9 in 10 Residents Don’t Drive Alone to Work. That Was True Before the Towers Came.

The numbers are striking: our neighbors don’t drive to work. This also predate the neighborhood’s transformation.

Hunters Point South and Long Island City have always been one of the most car-free communities in New York City. Updated Census data shows that just 10% of working residents here drove alone to work. Sixty-four percent of households own no car at all.

Those figures put this neighborhood well ahead of the citywide average: NYC sits at 22% driving alone and 55% car-free. The comparison matters because the rest of Queens grew up around car access. Neighboring areas like Sunnyside, Woodside, and Jackson Heights, average twice the car ownership rate.

The variation across the neighborhood is real.

Car ownership patterns differ across the neighborhood. The Court Square area full of the newest towers, highest incomes, most transit access, is the most car-free: 72% of households own no vehicle. The core Hunters Point blocks have 65% car-free households. The waterfront towers to the south, including the older Queens West buildings, sit at 54%.

The pandemic reshuffled the transit numbers.

In 2020, 75% of working residents took transit. That figure has fallen every year since: 65% in 2021, 58% in 2022, 54% in 2023, and 53% in 2024. The decline isn’t a transit story: it’s a remote work story.

Work-from-home went from 11% in 2020 to 30% in 2024. What looked like a pandemic blip, has become a durable fixture of the neighborhood. The neighborhood’s high WFH rate reflects its concentration of professional and managerial workers.

The transit share declined as WFH rose, but transit didn’t lose commuters to cars: it lost them to home offices.

Of the roughly 400 residents who commute by ferry, the NYC Ferry’s East River route connects the neighborhood to Midtown and Lower Manhattan directly. Ferry ridership has tripled since 2020, from 137 to 401, though it remains a small slice of total commuters.

The car-free pattern is not new.

In 2010, before most of the Hunters Point South towers existed, 55% of households had no vehicle. That figure has held steady or grown every year since, reaching 64% in 2024.

This matters for how we understand our neighborhood. The common assumption is that a car-free statistic reflects the new towers and new residents. But the pattern predates them. The original residents of this area, long before Hunters Point South opened, also didn’t own cars at unusually high rates. What changed over 14 years is scale: the number of car-free households grew from a small base to nearly 8,000, as the population quadrupled.

The neighborhood didn’t become car-free. It was car-free. It just got much more car-free.

Three zones, one neighborhood

Our neighborhood is really three different districts in one neighborhood.

We did a deep dive showing the building age data from the Census reveals that Long Island City’s residential boom bypassed an older community hiding in plain sight.

The building age data confirms what the population numbers imply. Ninety-two percent of Court Square’s housing units were built after 2010. On the waterfront, 56% were built after 2010 and another 29% date to the Queens West construction wave of the 2000s — leaving less than 5% of units pre-1990. Core Hunters Point is the exception: nearly half its housing stock predates 1990, and a significant share predates World War II. This is not a neighborhood that displaced an existing community to make room for new residents. In two of its three zones, the housing simply did not exist before the development boom began.

The neighborhood is adding tens of thousands of residents who don’t drive. The neghborhood was already majority car-free and now even more so.

The pedestrian improvements now under construction at Court Square — new crosswalks, signal timing changes, protected bike lanes on 23rd Street — were designed with this population in mind. So was the Queens Plaza redesign completed in 2018.

What hasn’t kept pace is parking policy.

Street parking in much of the neighborhood remains free and abundant, subsidizing car storage for the roughly one-third of households that do own vehicles while consuming space that could serve the majority who don’t. Community Board 2’s Transportation Committee has repeatedly flagged this mismatch in budget and land use discussions.

The data says the people in our neighborhood already made their mobility choice. We need our DOT and electeds to follow through and design streets for people, not cars.

Data:

U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. Transportation to work (B08301); vehicles available (B25044). Queens County and NYC figures aggregated from borough-level ACS estimates. Census tract figures for 2010–2019 use 2010 tract boundaries (tracts 1, 7, and 19 undivided); figures for 2020–2024 use 2020 tract boundaries (sub-tracts 1.01–1.02, 7.01–7.02, 19.01–19.03, aggregated to tract family). Work-from-home was not a distinct category in ACS transportation tables prior to 2019.