Commuters and tourists alike have welcomed the news that New York’s department of transport (DoT) will consider an expansion of bicycle and pedestrian lanes on the city’s world-renowned but perpetually crowded Brooklyn Bridge.
“I yell at tourists all day,” declared Ben Kalin, 45, who commutes by bike every day from Dumbo in Brooklyn to the World Trade Center, where he works as a reporter-researcher at Vanity Fair.
“It’s a mob scene up there. It was awful,” said Sandra Gray, who had just crossed the bridge on foot. A 65-year-old anthropologist now living in Kansas, she said her journey on Tuesday was much more difficult than it had been when she lived in Brooklyn a decade ago and used to regularly run and cycle across the bridge.
“It’s really blocked up there,” said Gray. “Cyclists are more aggressive – they yell at pedestrians, and out-of-towners don’t watch where they’re going.”
Yesterday the New York DoT announced a $370,000 study by engineering firm Aecom to examine how they can accommodate the growth in bridge users.
Numbers of pedestrians have jumped 20% in the afternoon and 275% on weekends from May 2008 to May 2015, according to the DOT. The numbers of morning cyclists jumped 66% and evening cyclists 93% in the same time period. Every day 10,000 pedestrians and 3,500 cyclists cross the bridge.
“It’s impossible to do this on the weekend because it’s so crowded,” said Marcia Barbosa, 50, an economist from Brazil who regularly visits New York and had just ridden over from Brooklyn on her bike.
For most of the bridge, there is only one path, suspended above the road surface, with the uptown side dedicated to bikes and the downtown side dedicated to pedestrians. But with the narrowest part of the bridge just 10 feet across, there is constant overflow from the pedestrian path into the bike lane – causing havoc for both parties.
“There were lots of people standing in the bike paths and bike drivers shouting at them. It wasn’t calm to walk,” said Nils Grothe, 16, a tourist from Frankfurt Germany, on vacation with his family.
“It is loud, stressful and noisy,” added his mother Sylvia Grothe, 49. “But it was worth it,” she said.
The new DoT proposal involves building extra paths on top of the road, with a separate bike lane for cyclists in the middle and pedestrians paths on either side.
But Gray warned against any plans that would drastically change the appearance of the 133-year-old bridge. “It’s one of the great achievements of humanity. It’s gorgeous,” she said.
