Cut-through driving: the bad habit clogging up your residential street

Looking out your apartment window, or waiting at a crosswalk heading to the subway, you probably assume that most cars you see are coming to or from somewhere in the area. But actually, you’d be wrong. A surprising amount of the traffic on your local streets is cut-through traffic – meaning these drivers aren’t your neighbors, and they’re not visiting a resident or a neighborhood business. They’re just using small, local streets kind of like a thruway. 

Residential streets just aren’t meant for this! They’re too narrow and short to accommodate significant traffic. And they’re lined with homes and businesses; they’re filled with families, seniors, residents walking to a corner store, kids playing games, and neighbors chatting. When drivers routinely cut through, these local streets quickly gridlock and become dangerous, loud, polluted, and chaotic. Suddenly it’s unsafe to play a game outside and unpleasant to stop to chat. There are health implications, too – noise pollution, air pollution, and dangerous streets all negatively impact physical and mental health. Plus, those nonlocal drivers make it harder for local drivers to get where they’re going; much of the slow, frustrating traffic in your neighborhood is not due to your neighbors, it’s the result of cut-through drivers who don’t actually have any business in your neighborhood at all. 

So just how much traffic in your area is cut-through traffic? A whopping 76% if you’re in Brooklyn’s Community Board 6, which includes Park Slope, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Red Hook, and the Columbia Street Waterfront. Three out of every four cars are just using those streets to get somewhere else, creating noise, chaos, and pollution for the people actually living, working, and spending time there. 

The same is true for Central Harlem – 75% of the traffic there does not originate or end within the neighborhood. If you zoom in to the ten blocks surrounding Marcus Garvey Park, it gets even worse; 84% of those cars are just cutting through. Everyone attempting to cross into the park is forced to contend with these nonlocal cars. That walk would be much more pleasant and safe (especially for vulnerable pedestrians like senior citizens and children) if three-quarters of the cars were not there.

What about a bustling destination like the Lower East Side, where foot traffic is very high? In nine square blocks between Delancey and Houston, cut-through traffic accounts for a staggering 90% of the cars on the road. Congestion pricing will surely help alleviate overall congestion in this area – early results do show that the toll program is freeing up road space – but that high percentage of cut-through traffic will likely remain the same. Very few people in this neighborhood own cars so most residents are not driving to or from their homes or area businesses; the vehicles needed on the streets are deliveries and taxis. Most other drivers, as the current cut-through data shows, are making streets feel dangerous, loud, and chaotic by just driving through a lively local neighborhood. 

Borough-wide statistics aren’t much better. Throughout Queens, one out of every four drivers didn’t start their trip in Queens and won’t end it there. That’s a lot of traffic doing nothing but negatively impacting Queens residents on its way to somewhere else. 

Luckily there are ways to combat this behavior that is clogging up our residential streets and making our neighborhoods feel less homey, welcoming, and safe. Reorienting our city to prioritize public and active transit is an important overarching goal that will also reduce cut-through traffic. But we can also design our neighborhood streets better, and prioritize the people living there, so that cut-through driving becomes less convenient or even impossible.

To do any of this, DOT needs the support of the City and local officials, but in car-dependent areas, they often don’t get it. This data shows just how wrongheaded that is. Even in areas known for car dependence, a large portion of cars on the road are not local. Councilmembers who reject bus lanes or bike lanes in favor of more space for cars are actually serving nonlocal drivers who are using their district as a highway, at the expense of their constituents. 

No one wants their neighborhood streets to be taken over by people with no stake or interest who don’t contribute to the area’s economic or cultural vitality. There are much better ways to design our roadways. But that relies on our decision makers leading with guts, vision, and problem solving.