New Yorkers know the pain of the Manhattan Bridge. With the subway tracks on the outside of the bridge, the bridge sways as trains pass over the East River. After decades of neglect, the bridge was severely destabilized by the early 1980s, and the city has invest nearly $830 million to repair and stabilize the now-100-year-old structure.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s — in fact, until 2004 — subway diversions were rampant. Sometimes, trains ran over only the Broadway side of the bridge, and Sixth Ave.-bound customers were out of luck. Sometimes, trains ran only over the 6th Ave. side., and Broadway-bound straphangers had to factor in an extra ten minutes for the trip through the Montague St. tunnel and Lower Manhattan. Well, Brooklyn, get ready to relive that subway nightmare on the weekends again soon.
The city is set to award contracts for the final phase of the bridge restoration, and as The Times, reports today, the plan to replace every support cable will mean four years of weekend subway diversion. Patrick McGeehan writes:
A $150 million project to replace all of the vertical suspension cables on the 100-year-old Manhattan Bridge will cause sporadic weekend disruptions in subway service and require closings of the bikeway and some traffic lanes for parts of the next four years, city transportation officials said this week…
Skanska has said that it will complete the work, which includes replacing the necklaces of lights that illuminate the bridge’s outer cables, in three and a half years. Mr. Gill said the city could penalize the company if it did not complete the work on schedule.
During that period, subway service across the bridge on the B, D, N and Q lines will be suspended on as many as eight weekends, Mr. Gill said. The schedule for those suspensions has not yet been determined, said Seth Solomonow, the department’s spokesman.
The bikeway on the north side of the bridge will also be closed for as long as eight months during the project, which is expected to begin by early next year and end in mid-2013, Mr. Gill said.
So subway riders will be out of luck, and bikers and pedestrians will have to share space. I wonder if the city gave any thought to shuttering a lane of traffic and allow bikes to enjoy some dedicated space. The bridge is, after all, quite popular with cyclists who want to avoid the tourist-infested Brooklyn Bridge walk way to the south.
Ben Fried at Streetsblog today also makes a thought-provoking point about this work. “Whenever the prospect of funding our transit system with bridge tolls or congestion pricing arises, you can count on a hue and cry from aggrieved motorists about subsidizing other people’s commutes. But if the bridges stay free, who’s really paying for somebody else’s ride?” he ask, and then answers: “As long as there’s no price on these bridges, we all pay for those free rides.” Indeed we do, and now we’ll pay with delayed and diverted subway routes as well.
7 comments
“Sometimes, trains ran over only the Broadway side of the bridge, and Sixth Ave.-bound costumers were out of luck.”
Is this a Halloween-themed post? 😉
Nope. Am I missing something?
Typo 🙂 “costumers” instead of “customers”
So true, we really should have tolls on the bridges, as such a large percent of New Yorkers don’t have cars, they shouldn’t be paying for road repair, and as an off hours commuter across the bridge myself who takes any train I can over the manhattan bridge, I think we deserve better subway service first and foremost. Darn I should’ve lived in Queens.
Do you have any idea what kind of traffic snarls would be caused by toll booths on these bridges? And you can’t make them EZ Pass only.
No one — no one — is advocating for toll booths or EZ Pass-only. The technology exists and is in use for high speed tolling. Implementation involves no toll booths, and It wouldn’t create any extra traffic. In fact, because of the fee, tolls would actually reduce traffic. Talking about toll booths in this context is simply a red herring.
Soak the fucking cars!