Closing the loop on a story we first brought you last June, we took a walk across Delancey Street (all 250 feet of it) this week to have a look at the new concrete barriers the city has installed to direct bike and pedestrian traffic flow at the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge.
The barriers, which were not that popular with cyclists, were paid for with anti-terrorism funds, and along with countdown clocks on the walk lights, are an attempt to improve safety at the dangerous intersection of Delancey and Clinton streets.
Click through for more photos.
The openings are not even as wide as the bike lanes! (I think the terrorists are winning)
I think the point is to slow down the cyclists (who tend to come hurtling off the bridge on fixies) for the benefit of pedestrians. As a pedestrian who crosses there frequently, mostly in a state of mild alarm shading to terror, I hope it works. It does seem counterintuitive, though, to herd both cyclists and pedestrians into a narrower space.
As a conscientious cyclist, I’m especially aware of sharing the road with other cyclists, cars and pedestrians. The intersection of Delancey and Clinton is, indeed, treacherous, exacerbated by cyclists speeding off the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. Pedestrians and cyclists have a very few number of seconds to make it across Delancey, and recently I was almost wiped out on my bike during my green light by a cyclist speeding down the ramp and shouting at me to watch it.
And now they’ve built a barricade to ‘prevent terrorists from driving onto that intersection’? I thought it was a joke when I read about it. With pedestrians and cyclists alike rushing to get even halfway across Delancey at Clinton, these barriers will only impede this bottleneck of cyclists crossing Delancey, cyclists whipping off the Bridge, and pedestrians running for their lives with a tiny entrance into the ‘box.’
A better use of those cement blocks would have been as part of a pedestrian and bicycle bridge over Delancey Street at Clinton. The public threat here is not ‘terrorists driving onto the pathway’; the public threat is the 10 second crossing light, the traffic cops who ignore the green light on Clinton and continue to wave cars and trucks on and off the bridge, and cyclists coming off the bridge slope at 15-20 mph paying little attention as to who has the light at the end of the bridge.
Cynthia, like I said, the terrorists have won. ; }