The Van Wyck, at Last, Has an Extra Lane—and a Little Dignity

By Anselm Whitlock, Queens Correspondent

Every city keeps a road it loves to hate, and for New York the honor has long belonged to the Van Wyck Expressway, the four-mile trench through Queens that greets millions of travelers a year with the full force of the region’s congestion before they have so much as reclaimed their luggage. Its name, routinely mispronounced by out-of-towners, has become shorthand for the indignity of getting to and from Kennedy Airport.

This week the state delivered a modest rebuttal. New high-occupancy vehicle lanes on the Van Wyck opened on Friday, CBS News New York reported, completing the central piece of a $1.4 billion reconstruction that began in 2020 and stretches more than four miles from the Kew Gardens Interchange to JFK. The lanes are reserved for buses, taxis and cars carrying two or more people.

Six Years in the Trench

Anyone who has driven the corridor since 2020 knows what the work entailed, because they have spent a good deal of time sitting in it. According to CBS, crews rebuilt overpasses, reconfigured ramps, replaced Long Island Rail Road bridges near Jamaica and upgraded the highway’s drainage, no small thing on a roadway that was built in the 1940s. Work on the service roads is expected to continue through later this year.

The opening also came a little late. The state Department of Transportation commissioner, Marie Therese Dominguez, had said the lanes would open in September. Friday’s ribbon arrives at the end of October, which, by the standards of large New York infrastructure projects, is practically punctual.

Gov. Kathy Hochul framed the reconstruction as an ordeal now concluded. CBS quoted her describing the project as a “test of endurance” for the people who use the road—a characterization few Queens commuters would dispute.

The Neighbors’ Verdict

The station’s reporting also gathered voices from the road’s edges, where the work has been less an abstraction than a daily condition. Larry Fisher, a driver interviewed by CBS, offered his assessment of the new configuration, and Rupe Harricharan, who runs Legend Cookhouse on Rockaway Boulevard, described what years of construction have meant for a business that depends on people being able to reach it. For the shops and homes that line the service roads, the significance of Friday’s opening is less the HOV lane itself than the prospect that the barriers and detours might finally come down.

That is the quieter story of the Van Wyck project. It is sold to the public as an airport improvement, part of the larger reinvention of JFK now underway, with its new terminals and promises of a twenty-first-century gateway. But the highway runs through South Ozone Park, Richmond Hill, Jamaica and Kew Gardens—neighborhoods that bore six years of disruption so that travelers bound for the airport might save a few minutes.

Will It Work?

Whether a carpool lane actually relieves a road like the Van Wyck is a question transportation planners have argued about for decades. The optimistic case is that buses and shared rides, freed from the general crawl, become more attractive, and that a steady flow in one lane eases pressure on the others. The skeptical case is that new capacity has a way of filling itself, and that the Van Wyck’s fundamental problem—far more demand than any surface-level highway can comfortably carry—is untouched by a single lane, however well-intentioned. Enforcement, too, will matter: an HOV lane is only as good as the willingness of solo drivers to stay out of it.

The honest answer is that nobody will know until the lanes have handled a few holiday rushes. Thanksgiving, conveniently, is less than a month away.

A Greener Way to the Airport

The highway is not the only route to southern Queens getting attention this fall. The city Department of Transportation has announced planning for a Southern Queens Greenway, a roughly seven-mile corridor that would run from Spring Creek Park to Brookville Park and link toward JFK and the Jamaica Bay Greenway. Community workshops are planned for 2027.

It is a pleasant juxtaposition: the state finishing a billion-dollar expansion of an eighty-year-old expressway, while the city begins sketching bicycle and pedestrian paths a few miles away. Queens, as ever, contains multitudes—and at least one more lane.

For the moment, the borough is entitled to a small, wary celebration. The Van Wyck is still the Van Wyck. But it is a somewhat better-built Van Wyck than it was in 2020, and its neighbors can at least begin to imagine a year without orange barrels.

Featured image: The Van Wyck Expressway near JFK Airport. Photo by Tdorante10 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.