GW Bridge Construction Alert, and How to Avoid It

As of August 5^th, expect delays at the GW Bridge. 

The George Washington Bridge is undergoing a multi-million dollar renovation project to repair the aging upper level. Nighttime work has most lanes of upper roadway completely closed. 

This week, Jersey bound lanes will be closed from 11 pm to 5 am, and starting next week inbound lanes will be closed at the same times. As usual, residual morning delays may occur until 6-7 am. They will adjust lane closures accordingly with Yankee games.

What does this mean? At night, the CBX Westbound / 95 N is going to be a nightmare . The Deegan will be slightly better. After next week, expect inbound delays of up to an hour. Lower level recommended if you have to take the bridge. Upper Manhattan is going to suck for the rest of the month.

My suggested night time route is to take one of the tunnels from in town, or the Verrazano / Goethells combo if coming from the south. For all other times of day, my advice remains to always default to the lower level unless you hear reports of massive Deegan delays or a Yankee game.

Why the GWB Carmegeddon isn't as bad as we thought it would be...

Last night I decided to take the lower level of the GWB inbound. This was not an error, rather a carefully calculated decision based on upper level toll plaza traffic and CBX traffic on the other side. I decided that the 25 minute trek downstairs was favorable to about 40 minutes upstairs. I would have followed the traffic indicator sign on the 95 approach which listed approximate wait times, but shocker, it wasn’t working.

We have all been warned to avoid the GWB. Everyone says its complete anarchy as 3 lanes are reduced to one, creating an absolute bottleneck and gumming up the full approach. This is actually not true.

[caption id="attachment_579" align="aligncenter" width="300"] this is the three lanes that are on the GWB lower level. the left is the HRD exit, the right is the Deegan exit and in the middle is the CBX approach.[/caption]

In reality, the traffic pattern is not all that different. The 3 lanes in question encompass the Harlem River Drive left exit, the 95 through traffic lane, and the Deegan lane to the left. The Harlem River Drive exits as normally, and about 50 yards later, the other two lanes go into a slow merge. And when I say exit as normally, I mean the left lane moves more rapidly than the 2 right lanes. The middle lane is not for the weary, requiring constant concentration to keep within 6 inches off the bumper of the car in front of you, to prevent the asshats that are too important to wait from cutting in.

I think these pricks are actually thee root cause of most of the  traffic down there, both on the span and in the Harlem River Drive approach. People stop in the middle of the left lane to cut off traffic, which causes that lane to stop moving, in addition to the middle lane. After this it’s 2 lanes merging slowly, which are then expanded out from one lane to two, which actually is an improvement over the cluster that was the previous traffic pattern -Remember that? Lower level and upper level all merging into four lanes, with all of the Deegan bound trucks desperately trying to jockey all the way to right from the other side of the road, through traffic? Yeah, im kind of glad that’s gone.

So in conclusion, the lower level of the GWB right now is not that bad for the weekday commuter, but always add about 10 minutes to drive time. But still consider it off-limits between Thursday night and Sunday night, when all the travelers are on their way to their destination. For now it is an option, but when September hits, I still think its going to be utter chaos.