Hylan Boulevard’s Dongan Hills CVS Lot Bottlenecks Staten Island—or So Locals Dread

The persistent dysfunction of a Staten Island parking lot highlights New York’s struggle to reconcile car-centric suburbs with urban congestion and infrastructure designed for another era.

The measure of a city’s civility, urbanists like to say, can sometimes be found in the humble parking lot. By that standard, the CVS lot at 1361 Hylan Boulevard—a patch of tarmac in Dongan Hills, Staten Island—is a cautionary tale. Each weekday evening, a queue of cars snakes from the cramped entrance out across Hylan, one of the borough’s busiest arteries, seeding frustration among drivers and, occasionally, gridlock for half a mile.

This is not Times Square or even commercial downtown Brooklyn, but rather the kind of suburban neighbourhood that has—proportionally—more cars per household than anywhere else in New York City. Yet the CVS lot, cited regularly as “one of the worst” by exasperated locals, seems engineered for neither volume nor modern vehicles. Its single, counterintuitive entrance off Hylan, combined with angled spaces and narrow lanes that freeze whenever an SUV dares reverse, exemplifies what New Yorkers lucrelessly call “ill design.”

Adele C., a shopper and local resident, is blunt in her assessment: “It’s just ill-designed. I have no idea why it’s so bad, but I do know it’s one of the worst.” Her experience is not unique. Surveillance by local reporters has recorded the same spectacle—cars spilling from the lot, blocking a rush-hour bus lane, and drivers caught in automotive limbo—on multiple occasions within a single evening.

The lot’s popularity is, paradoxically, in part to blame. As another customer, Vilma Mancero, observed, “The location of the pharmacy is perfect for a lot of us, the next closest one is really far. It’s just the amount of people who come.” For most of the day, especially after peak shopping hours, the chaos subsides. But during late afternoons, the bottleneck radiates stress well beyond its own boundary, affecting traffic flow on Hylan Boulevard and, in some cases, leading to testy exchanges between New Yorkers who might, paradoxically, be less combative in a bustling subway car.

Poor parking design may seem a parochial concern. But the ripple effects are legion: Bus-lane blockages slow transit, curbside gridlock disrupts commercial deliveries, and emerging data from traffic apps suggest accident rates around these lots are marginally higher. Cumulatively, such pinch-points erode the promise (long-held if rarely delivered) that less-dense boroughs offer an easier, more predictable driving experience. In truth, they instead reveal fissures in New York’s approach to urban planning on the edges of its own sprawl.

Parking—the wonks’ favourite urban symptom—has long divided New Yorkers. In central Manhattan, planners and mayors have whittled away at curb spaces and introduced congestion pricing (coming, eventually, in 2025), announcing a new gospel of walkability and mass transit. Staten Island, by contrast, still resembles the outer boroughs of Philadelphia or Boston, where the car reigns sovereign and pharmacies are only as accessible as their asphalt lots will allow. The competition is less for kerbside spots and more for a way in—and, crucially, a safe way out—amid narrowing lanes, swollen vehicles and barely adequate exits.

A symptom, not the cause

Yet Staten Island’s asphalt angst is hardly unique. Across America, a post-pandemic return to car dependency—egged on by remote work patterns, public transit anxiety and ever-larger SUVs—has rendered once-passable suburban lots into miniature maelstroms. Even Los Angeles, with its gargantuan surface lots, has seen sharp upticks in minor collisions and complaints about egress. American lot design lags behind Europe and much of Asia, where planners long ago legislated for pedestrian safety, multi-directional ingress, and capacity matching. In Japan, spots are narrower but more numerous; in Scandinavia, vehicle size is capped and egress signals abound.

In socioeconomic terms, the stakes are far from puny. For the elderly or disabled—many of whom rely on CVS pharmacies for prescriptions or basic groceries—the prospect of navigating a gauntlet of vehicles and inattentive drivers can be daunting. For the city, each privately managed parking snarl tacitly subsidises car use and decelerates public transport, since blocked bus lanes carry a cost in missed connections and lost productivity. For nearby businesses, the churn of annoyed shoppers bodes ill for repeat patronage.

What is to be done? Marginal improvements (changing entrance-exit flows, repainting lines, or deploying an attendant) are both technically straightforward and, frustratingly, rare. The incentives favour the status quo: Landlords prefer cramming the maximum spots into zoning minimums; retailers avoid costly redesigns; city agencies often regard private lots as outside their remit, absent a fire code violation or accident record that cannot be ignored.

The city’s responses in such cases tend to be tepid. When pressed, a Department of Transportation spokesperson will point to its jurisdictional limits, while property owners assert that demand is simply too buoyant for any configuration to work smoothly. In truth, Staten Island’s lots are neither uniquely dysfunctional nor uniquely fixable—they are a microcosm of suburban America’s uncritical embrace of the car.

We reckon the answer lies in treating such lots less as unfortunate side effects and more as test cases for urban integration. Municipal incentives for retrofitting, stricter design regulation, and a frank reassessment of car dependency at the edge of one of America’s few true public-transport cities are overdue. The city that can rezone whole blocks for new housing (witness the reimagining of Willets Point) has little excuse to ignore the everyday pinch-points of its own commuters.

In the end, the headache that is the CVS lot on Hylan Boulevard matters because it encapsulates a wider truth: All cities—especially those that half-aspire to suburban convenience—must reckon with how people actually move, shop and grumble in daily life. Until New York accepts that traffic is made not only by highways but by unremarkable clusters of painted tarmac, more of its residents will be left circling the lot, engines idling and patience fraying. ■