Transit Strike

December 20th, 2005

Today is the first day of the New York transit strike. En route to meet a friend in lower Manhattan, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with about 2000 good-natured, heavily bundled New Yorkers. Most of them were headed east to Brooklyn, where they were greeted by Borough President Marty Markowitz (and his bullhorn) and Red Cross volunteers (and their cups of coffee and water).

The side of a Red Cross truck read: “Disaster Relief.”

I was headed towards the city, so I walked against the flow of foot traffic, dodging wobbly fair-weather cyclists and those with the British tendency to keep to the left in pedestrian traffic. However, in the sometimes-scary ballet of a congested bridge walkway, not once did I hear a walker shout at a biker, or vice versa.

One category of bridge commuter that does deserve a bit of malice: the recreational jogger. What drives a person to pull on his/her Lycra tights, lace up the New Balances, and freakin’ run through near-gridlock on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway?

Satellite trucks from news networks were stationed on the Manhattan end of the bridge. It was a weird feeling to pass a Fox News reporter doing a standup report, only to see that reporter still reporting live when I arrived at my friend’s office some 10 minutes later. How much can one report on the simple act of walking? “Brit, from my vantage point, where I am blocking access to the Brooklyn Bridge, I can see that the left foot is in front of the right foot. Now the right foot has overtaken the left foot. Unbelievably, now the left foot is back in the game and gaining on the right. Whoa! There went a Schwinn! Right past me!“