It’s funny you should mention this– I was at this exact intersection on my bike last week, trying to get from the greenway to the GW Bridge. The greenway has no signage or maintained exits that lead anywhere near the bridge. At least with a bike, you can take to the roadway– on foot, it must have been even worse!

Speaking of which, the GW bridge is also a pretty sorry situation for cyclists and pedestrians. It’s always been bad, but at least the south deck had ramps that allowed cyclists to ride all the way from one end to another in a pretty direct manner. Now they’ve got the southern deck closed and everyone has to use the northern deck, which involves no fewer than six stairways. Talk about second-class traffic!

Brad, sorry to hear about your travails. I tried to cross from the park back to RSD once with the cycle, and resolved never to do so again. My objections are with the pathway up until you get to the GWB on-ramp, however: I think it’s dark, poorly marked, and a good place to get mugged.

As someone who uses the GWB quite frequently (even more in nasty months), it’s pretty simple to get to it from the greenway (no highway crossing required).

Just continue past the bridge until you get to the pedestrian bridge and then ride back over to the south entrance.

The south entrance is pretty nasty but not ‘unnavigable’, with some experience, it’s easy to make the hairpin turn without taking your feet off the pedals. Just ‘look where you want to go’ and the bike kind of moves in the right direction.

The good access point between the GWB and west side greenway is at around 181st St and Riverside. It’s not that hard to get to either of the GWB pathways from there (via Ft. Washington) but as earlier posters have noted, you have to know about it to know about it.

I got caught up in this Konami code of a greenway during Memorial Day weekend. By the time I got past the interchange and the woodland trail right by the GWB, I was choking back frustration and rage over having no idea where I was or if I was going the right way, or if this was the bike path or pedestrian path or if they were one and the same.

After a few frantic phone calls, I kept going and it sorted itself out all the way up to Inwood, but on the way back down to Battery I took Broadway. Screw that nonsense. It was twice as fast.

Long story short, this so-called greenway ought to be a lot better marked for the sometimes-directionally-challenged such as myself.

If you look at the NYC Cycling Map, the most obvious route from the Greenway to the GWB is to follow the Greenway up the hill, past the lighthouse, over the Amtrak Bridge, under the tunnel to the top of the hill. At that point it runs parallel to the Henry Hudson Parkway and there’s a pedestrian bridge that that forms the West 181 Street access point, just as Liam mentioned.

This is the same location that was in the news two or three years ago where a wall partially collapsed onto the roadway of the Henry Hudson and Riverside Drive.

From West 181st Street, take a right to go south on Fort Washington Avenue, past the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and then turn right, again, to go west on 178th Street along the south side of the bridge.

http://www.transalt.org/files/resources/bridges/bridgif/map_gwb.gif

I was at the Little Red Lighthouse just yesterday and explained this to some visitors on bikes trying to find their way to the GWB. Perhaps it’s not so obvious to visitors because you have to pass under the bridge to go up the hill before turning south on Fort Washington Avenue to West 178th Street?

Here’s the map insert graphic

http://www.transalt.org/files/resources/bridges/bridgif/map_gwb.gif

Sad to say – that’s my favorite way of getting to the GWB because the hills are a bit more manageable (yeah, I hate hills).

Would love if they beefed up that sidewalk but fear they’ll close it off instead as a cheaper fix.

Stacy & others, you can’t turn right on West 178th St. It is one-way eastbound. Better to spin along another block downtown to W. 177th and turn right off of Ft Washington there.

Also, turning right off of W. 181st onto Cabrini, instead of turning right on Ft. Washington, shaves about two dozen feet of climbing off the route. You can turn left off of Cabrini onto West 180th and then right on Ft. Washington to go down to West 177th.

Jackson – That’s true. When I was a ‘kid’ we’d ride up Riverside Drive till we reached something that was more like an approach ramp to the GWB than any kind bike path. The Greenway is indeed a vast improvement over what we had previously.

But this isn’t just about bicycles in the parks. It’s about community access to their waterfront park – a park that cyclists, joggers, dog walkers, tennis players, basketball teams and families with small children visit on a regular basis. Shouldn’t they be entitled to use the recreational facilities offered in Fort Washington Park without risking life and limb as the title of this entry accurately asks?

