A hot topic on Streetsblog the past few weeks has been the massive numbers of pedestrians and cyclists using the Brooklyn Bridge walkway during rush hours and weekends. Since many folks don't have the chance to experience the promenade day-in and day-out, I decided to capture the conditions on a recent ride home from work.

I shot all the footage you see here in about half an hour, starting at 4:15 p.m. -- it doesn't even show rush hour, when there are usually far more cyclists. I would say these scenes capture typical conditions on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., as long as it's not rainy.

So, you can see the Brooklyn Bridge promenade is popular. Which is good! It's a wonderful place to experience the city and an important transportation link for many New Yorkers. But all those commutes, workouts, and sightseeing expeditions are increasingly uncomfortable for pedestrians and cyclists. Ten years ago I would have been amazed to see this many people using the walkway. Today, the Brooklyn Bridge promenade needs some relief.

Cyclists and pedestrians have uneasily shared scarce space on the Brooklyn Bridge promenade for years. As people use the walkway in ever greater numbers, it only becomes more crowded for pedestrians, more stressful for cyclists, and more dangerous for everyone involved. Is there an end in sight? In a Times op-ed last month, Robert Sullivan suggested that the upcoming overhaul of the bridge would provide a good chance to disentangle the promenade by giving cyclists their own space. The rehab plan that's moving forward now, however, includes no such solution.

The shared pedestrian-cyclist walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge. Photo: PIPERPILOT84.

New York City DOT is scheduled to begin a massive renovation project on the Brooklyn Bridge in December, with the contract awarded to Skanska Koch. The overhaul has been in the works since the state DOT listed the bridge in bad condition in 2007, and it will give the bridge some long-needed repairs, taking care of cracked concrete and other structural issues. But there's more to the project than just maintenance:

• Arguing that the on- and off-ramps for car traffic are too narrow, the city will widen many of them from one lane to two.
• Steel safety barriers will be added to the bridge's roadway, to prevent cars from crashing into the East River. These barriers are required for the project to receive federal stimulus funding.
  
• A side project, set to start in 2012, will revamp the gateway to the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side by reconstructing the entryway at the crossing of Tillary and Adams Streets.

Overall, the rehab project (which doesn't include the revamp of the Brooklyn-side gateway) is set to cost $365 million, of which about $30 million is coming from federal stimulus funding.

None of that money is slated to improve the bridge for the thousands of pedestrians and cyclists who use it every day. DOT has no plans right now to address the crowding on the promenade, but the agency does say it will act accordingly if a crash proves that safety enhancements need to be made. Update: DOT contacted us to clarify their statement, saying they were speaking about monitoring street safety in general, not the specific condition that exists on the promenade. "The agency is always looking for ways to improve safety," said spokesman Seth Solomonow. "We take appropriate actions no matter where they're needed in the city. We're not waiting for a crash to prove that improvements need to be made."

A walkway overhaul, he added, would not be a natural fit for the rehab project, which is limited to structural problems with the ramps, not the whole span. "We are not rehabbing the whole bridge," he said. "What you drive on and what you walk across is not going to change."

It's only a matter of time before some poor tourist gets hit and injured (or worse) by a cyclist trying to navigate through the crowds that the bridge attracts. And when the revamped Brooklyn-side gateway starts enticing more cyclists and pedestrians onto the bridge, the problem is only going to get worse.

There's no shortage of ideas to fix the problem. The city could, as Sullivan suggests, install a protected bike lane on the roadway. Or they could construct a bike path over one of the road beds. It is not out of the ordinary for New York City's bridge reconstruction projects to improve bike-ped infrastructure. One phase of the Williamsburg Bridge reconstruction, completed in 2002, included the addition of a new 18-foot wide footpath/bikeway in addition to structural repairs. With hundreds of millions of dollars now targeted for the Brooklyn Bridge, there's got to be a better way to allow cyclists and pedestrians to safely use it.

