For every 10,000 people living in Hunters Point South and Long Island City, there were 674 car crashes in 2016. By 2025, that number had fallen to 162.5: a drop of more than 75 percent.
Some of that decline is happening everywhere. Crash rates fell across Queens and citywide too, driven in part by a pandemic-era drop in traffic that never fully reversed. But the neighborhood’s decline outpaced both. In 2016, HPS/LIC’s crash rate ran nearly four times Queens’ rate. By 2025, that gap had narrowed to about two times.
If the decline were just about fewer cars on the road, traffic through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel — the neighborhood’s direct link to Manhattan — would have stayed depressed too. It didn’t. After collapsing in 2020, tunnel crossings recovered to within a few percent of pre-pandemic volume by 2022, and stayed there through 2024. Crashes did not follow traffic back up.
Pedestrians injured Cyclists injured Motorists injured Deaths (labeled)
Part of the story is straightforward math. The neighborhood's population nearly doubled over the decade, from roughly 31,500 residents in 2016 to more than 50,000 by 2024, even as the raw number of crashes fell by more than half, from 2,121 to 815. More people, fewer crashes: the rate drops twice over.
What the data can't say is how much of the improvement came from safer streets and how much simply came from a bigger denominator. Fourteen people died in crashes across the two ZIP codes over the decade, and total injuries fell more slowly than crash counts did, staying above 380 a year even as the crash count itself dropped by more than half.
The next piece in this series looks at where in the neighborhood these crashes are concentrated. The one after that digs into what's causing them.
Special section
Neighborhood traffic
- Traffic Trends: 2016–2026
- Where Crashes Happen in HPS & LIC
- What's Causing Accidents in HPS & LIC
Data
Source: NYC Open Data, Motor Vehicle Collisions – Crashes (NYPD); U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 5-Year Estimates, Table B01003. HPS/LIC = ZIP codes 11101 and 11109. NYC total includes crash records with no borough recorded (19–38% of citywide rows depending on year). *2025 and **2026 population figures estimated using the 2024 ACS vintage — not yet available. **2026 reflects a partial year (crash data through June 8, 2026); injury/fatality and rate figures for 2026 will rise as the year completes.
