A decade of crash data shows two different stories: which streets crash the most, and which streets hurt people the most.
Hunters Point and Long Island City’s most crash-prone streets aren’t its most dangerous ones. Van Dam Street and Queens Boulevard post the highest raw crash counts in ZIP codes 11101 and 11109. Northern Boulevard, with fewer crashes per intersection, sends a higher share of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians to the hospital.
But raw crash counts tell only part of the story. When crashes are weighted by how often they hurt someone, a different corridor emerges as the borough’s most dangerous: Northern Boulevard.
HPS By the numbers
The volume corridors: Van Dam Street and Queens Boulevard
Van Dam Street and Queens Boulevard account for more individual crashes than any other streets in the neighborhood. Van Dam Street appears in 13 of the area’s crash-prone intersections, totaling 1,031 crashes and 337 injuries since 2016. Queens Boulevard appears in 13 intersections as well, with 1,423 crashes and 472 injuries, including two of the twelve traffic deaths recorded in the dataset.
The corridor’s crash concentration follows its industrial-to-residential transition. Six of Van Dam Street’s ten most-crashed intersections cluster between Thomson Avenue and 48th Avenue, a stretch that carries truck traffic to and from the Long Island Expressway alongside a growing residential population. Queens Boulevard’s worst crashes cluster closer to Sunnyside Yards, where the roadway narrows near Skillman Avenue.
Special section
Neighborhood traffic
- Traffic Trends: 2016–2026
- Where Crashes Happen in HPS & LIC
- What’s Causing Accidents in HPS & LIC
Top 10 intersections by crash count, 2016-2025
| Intersection | Crashes | Injured | Killed | Injury rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jackson Ave & Queens Blvd / Northern Blvd (Court Square) | 370 | 99 | 1 | 27% |
| Queens Blvd & Skillman Ave | 276 | 119 | 1 | 43% |
| Thomson Ave & Queens Blvd / Van Dam St | 216 | 67 | 0 | 31% |
| 47 Ave & Van Dam St | 199 | 52 | 0 | 26% |
| Hunters Point Ave & Van Dam St / 49 Ave | 188 | 73 | 0 | 39% |
| 39 St & Queens Blvd | 176 | 55 | 0 | 31% |
| Skillman Ave & Thomson Ave | 174 | 78 | 0 | 45% |
| Greenpoint Ave & Hunters Point Ave | 157 | 26 | 0 | 17% |
| 41 Ave & Northern Blvd / Queens Plz East | 139 | 25 | 0 | 18% |
| 48 Ave & Van Dam St | 112 | 43 | 0 | 38% |
Source: NYC Open Data Motor Vehicle Collisions (h9gi-nx95). ZIP codes 11101 and 11109.
The severity corridor: Northern Boulevard
Northern Boulevard dominates the list of intersections with crashes that injure someone. Seven of the ten highest-injury-rate intersections in the neighborhood sit on Northern Boulevard: at 45th Street, 33rd Street, 37th Avenue, 34th Avenue/41st Street, 46th Street, and 43rd Street, injury rates run from 69 percent to 73 percent of all recorded crashes. At 35th Street and Honeywell Street/Skillman Avenue, the rate exceeds 100 percent, meaning some crashes injured more than one person.
Northern Boulevard isn’t just the severity outlier. It’s also the corridor with the most total crashes and the most total injuries of the three: 1,677 crashes and 747 injuries across 33 intersections, a 44.5 percent injury rate overall, compared with 32.7 percent on Van Dam Street and 33.2 percent on Queens Boulevard.
Top 10 intersections by injury rate (minimum 10 crashes), 2016-2025
| Intersection | Crashes | Injured | Killed | Injury rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 35 St & Honeywell St / Skillman Ave | 36 | 38 | 0 | 106% |
| 35 Ave & Steinway St | 42 | 33 | 0 | 79% |
| 45 St & Northern Blvd | 22 | 16 | 0 | 73% |
| 33 St & Northern Blvd | 57 | 41 | 0 | 72% |
| 22 St & 38 Ave | 32 | 23 | 0 | 72% |
| 37 Ave & Northern Blvd | 28 | 20 | 0 | 71% |
| 34 Ave & 41 St | 21 | 15 | 0 | 71% |
| 46 St & Northern Blvd | 14 | 10 | 0 | 71% |
| 34 St & 43 Ave | 39 | 27 | 1 | 69% |
| 43 St & Northern Blvd | 35 | 24 | 0 | 69% |
Source: NYC Open Data Motor Vehicle Collisions (h9gi-nx95). ZIP codes 11101 and 11109. Limited to intersections with at least 10 recorded crashes to avoid small-sample distortion. Injury rate can exceed 100% when a single crash injures more than one person.
editorial
Our take
Comparing our neighborhood to the rest of the city
We found that the neighborhood’s per-capita crash rate fell from 674.0 per 10,000 residents in 2016 to 162.5 in 2025, outpacing declines in Queens and citywide. Traffic volume through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the neighborhood’s main vehicle gateway, recovered to nearly its 2019 level by 2022, even as crashes stayed at roughly half their 2019 count, arguing against a simple “fewer cars on the road” explanation.
That decline was citywide and borough-wide. It didn’t happen evenly within the neighborhood. Northern Boulevard’s injury rate suggests that wherever crash volume did fall, the crashes that still happen on this corridor are disproportionately severe compared to Van Dam Street or Queens Boulevard.
The City Council voted 42-9 in April to approve a Bus Rapid Transit expansion along Northern Boulevard in Astoria and Jackson Heights, adding dedicated bus lanes tied to the city’s Vision Zero safety initiative. The corridor is also part of the MTA’s roughly $30 million Queens Bus Network Redesign. This month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul named Northern Boulevard as one of the next corridors for bus rapid transit investment, following a similar project on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.
None of that current activity is a dedicated street-safety redesign of the kind DOT ran in 2018, when the agency held community workshops specifically on safety improvements for Northern Boulevard between Queens Plaza and 68th Street, the same stretch that shows up as the corridor’s most severe intersections in this analysis. That project is listed as inactive on DOT’s site. It’s also unclear whether the current bus lane investment reaches into the Queens Plaza and Long Island City segment of the boulevard, or stops further east in Astoria and Jackson Heights.
Randy Plemel
Publisher
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The founder and publisher of the Hunters Point Ledger, a newsletter covering Hunters Point South and Long Island City. He serves on Queens Community Board 2, and all views are his own.
