Sometime on Saturday evening after biking ’round Brooklyn, eating fried catfish and biscuits, and our air hockey tournament, four of us decide to take a break before the Conflux* party at Barcade and walk back home to the city for nap time. We convince Dens, who lives approximately 50 steps from the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge and has NEVER WALKED OVER IT that we should walk back home since it’s a gorgeous night out. He concedes, excited for his first trip over on foot and we make our way up the bridge.

Bikers are speeding by, pedestrians are strolling leisurely, and then all of a sudden we hear a skid-crash-screeech-oh-shit! and turn around to see that a biker has smashed into a pedestrian from behind, shoes and bikes and bags flying as they collapse into a heap on the bridge. Biker Girl (BG) quickly gets up while Pedestrian Girl (PG) wails, moans, then falls to the ground. Like anyone who has recently read the hippocratic oath, we made like EMTs and called 911, friend Stan holding PG’s head, a circle of people quickly forming around us. PG seems to daze in and out of consciousness, whiplashed, bruised, dry-heaving, and unable to speak. Biker after biker stops, volunteering any help possible, from first aid kits to biking to the nearest police vehicle to assure an ambulance was on the way.

After 15-20 never-ending minutes, the police still haven’t arrived and the ambulance is nowhere to be seen. We soon spot the police coming up the bridge! They are LAUGHING, CHATTING, AND TAKING THEIR SWEET SWEET TIME while poor PG is on the ground, seemingly insensitive to the fact that she may be seriously injured. The ambulance arrives in another 10 minutes. The whole process is alarmingly slow and just unnerving considering the potential for real injury. We ask the police officers if we can call later to check up on the girl and they look at us like we have 7 eyes! Why would we care about a girl we don’t know?!

Later on we walk BACK over the bridge (M’hattan –> W’burg) and run into the same police officers on the way to the party. We ask about the girl and good news, she is going to be okay (yay). Aside, what we learned from this experience:

1. The Williamsburg Bridge needs to open the south side footpath back up ASAP
2. Bikers need to SLOW down on the ramps (yah, me included) because pedestrians step out in the middle of the lane ALL OF THE TIME
3. Pedestrians need to keep to ONE SIDE!
4. Don’t expect the NYPD to help you in a timely, kind, or informative manner
5. Wear your bike helmets, people. C’mon!
6. Williamsburg bridge = 1.38 miles long

Anyhow, whether on bikes or skates or skateboards or foot, be careful on the bridge. It’s narrow and crowded, ’specially on those nice days.

Published Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 1:37 pm. Filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.