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Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot is one of the most amazing experiences you can have in New York, whether you’ve lived here forever, or just passing through. Depending on which direction you face, standing in the middle of the Bridge’s pedestrian promenade offers panoramic views of New York Harbor, or the East River wending its way North towards Williamsburg, Long Island City and points beyond. The problem is, if you stand for too long in any one place, you’re likely to get hit by a speeding bicyclist or bumped into by a gaggle of gawking tourists. The latter are especially aggravating if, for whatever reason, you take the footpath to or from Manhattan as public transportation and need to get some place in a hurry. (Word to the wise: Don’t expect to.) According to a report in The New York Times, however, the situation may be redressed by a possible expansion of the walkway.
By some estimates, 10,000 pedestrians and 3,500 cyclists cross the Bridge every day. That’s far less, of course, than the 300,000 who flock to Times Square daily, but given that the promenade is only 17 feet across at widest (and narrows to a mere ten feet in width), the sense of overcrowding can feel the same as trying to fight your way through the mob in the “bowtie” where Broadway meets Seventh Avenue.
The most obvious solution to the problem would be to widen the existing path across the girders spanning the traffic lanes below. That’s one idea, but before anyone starts laying out planks willy-nilly, the city has to conduct an engineering study to determine how much more weight the Bridge can hold; such a survey over seven months will be soon underway. It would be surprising, however, if it learned that the Bridge can’t deal with the load: When it opened in 1883, elevated trains and trolley cars brought far more people across the Bridge than cars do today.