What happens when a bunch of traffic planners and engineers find themselves in the epicenter of a pandemic that brings their day jobs to a grinding halt? When one of them is Sam Schwartz, aka “Gridlock Sam,” it turns out they dream infrastructure, specifically elegant ribbons of bike and pedestrian pathways.
Standing recently on a narrow pedestrian bridge over the FDR drive, Schwartz scanned the view of Queens and Manhattan, and shared his vision for three cross-river bridges.
“When we’re looking at it from a little bit of a distance it's not going to look like the bulky Queensborough Bridge. It’s not going to look like the clunky Williamsburg,” he said. “This one will look like a wisp.”
A wisp of a bridge, suspended by cables, 20-feet wide with a lane for cyclists, and one for people walking. It would stretch from Long Island City, stop on Roosevelt Island that would be accessible by elevator, before gracefully landing on the future East Midtown Greenway, or taking over exit 8 on the FDR at 41st Street.
Rendering of ribbon bridge going into Manhattan from Queens
“A very light ribbon crossing the river. And that’s why we call it the Queens Ribbon,” he said.
The other two bridges would go from Brooklyn Bridge Park, stretching to Governor’s Island before stopping down in the Financial District. The last one would stretch from either Hoboken or Jersey City to midtown Manhattan.
To Schwartz, COVID-19 was “a wake-up call,” one that led him to dream of wispy ribbon bridges crisscrossing the city’s waterways.
But this isn’t just anybody’s quarantine fantasy of how the city should redesign itself for a better post-COVID future. Schwartz is a former commissioner of the Department of Transportation. And he knows people. He enlisted the firmTY Lin International to draft plans for his ribbon bridge concept. And he got an assist from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and its Institute of Design and Construction Innovation led by Michael Horodniceanu, the former head of capital construction at the MTA who oversaw the Second Avenue subway extension.
“There is a need for us to make sure that we increase the ability of people to cross into Manhattan utilizing additional bridges,” Horodniceanu said. “We’re going to create a different paradigm of moving people,” without adding cars.
Rendering of what the ribbon bridge would look like over the East River
Horodniceanu said he’d like New York City to become as cycling friendly as cities in The Netherlands and Denmark but that means building capacity. As it stands, the Brooklyn Bridge is nearly at capacity; there’s been a 132% increase in East River bridge crossings in the past decade.
Before the pandemic, cycling overall and cycling to work grew exponentially, with about 50,000 people commuting daily by bike before the coronavirus disrupted work-day habits. A tiny fraction compared to the five million daily commuters who rode the subway, but it was a growing trend.
Listen to reporter Stephen Nessen's radio story for WNYC:
Schwartz thinks the new bridges could be built in the next decade, and would cost about $100 million dollars each. Despite the tough financial outlook right now, he said it was a bargain.
“We spend far more than that for the roadways on any of the East River bridges, so this looks like a great investment to me,” he said.
He would need support from the city and state but Schwartz said he’s buoyed by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s enthusiasm for bridge building. He thinks his proposal would appeal to Cuomo’s penchant for doing things that haven’t been done for a long time.
Rendering of the ribbon bridge across Roosevelt Island
“Nobody since 1909 has built a bridge to Manahttan’s business district?” Schwartz said. “The last bridges were the Manhattan and the Queensboro. That’s crazy. We can think big. And I’ve heard him say that quite a bit.”
A spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio said the mayor’s office would review the proposal.
"We appreciate the engineers’ hard work in crafting a proposal to reimagine mobility in our city – especially on our East River Bridges, which are more than 100 years old and not easy to retrofit,” said Mitch Schwartz (no relation). “We look forward to reviewing the report and continuing to think creatively about how we can give New Yorkers more bike and pedestrian transit options.”
