What Happened
A crash on westbound I-495 in Queens County blocked the left lane on Sunday, August 30, 2026. The incident is classified as minor. No additional details on the number of vehicles, collision type, or time of the crash were available in the initial report.
The left lane remained blocked as of the alert. The two right lanes of the westbound expressway stayed open, but drivers approaching from Nassau County heading into New York City faced reduced capacity through the affected stretch.
Location & Road Context
I-495, the Long Island Expressway, runs west through Queens before terminating at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel entrance near the borough’s western edge. The westbound lanes through Queens carry some of the corridor’s heaviest inbound volume, particularly on Sunday afternoons as weekend travelers return to the city.
According to Long Island Traffic’s incident registry, I-495 has logged 100 incidents in the past 30 days and 422 in 2026 to date — this crash among them. The most recent fatal crash recorded on the corridor occurred August 26, 2026. Queens County has 304 recorded accidents in the local incident database. Sunday also brought a separate minor crash on I-495 and a minor crash on the Southern State Parkway earlier in the day.
Source data: 511NY incident record. No official police press release or named-party information was available at time of publication. This report will be updated as details are confirmed.