The Williamsburg Bridge funnels 16,000 vehicles a day onto a single one-lane residential block, resulting in endless traffic and frequent pedestrian casualties.
As a fellow LES neighbor who feels the pain of Clinton Street every day, I really enjoyed this piece. One thing I think is missing, though, is that Clinton has two related traffic problems, not just one.
The Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp is absolutely a major contributor to the congestion and safety issues you describe. But the other half of the problem is the traffic heading TO the bridge. A huge volume of cars exits the FDR and is funneled onto Clinton Street before continuing north to the Williamsburg Bridge. So the bottleneck doesn't actually begin at Delancey, it starts several blocks south, where Clinton has effectively become a regional through-route in addition to a bridge off-ramp.
I'd love to see a proposal that tackles both directions. In addition to rerouting traffic coming off the bridge to Essex and Allen as you suggest, I'd also explore diverting FDR traffic heading to the bridge onto Madison Street—a wider two-lane roadway—and then East Broadway to access the bridge. That would take a significant amount of pass-through traffic off Clinton in both directions and allow it to function much more like the neighborhood street it should be.
I used to live right there and thought about this every day, thank you so much for writing the piece. Do you have any suggestions on how we could campaign for this change?
As a fellow LES neighbor who feels the pain of Clinton Street every day, I really enjoyed this piece. One thing I think is missing, though, is that Clinton has two related traffic problems, not just one.
The Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp is absolutely a major contributor to the congestion and safety issues you describe. But the other half of the problem is the traffic heading TO the bridge. A huge volume of cars exits the FDR and is funneled onto Clinton Street before continuing north to the Williamsburg Bridge. So the bottleneck doesn't actually begin at Delancey, it starts several blocks south, where Clinton has effectively become a regional through-route in addition to a bridge off-ramp.
I'd love to see a proposal that tackles both directions. In addition to rerouting traffic coming off the bridge to Essex and Allen as you suggest, I'd also explore diverting FDR traffic heading to the bridge onto Madison Street—a wider two-lane roadway—and then East Broadway to access the bridge. That would take a significant amount of pass-through traffic off Clinton in both directions and allow it to function much more like the neighborhood street it should be.
I used to live right there and thought about this every day, thank you so much for writing the piece. Do you have any suggestions on how we could campaign for this change?