How Bad Are Street Surfaces In Your Harlem Hood?

If your Uber rides home from the bar are starting to feel more like back-road safari trips, a new street quality ranking (and mapping!) project from NYC’s Independent Budget Office may explain why.

“Street conditions citywide have trended downward somewhat since 2012,” city researchers found.

The NYC neighborhoods with the poorest quality streets? Not Harlem, Uptown Northern or Upper Manhattan, but Kew Gardens in Queens, Parkchester in the Bronx, Seagate and Coney Island in Brooklyn and — kind of a shocker — the Upper East Side’s Lennox Hill area in Manhattan.

In general, Brooklyn, Harlem, Uptown Northern and Upper Manhattan streets were found to be in better shape than streets in other boroughs. The top three neighborhoods for quality street surfaces, according to the report, were Fort Greene, Starrett City and Williamsburg — all in Brooklyn.

To arrive at these rankings, the Independent Budget Office tapped into the NYC Department of Transportation’s street quality assessments from the past 18 months, in which sections of every street in the city were rated from 1 to 10. (“Poor” means 1-3, “fair” means 4-7 and “good” means 8-10, except for “local streets,” for which a rating of 7 is considered “good.”)