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Biking Over Manhattan Bridge To Get Annoying From Monday Through 2012
By
John Del Signore
Published Jul 15, 2011
Modified Jul 15, 2011
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By
John Del Signore
Published Jul 15, 2011
Modified Jul 15, 2011
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If you commute over the Manhattan Bridge by bike or foot, you can expect some changes Monday morning, when all the cycling gets rerouted to the south side of the bridge, which is currently the pedestrian side. Meanwhile, all the pedestrians will be rerouted to the north side of the bridge, which is supposed to be for cyclists but is often populated by clueless wandering dawdlers blocking the path. The change is annoying because on the Brooklyn side, cyclists will now have to dismount and carry their bikes up and down the stairs to get to the path. And they'd better get used to it, because this is the way it's going to be through January 2012. WHY GOD?!
At press time, God was unavailable for comment, but Teresa Toro, the DOT's community liaison for the project, explains that this is being done for that Manhattan Bridge rehabilitation work we warned you about last year. Workers are replacing all the bridge suspenders and repairing all the cables. Now that they've started on the north side, the bike path will be covered with protective sheds under any active construction. But because the sheds are only three feet wide, they're too narrow to accommodate the 3,000 cyclists a day who pedal over the bridge.
"We will have 100 iron workers going up and down the suspenders on the north side every day, so we will be narrowing north bike path for construction sheds," Toro tells us. "Pedestrians will be safe because like, iron workers, they will be walking through construction sheds, but it can't accommodate thousands of cyclists a day." Oh well, at least the stairs have those little metal "bike channels" you can glide your bike along as you go up and down. And really, all of this is probably better than dying in some catastrophic suspender-snapping bridge collapse... we guess.
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John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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