid transit option. The Clearview Expressway is the only alternative highway that could serve similar trips, but requires a more than 2-mile detour through the already congested local freight network. Hence, while the Project Area connects to other roadways, bike lanes, and freight corridors (Figure 4), it offers a mostly unparalleled transportation corridor for local and regional commuters. Delays, closures, or safety risks due to Project Area flooding force thousands of drivers onto local streets or the Clearview, creating a bottleneck and impeding inter-neighborhood and -regional connections.
