Tonight: Final Round of Harlem River Bridge Workshops Gets Started

We have some late additions to the Streetsblog calendar. At 6:30 p.m. today at the Rio II Gallery on Riverside Drive, DOT will hold the first of four community workshops as part of the third and final phase of preparation for the Harlem River Bridges Access Plan, set to be released this spring.

Last year, responding to uptown advocates, DOT launched a series of workshops to collect ideas about how to improve walking and biking access to 16 bridges that link Manhattan and the Bronx. Currently, 13 of those bridges have some sort of pedestrian crossing while only five (including the Randall’s Island Connector) have bikeways [PDF]. The approaches to most of the bridges are dangerous and intimidating for people walking and biking, though DOT has started to make progress in some areas.

Earlier workshops addressed current conditions on the bridges and looked at potential redesigns. In this final round, DOT will show data and ideas it’s collected so far, asking for a final round of feedback before drafting the final plan.

Meetings today and tomorrow will address the bridges south of the Macombs Dam Bridge, while next week’s events will address the bridges to the north. See the Streetsblog calendar for times and locations for each workshop.