Pontoon Bridges - good enough for the Army, good for the L train shutdown??

[Deucey]

https://nypost.com/2018/02/19/this-odd-solution-could-make-the-l-train-shutdown-less-awful/

A crew of engineers and real estate agents is hoping to convince the city of another option to mitigate the pending L-pocalypse — a floating bridge over the East River to help ease the pain of the train’s tunnel shutdown.

Pontoon bridges have been quickly built all over the world to deal with temporary traffic issues, said Parker Shinn, who is trying to garner support for the project.

“We are confident that this would be a practical solution from both an engineer and a cost perspective,” said 31-year-old Parker Shinn, who lives in San Francisco but spent years dealing with the hell of living off the Third Avenue stop in Manhattan and waiting for several trains to go by before he could get on one.

The proposed bridge would be anchored by 37 barges over 3,000 feet and elevated enough for small boats such as ferries to pass through.

It would have a 240-foot long drawbridge in the center for larger boats. The bridge would have two lanes for buses and two for pedestrians and cyclists at a cost of about $38 million, said Shinn.

Shinn, who is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise $50,000 for marketing and additional engineering, said he’s aware of the huge hurdles in the way of getting the project built by April of next year, which is when the L train shutdown is supposed to start. But he said the city and MTA’s weak plan released in December convinced him that he had to try.

“When I saw the MTA’s plan, I was really concerned for the people in Brooklyn,” said Shinn. “The rough calculation of economic lost in terms of lost time is staggering.”

Under the plan the MTA and city released, the cars will be required to have three or more passengers to drive over the Williamsburg Bridge during rush hours. Cars would also be nixed from a stretch of 14th Street in Manhattan — from Third Avenue to Ninth Avenue eastbound, and Third Avenue to Eighth Avenue westbound — to make way for an exclusive “busway.” Meanwhile, there will be three new bus routes between Brooklyn and Manhattan that will drop riders near subway stops at Delancey Street, Spring Street, and Broadway-Lafayette.

MTA officials declined to comment on the bridge plan and city transportation officials did not return requests for comment.

[CenSin]

While we’re at it, the bridge should have a red carpet with a banner in the middle of the bridge that reads: WELCOME HIPSTERS.

12 minutes ago, Coney Island Av said:

The funniest part is this:

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at a cost of about $38 million

 

Someone is out of touch with reality.

[RR503]

Jokes aside, it’s kinda sad that this one relatively transient issue is getting so much media/civic attention. There are so many other, more worrying problems with transit in this city that have no fixed end date. I wish we were spending our time and energy and column inches on those ones, not this weed generated, overhyped BS. I don’t mean to negate the inconvenience of the shutdown, but the reality is that all NYers have been suffering through commutes which have been lengthened more than those of post-shutdown  riders over the past few years just given our system’s (bus and subway) holistic and wholly incomprehensible disfunction.

Yet we choose to focus seemingly infinite energy and brainpower on “ten thousand novel ways to cross the East River.” In the words of our dear beloved president, “sad!” 

Just goes to show the power of well-monied, social media-armed constituencies in this day and age. 

[LGA Link N Train]

When I first saw this proposal, I knew from the beginning that this was something to laugh at.