George washington bridge 2021
The Port Authority, which oversees the George Washington Bridge and the Trans-Manhattan Expressway, does not need to abide by inspection standards set by the DOT but they are required to report any serious findings from their inspections to the state within a week.Īccording to the most recent report from the DOT and NYSTA from May, there were 20 bridges and roads controlled by one or both of those authorities that were ranked as being in “poor” condition out of the 244 in Manhattan. The roads and bridges of New York City are supposed to be evaluated every two years by either the city or state Department of Transportation or the New York State Thruway Authority under state and federal law.īoth agencies, along with the MTA, inspect their own bridges and roads as a part of compliance mandated by New York state. Yet, while the social virality of Sellars’ post helped get a quick response from officials, New Yorkers can’t always rely on the power of the internet when they have questions or concerns about crumbling city infrastructure. The city urgently needs a plan to rehabilitate BQE - or risk having to ban trucks from driving on it. Similar issues are affecting the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, with road salt and constant wear causing dangerous cracks in the concrete coverings that protect supportive steel bars. “These are things that will take five or 10 years to fix, but based on these photos, this is something that should happen tomorrow.” I think we need to pay more attention to this issue,” Guo said.
Zhan Guo, an associate professor of urban planning and transportation at New York University’s Wagner School, said the photos of those columns, and the state of aging bridges and roads in the city in general, should be on the mind of residents and officials.
Even with this statement from the Port Authority and de la Rosa, however, Sellars’ post continues to get new comments online from people worried about the look of the columns. “The non-load bearing concrete encasement around the steel columns supporting the George Washington Bridge Bus Station and the four buildings above the Trans Manhattan Expressway is in the process of being replaced as part of the Port Authority’s ongoing $2 billion ‘Restoring the George’ program that fully rehabilitates and modernizes the 90-year-old George Washington Bridge,” said Amanda Kwan, a spokesperson for PANYNJ.Ĭouncilmember Carmen de la Rosa (D-Manhattan) conveyed that same message from the Port Authority in an attempt to quell the fears of many residents who call those buildings home. Officials with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey told THE CITY that the pillars look the way they do because of ongoing work to repair parts of the expressway and the bridge - aptly named the “Restore the George” project, which began in 2016. Members and sponsors make THE CITY possible.īut, according to the agency in charge of this stretch of highway connecting the Harlem River Drive to the George Washington Bridge, there was and is no need for concern. Someone named Zion Love - who had no connection to Sellar - even launched a petition in response to the photos, demanding answers for why these columns looked so dilapidated, and what the city was going to do about them. The photo showed up on Twitter and in Upper Manhattan Facebook groups. Sellars did not expect his post to go viral, but it did. He began the post asking if the “structural integrity” of the expressway and those four buildings that make up the Bridge Apartments was “compromised,” expressing that he wasn’t sure that he felt safe enough to drive under there, knowing what those columns looked like. His concern led him to posting the photos of the pillars on his personal Facebook page. As someone with a background in engineering, the thought of the buildings lacking that support concerned him. What troubled him most was the four towering apartment buildings that sit atop the expressway in Washington Heights, he said. I thought, ‘Huh! That looks interesting’,” Sellars, a 49-year-old home improvement contractor from Locust Valley, Long Island, said of the crumbling concrete. They looked even worse for wear than usual. Jeff Sellars looked out of his car window on his way to the George Washington Bridge and noticed something odd about the concrete pillars of the short subterranean highway known as Trans-Manhattan Expressway last month.