East River bridge traffic counts and configurations through 1989. Source: FHWA [PDF]

Sullivan notes that, about a century ago, when it carried over twice as many people per day, horse-drawn trolleys and buggies once shared the Brooklyn Bridge with trains and pedestrians (and no creature, human or animal, crossed for free). Despite efforts by DOT to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians on the narrow elevated path, Sullivan says, "with more people walking and more people biking (both good developments), chaos quite naturally ensues."

Rather than ban bikes from the bridge, a proposal he says he hears "all the time," Sullivan writes:

If we bicyclists cede the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, then it might be a step toward winning the public’s respect. Then, just maybe, pedestrians would call a truce and recognize that their real enemy is the car, that bikers are like pedestrians in that they are just trying to get to work without the use of a gurney.

[Cyclists] are full-fledged New Yorkers now, not maniacs who need to be banned. We are all fighting to make the streets safe for something other than driving and parking. The livability revolution has begun. There is no turning back.

With a four-year rehab project coming up, Sullivan suggests new bus routes on the bridge to lay the groundwork for the return of rail.

What do you think? Is an exclusive pedestrian walkway, with separated bike lanes below, the way to go? And what about bringing back rail? Who should be tolled? In short: What does your ideal Brooklyn Bridge look like?

Last week DOT unveiled this conceptual plan for a better gateway to the Brooklyn Bridge [PDF]. For the thousands of pedestrians and cyclists who access the bridge on the Brooklyn side every day, it's a winner.

Presented at a public meeting in downtown Brooklyn, the new design features a more generous, boulevard-style bike-ped access ramp to the bridge, plus wider medians and sidewalks, curb extensions, and separated bike lanes on each of the three approaches to the ramp. If implemented, the proposal would greatly improve safety at one of the most complex, heavily-trafficked intersections in the city.

The project is still in its early stages. This plan, based on input from an earlier public workshop in January, will be refined again, with DOT aiming to bring a more finished proposal before Community Board 2 this fall. The multi-million dollar reconstruction of Tillary Street and Adams Street, which cross paths at the foot of the ramp, is slated to begin in 2012.

A reader who went to last week's workshop tells us the reception was generally positive. About 40 people attended, and after DOT's presentation, everyone marked up large copies of the plan with notes about what they liked and didn't like.

Some highlights from the concept plan:

• The entry ramp, currently a concrete barrier-lined chute where pedestrians and cyclists vie for space on a 10-foot wide path, would expand to a 14-foot wide path with plantings on each side. To make room, existing medians would be consolidated and service lanes on Adams Street would be eliminated or reduced in width.
  
• Two-way protected bike paths would extend at least one block in each direction from the foot of the ramp. On Adams Street, cyclists would have a straight shot to and from the ramp thanks to a center median two-way bike path.
• More pedestrian space -- including wider sidewalks, medians and curb extensions -- all along Tillary from Clinton Street to Flatbush Avenue. Similar treatment on Adams directly south of the access ramp.

The city is, in some ways, making up for lost time on this one. An earlier DOT regime passed up the chance to improve safety at the Tillary/Adams intersection when the Adams Street median was redesigned in 1998.

More graphics from DOT's concept plan after the jump.

The intersection of Adams and Tillary in DOT's concept plan. The foot of the Brooklyn Bridge access ramp is at the top of the picture. Proposed additions and enhancements to ped/bike areas are shaded lighter than existing sidewalk. For a look at the existing conditions and the full plan, see this PDF.

Proposed geometry for the bridge access ramp. Image: NYCDOT.

From an e-mail issued by the Brooklyn borough commissioner's office earlier this week:

NYCDOT will be implementing enhanced markings and signage on the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade (Bicycle/Pedestrian Path) in order to calm bicycle traffic and reduce potential bicycle-pedestrian conflicts.

Here are more details from the DOT web site:

The Brooklyn Bridge bicycle and pedestrian path will be intermittently closed to cyclists on several upcoming Saturdays and some weeknights to allow DOT workers to remove outdated signage, install new markings, update pavement symbols and improve the pedestrian crossing at the Washington Street entrance. These changes are necessary to minimize bicycle and pedestrian conflicts on the path and to ensure the safety of all path users.

