We ran the before-and-after on Fifth Avenue and its three parallel avenues. Park Avenue, which no plan ever touched, moved more than Fifth Avenue did.
The Date Nobody Can Give You
NYC DOT has been proposing a protected bike lane on Fifth Avenue in Midtown since at least 2017. The last start date the city published for the 34th to 59th Street stretch was September 2021. Reporting that October said the project had been handed to the next administration instead, and we could not find a public source confirming that a protected lane was ever installed on that segment.
So we used September 2021 as the boundary, because it is the only date the city itself put in writing. Read what follows as a test of whether a two-year before-and-after can detect a street redesign at all.
311 complaint counts on a handful of blocks over a couple of years cannot separate a bike lane from a construction boom, a bar opening, a new bus route or a change in how people report things. Anyone quoting a clean causal percentage from this data is guessing.
The Numbers
Noise complaints on the four Midtown avenues, 24 months before September 2021 against the 24 months after:
- Fifth Avenue: 4,755 to 5,597, up about 18 percent
- Park Avenue: 1,476 to 1,850, up about 25 percent
- Madison Avenue: 2,372 to 2,059, down about 13 percent
- Lexington Avenue: 2,676 to 2,248, down about 16 percent
The avenue at the center of the redesign moved in the opposite direction from Madison and Lexington, which were supposed to absorb the overflow. Park Avenue, which no plan ever touched, swung the most of the four.
What Does Hold Up
The levels hold up, and they are more useful than the changes. Per home over a full year, Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue run at roughly double Park Avenue's rate of noise complaints, and the quiet scores agree:
- Park Avenue scores 55 on quiet and grades 74, the best of the four
- Lexington Avenue scores 39 and grades 67
- Madison Avenue scores 35 and grades 67
- Fifth Avenue scores 20 and grades 67
More than thirty points separate Park Avenue from Fifth Avenue on quiet, which is many times larger than anything the bike lane window produced. All four are whole-street numbers covering each avenue end to end, so they describe the avenue rather than your corner of it.
What to Actually Do
Do not wait for a headline number about a redesign to tell you what a block is like. Look up the avenue, then look up the side street you would actually be sleeping on, and compare the two. Below 50 on quiet an avenue ranks in the louder half of avenues like it, and three of these four are there.
Scores are built from 311 complaints, HPD violations, NYPD crash records, NYPD felony complaint records, MTA stop locations, DOHMH food permits, and the street tree census, divided by the homes and businesses on the street, updated weekly.