Bicycling

Construction Narrows Brooklyn Bridge Bike-Ped Path

Heads up if you bike or walk across the Brooklyn Bridge: Rehab work slated to last until 2014 is narrowing the promenade from 14 feet to 11 feet.

By Noah Kazis

5:04 PM EDT on August 27, 2010

During the Brooklyn Bridge rehab, stretches of the 14-foot-wide bike-ped path will be narrowed to 11 feet. Photo: Noah Kazis

Heads up if you bike or walk across the Brooklyn Bridge: Rehab work slated to last until 2014 is narrowing the promenade from 14 feet to 11 feet.

Right now, paint removal work has narrowed part of the bike path by a foot and a half. A similar “paint removal containment unit” will soon be installed on the pedestrian side. The narrowed section of the path, which will fluctuate between 600 and 1000 feet long, will shift as the paint removal work moves along the bridge. DOT has already installed signs telling cyclists to dismount.

For what it’s worth, none of the cyclists I saw on the bridge dismounted and everything seemed to work fine. But that wasn’t during peak commute hours, and the other side of the path hadn’t been narrowed yet. It may be worth going even more out of your way to take the Manhattan Bridge, but that route will have its own construction headaches starting at the end of this year.

If you have any suggestions for the Brooklyn Bridge construction managers about how to make the best of a tight space that’s about to get even more cramped, email brooklynbridgeoutreach@gmail.com.

Dismount signs are up in both directions. Photo: Noah Kazis

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.