The Manhattan Bridge is the suggested alternate route.

This had us wondering what, if anything, DOT's plans have to do with the recent ticketing blitz aimed at bridge bike commuters. But the press office would only refer us to the NYPD, saying "we do not issue tickets."

Photo: Sugar Pond/Flickr

I am a very conservative rider. I was wearing a helmet, had a front light blinking during the day, have fenders, a bell, etc. I was traveling at a slow speed to come to the end of the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge to make a right onto Tillary Street. When I got to the very end of the bike route (where a car usually blocks the crosswalk), a uniformed officer told me that I was supposed to dismount and walk to the point where the path ends, and where we were then standing. I pointed her to the bicycle symbol painted on the ground about 10 feet from where we were and she pointed up to a sign about 30 feet away and explained that from that point to the end, bikers were to dismount and that C class summonses were going to be handed out shortly and that she was providing a warning. There is no corresponding sign from the entry point of the bridge to the "dismount" sign for bikers to walk toward Manhattan for 30 feet.

I ride this route every day and never noticed the sign. As you know, there is lax enforcement of all traffic laws when it comes to motor vehicles and this is infuriating to be warned that desk appearance tickets will soon be dispensed.

Before the four "New York City Waterfalls" began gushing along the East River this June, DOT marked a bike route passing by each installation and released a guide to go with it. In this Streetfilm Elizabeth Press shows us a recent bike tour of the falls, led by DOT commish Janette Sadik-Khan. Special bonus feature: commentary from "Waterfalls" artist Olafur Eliasson about his work.

Next Thursday, artist Olaf Eliasson's much-anticipated "New York City Waterfalls" installation will debut along the East River. The project, as elegantly described in this week's New Yorker, "features four tall, widely separated, openwork steel towers housing powerful pumps that will pull river water up to a high basin and send it cascading down again, continuously, from seven in the morning until ten at night, through mid-October."

There will be one waterfall each near the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, one off the Brooklyn Heights promenade, and one off Governors Island. If you want to see all four by bike, DOT has you covered with its "Bike the Falls" guide, featuring a map to viewing points along with written directions to lanes and paths along the route. Road markings will also be in place. Check it out.

Clarence reports that, for a moment at least, he felt like he'd been put on equal footing with drivers. It may be a small step, but this newfound attentiveness to directional signage for cyclists sure beats bent over pedestrian safety signs, and hard-to-spot share-the-road signs.

Last week, Cap'n Transit posted a series about running express bus lanes over bridges and tunnels, which would boost the capacity of crossings and put them on a de facto road diet. These steps will "get rapid transit value even on non-rapid bus routes," he says:

What if we had an XBL on every major bridge and tunnel? We could take all the buses that pass nearby and feed them through it, bringing people into Manhattan where they can get to jobs easier. This would be a form of BRT, even if it doesn't have fancy brands or fake subway stations.

Enhancing the appeal of transit while taking away lanes for private cars is a fantastic recipe for mode switch. And doing it on the city's biggest bottlenecks could capture some of the virtuous cycle benefits that might have materialized had congestion pricing passed.

The key, says the Cap'n, is not only giving buses dedicated rights-of-way on crossings, but making approaches smoother and providing logical routes after exiting as well. Here's the short version of how he would make this work for buses going through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. (The long version is well worth reading, too.) 

• Make the Gowanus HOV lane two-way and 24/7
• Run more buses
• Extend the Church Street Transitway north, and institute a parallel southbound route
• Institute through-running of buses to New Jersey and the Bronx

And to make it work on the Brooklyn Bridge...

...you first have to allow buses on the bridge. Then it's a relatively simple matter of running the Fulton Mall and Livingston Street buses down Adams Street, and figuring out where they go once they get to Manhattan.

Easier said than done, of course, but very much in line with the city's commitment to BRT:

Simple, yes. Easy - especially politically? Not so much. But all these posts assume a certain level of political and financial support for BRT. Without that, you're not going to get much BRT anywhere in the city.