Before we get all lathered up, the good news is here. Our gummint has anticipated our gripes and complaints and has plans in place to address them. Specifically, if you check out the “Master Plan” pdf, you’ll see New Park Access at the foot of West 165th St, with new bridges over the highway and railroad, as well as a “Treetop Canopy Walk.”

I’ve gotten lost a couple times trying to find the greenway from Riverside Drive — once you pass NYSPI you find yourself on the Henry Hudson with no idea where to go. I would just give up and double back until an earlier connection.

Glad to know that the connection is there, now it’s just a matter of signage and relatively simple improvements from the city.

The first baseball team and first baseball league were in New York City. What other parts of our civic heritage do you propose we abandon?

James: “The pathway becomes inundates with throngs of people hanging out, barbecuing, etc. on any summer evening and it can get bad enough that you have to either slowly wade around people at 1 or 2mph or dismount the bike and walk. I’m all about the provision of quality public spaces for the people of this city but this is just ridiculous. A prime example of how the ‘shared space’ concept can easily break down when the rules are ignored.”

Well, they shouldn’t be barbecuing. That’s illegal and a nuisance. But I got the uncomfortable feeling reading your post that you don’t accept pedestrians in the greenway. Why shouldn’t people be “hanging out”? If they wish to do so in large numbers in what is basically a public park, don’t they have a right to do so? You mention “rules…ignored.” Please quote or link to this rule you refer to.

I could go on at length about pedestrians menaced by bikers, not just riding, but racing down the greenway.

James, I think your last sentence summed things up perfectly. In crowded conditions, all users of the greenway have to make compromises and accommodate one another. So the practical solution is either to walk your bike or choose less predictably crowded times to use the greenway. The alternative would be to clear the greenway of peds to make way for bikes — and how would you go about doing that? Signage? Police enforcement? Sharing seems to be the only viable alternative.

“Mobbed out”?!

I guess the fundamental difference I have with James and Nathan is whether the greenway should be a high-speed corridor or a park.

My contention is that those walking, jogging, hanging out, etc. are almost entirely people who live in the surrounding neighborhood. Should they be shooed away so that other people — many of them outsiders — can pass through with their vehicles?

Generations of non-vehicular New Yorkers were deprived of riverfront access by the shortsighted policies of Robert Moses. Now that the greenway is here, how ironic that some people connected with the livable streets movement should wish to dispossess them all over again.

The area in question does have a transportation corridor — the Henry Hudson Parkway. If bikers are unwilling to coexist with pedestrians, maybe that’s where they belong.

Mark, we’re talking about different things. If you’d been downtown on the west side that night you would not be shocked by my characterization of the crowd, nor would you suggest that most of its members were from the neighborhood (or even this side of the Hudson). I probably shouldn’t have waded in here since the discussion is about a section much further uptown and more of a regular crowd, but what James was saying resonated with my experience that, at times, the greenway can be taken over by indifferent recreational crowds that could just as easily amuse themselves in adjacent areas where bicycles aren’t allowed, instead of shutting down the one safe place to ride up and down the island.

I can’t speak for James but mine isn’t the extreme position that you and now Jonathan have set out to characterize it as. I’ve said I would simply like to be able to ride my bicycle on this officially designated bicycle lane. You couldn’t pick a more ridiculous target than me to vent frustration with high speed cycling in crowded environments. I never have problems sharing space with pedestrians; I’m slow, I yield, I’ll stop if necessary. But crowds of pedestrians walking four abreast forcing everyone in transit to or from home on a bicycle to walk for ten minutes? Yes, I will dare to complain on the internet about this. By the way your Robert Moses comparison is now the livable streets version of Godwin’s law.

Then that makes you HITLER!

If you did try, you might gain some insight into the fallibility of associating someone or something with a vilified historical figure. But I’m willing to concede that I’m Robert Moses because I want to ride a bicycle on the greenway if you’re willing to drop this absurd line of argument.

Nathan, what I do is to adapt my route to follow Riverside Drive/Ft. Washington Ave, Convent Avenue, or St. Nicholas Avenue, depending on terrain and destination, on those hot summer weekend evenings. That’s the advantage of a bicycle.