Bicycling

Manhattan Bridge Bike Path Detour to End on March 5

The Manhattan Bridge bicycle path will return to its usual place on the north side of the bridge on March 5, according to a Department of Transportation spokesperson.

By Noah Kazis

2:49 PM EST on February 9, 2012

The Manhattan Bridge bicycle path will return to its usual place on the north side of the bridge on March 5, according to a Department of Transportation spokesperson.

Since July, construction has forced cyclists and pedestrians to swap sides on the bridge. Bike riders heading into Manhattan have had to navigate a dangerous detour onto the Bowery. Though DOT painted a temporary bike route along Bowery for the duration of the construction, NYPD enforcement was almost non-existent and the lane was often unusable.

Flipping the bicycle and pedestrian paths on the bridge also led to some heightened conflict, not so much along the path itself but in the minds of the Daily News editorial board. The newspaper wrote a series of scathing editorials depicting cyclists as “illiterate, blind, or merely — this is our guess — oblivious to all man-made law,” one of the low points of last year’s media bikelash.

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.