Note to Cap'n Transit: Ideas this good deserve credit, but all we know about you is that you live in Queens (and work in "accounting"). When will you shed the mask and reveal your true identity?

Image: Federal Highway Administration (PDF)

Bike Snob NYC tells the sordid tale of a New Year's Eve morning bike commute gone horribly, horribly wrong...

I had been riding Manhattan-bound over the Brooklyn bridge when I was overtaken on the incline by another cyclist. As he passed me, I noticed to my astonishment and horror that the waist of his jeans was so low that it revealed a sizable percentage of his buttocks. I'm not talking about the sort of incidental plumber's crack that's so commonplace in our society that we hardly notice it. No, I'm talking more crack than Chris Rock smoked in "New Jack City." I was being mooned. Maybe not a full moon, but certainly at least a waxing gibbous. What's more, it was pretty cold out that morning, so the entire objectionable region was redder than Kentucky on election day.

While I generally observe a policy of not taking candid photos of other cyclists out on the road, I do make an exception when I feel that I have been wronged. And nothing's more wrong than exposing yourself to a fellow commuter like a mating baboon. At that moment, all bets (and, apparently, undergarments) were off.

Is it just me or does the cyclist in the photo above look awfully familiar to anyone else?

One day it hit me: Why not erase the white line? Why not end the separation of cycles and pedestrians from each other, and allow them to mix freely on the curved arc across the East River. After all, under the "Shared Street" philosophy, pioneered in Holland and spreading around the world under the proselytizing of folks like my colleague Ben Hamilton-Baillie of Bristol, England, a number of good things might happen.

First of all, walkers would have more space. That's an obvious benefit. As the bottom and most important base of the pyramid of uses that occupy a public space, it's right that walkers should have as much space as possible in a public right of way. They are using the most efficient form of transportation ever devised in terms of moving people from point A to B.

Secondly, bikers would slow down. Just as the "Shared Street" studies show with drivers when faced with a street devoid of traffic signs and lines and full of kids playing and people walking, bikers would slow down when faced with the task of slowly navigating through the crowds of locals and tourists making their way from one shore to another. The bikers would not have some line on the sidewalk essentially giving them a thumbs up to speed along, shouting at pedestrians to get out of their way.

It's a problem now that quite a few cyclists feel no restraint in zooming down one side or another of the walkway. They risk collisions should a person on foot take a step the wrong way, and at the very least it's scary to have a cyclist hurtle past you while you're on a scenic stroll.

I can practically hear cyclists screaming "No" at my suggestion. It might turn what is an efficient morning commute for cyclists including myself into something much slower and less practical. That is a possibility. But I suspect if the lines were erased on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, and pedestrians, cyclists and other forms of non-motorized traffic were allowed to mix, the people on wheels would still move at a reasonable pace.

It's a leftover legacy of modernist urban planning and design that separating things somehow makes them more efficient or more productive. It's being increasingly discovered that's not the case. New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has been very astute in trying things. How about erasing that line for a while on the bridge, and seeing what happens?

Photo: twharris 

When asked for advice for New Yorkers who don't ride, Petra Kirstein says "New York is beautiful, and New York has beautiful weather. Just try it, its wonderful!" The former Transportation Alternatives staffer and life-long bike commuter rides each day from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn to Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Her commute includes a stop at her son Magnus' daycare and a jaunt over the Brooklyn Bridge. Send Streefilms an email and nominate someone you know for Cyclist of the Month.

This weekend's City section of the New York Times featured a mind-blowing essay by children's-book writer Sarah Shey about her habit of taking her one-year-old son out for drives in the city -- drives with no destination or purpose in mind, in which she crossed and recrossed the Brooklyn Bridge endless times.

Shey, who is originally from Iowa, writes that she missed "the pristine geometry of vacant blacktops, where a car can travel at least mile a minute, stair-stepping from field to unclothed field and not meet a patrol car." So she decided to try to recreate her family's bygone post-supper aimless-driving ritual here in the big city. You really have to read the whole thing to believe it, but here are some highlights:

Supper hour didn't work for us in Brooklyn. We had both traffic patterns and my son's schedule to consider. So early Saturday morning it was. My son and I got to escape our cavelike apartment. My husband got to lounge in bed for a few extra hours. And the best part of the deal: I got to concentrate on the road - not, for a change, on my family.

