Sandy – Trail Report – MVT

[viennabiker]

One strange but welcome aftermath of the storm: somebody removed the plastic barriers near the entrance to Roosevelt Island that cut off the southern end of the parking lot from the trail. Cyclists were forced to make a couple of sharp turns in an area rich with joggers and walkers. The barriers had been there for a couple years, originally placed for some construction work on the island (if I recall) but never removed–until a couple days ago. Now a cyclist can take the whole length of the parking lot. On weekends, things can get a bit crowded in that area with visitors not used to the traffic flow, so it will still be a go-slow zone. But for weekday commuters it is a very welcome change.

[rcannon100]

Yup. If you twitter, send a tweet to @NPSGWMP thanking them for taking down the barriers. My guess was they took them down right before the storm to protect against them blowing all over the place. That…. or they blew all over the place and ended up in the river.

Yes, the barriers were installed when we complained about the construction trucks driving on the bike path and coming close to running over cyclists.

[dasgeh]

I’m not convinced the barriers are gone for good. They’ve been taken down before — I believe the last time was around the 4th of July — but they seem to come back up.

A few weeks (? some normal weekday, maybe even last week) ago I saw an official-looking person sitting near the citizen-made cut out in the barriers (someone had just removed one and put it to the side, so you could turn into the bike parking area then the parking lot – not ideal but better than the multiple right angles in the middle of the lot). I really don’t know what she was doing, but she seemed to take note when I went through the cut out and into the parking lot. My hope is that she was monitoring how people could use that route safely and that the barriers are really down forever.

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