Our nondestination of choice was the Brooklyn Bridge. Back and forth we'd drive - sometimes 10 or 12 times - as if we were on autopilot. I leaned back into the bucket seat of my hatchback, whose posture recalled a dromedary. My hand squeezed the automatic clutch as if it were a stick shift, and for the first time in a week I felt in control.

My destiny was clear: to span the East River. The green light flashed above Tillary Street. I smashed down the accelerator, and with its 130-horsepower engine, my car attacked the 1.5-mile route with exhaust streaking behind us, I imagined, like a contrail.

Shey discovers a few little hitches in her unfettered freedom, like traffic regulations:

For the first couple of times, I took the Manhattan-bound Chambers Street exit, ignoring the "No Turns" sign, and spun around as soon as I passed the triangular traffic divider, a risky maneuver. I didn't want to make that a habit; I was well acquainted with the New York Police Department. Once, on Tillary Street, opposite Brooklyn's main post office, I got pulled over by a police officer. He had found fault with my decision to circumvent a backlogged entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting across two lanes of traffic while waving my arm out the window. I pushed open my door.

"Ma'am, stay in your car," the officer said. "Do you realize what I pulled you over for?"

"Gosh, I know I did something terribly wrong, sir. It felt terribly wrong."

He looked into my eyes. "Ma'am, among other things, you ran a red light. " I'll let you off with a warning."

"Oh, thank you, sir. It's a very confusing approach. I'll do a better job next time."

Luck wouldn't always be on my side. It was time to find a legal route.

Luck was indeed with Shey, and the hapless pedestrians and bicyclists cluttering the streets she felt called to zoom down, unhampered by silly conventions like traffic lights and lane markings. Not because she didn't get a ticket, but because she didn't injure anyone as her car "attacked" her chosen route.

It apparently never occurred to her that she might need to create a new family ritual for Saturday mornings, one more suited to life in New York -- like, say, going for a walk. For Shey, evidently, standing on her own two feet doesn't afford as much freedom as burning oil on the Brooklyn Bridge.

It isn't just in California where SUV's are secretly banned from certain roadways. Right here in New York City, many SUVs are banned from the Brooklyn Bridge, but nobody seems to know it.

Following on a Slate article about a similar phenomenon in California that came to our attention on Tuesday, Streetsblog correspondent Jason Varone snapped pictures of the signs pointing out the three-ton weight limit on the Brooklyn Bridge. Guess what? Navigators and Escalades are over the limit. So are Chevy Surburbans, Dodge Durangos, GMC Yukons, Hummers, Land Rovers, Range Rovers, Mercedes M Class 320 and 500s, Toyota Land Cruisers and Sequoias, and Ford Expeditions, among other SUV models.

Coming as it does underneath a sign reading "No trucks or buses," most motorists undoubtedly assume that the 3-ton weight limit is meant to discourage trucks and buses only, not SUVs. And so they drive over it every day while the police, heavily present on a bridge that has been the target of foiled terrorist plots, fail to enforce the law.

As the decades have gone by, the number of people crossing the Brooklyn Bridge has decreased tremendously, but the weight of their stuff has gone up. One hopes the SUV owners stuck in traffic next time the bridge has to undergo the extra maintenance required by all that extra daily weight will pause for a moment of introspection and look in the rearview mirror when they wonder who's to blame.

The weight limit is posted on the Brooklyn entrance as well.

I suppose we have made progress, afterall:

Officially, the bridge's opening was dubbed "The People's Day," yet the people played no part in the festivities. As local and national officials, along with their invited guests, strolled leisurely over the bridge, members of the general public were corralled into holding pens to await their turn. This arrived at midnight, as did chaos. A man at the front of the queue complained of the "helter-skelter" amid those "willing to pound one another to mince-meat."