Originally Posted by
Rage
I’m actually not so crazy about how the new lane on the Brooklyn bridge is going to be tucked away from the panoramic views afforded by its present iteration/configuration.
That's probably a good thing actually, if it discourages the kind of tourist gawking and photo-ops that so plagued the existing path.
For sake of comparison, think of that picturesque "bike-only" path winding a block through Battery Park between South Ferry and the southernmost Bowling Green. It's just too darn pretty, that pedestrians insist on strolling through what is the only legal bike routing, rather than the gratuitously wide pedestrian-only sidewalk immediately to the east of it.
Being stuck in the middle of the car lanes hopefully nixes some of the "but I brought a citibike" photo-stop-ism
And it might not be only a cycling a concern: a longstanding argument against lane conversion was the claim that a dense crowd of people presents more load per square foot than automobiles. At first intuition that seems absurd, but packing 20-30 standing adults into the footprint of a car in bumper-to-bumper traffic doesn't really seem hard at all. To put some "official" numbers on it, a 60 foot subway car has a standing capacity of ~200 people, and a typical automobile is 15 feet long, so that's actually 50 people replacing a car. If we say 4000 pounds for the car and even just 100 for the people, that's already heavier, with the people on diets and the the car bumpers literally touching.
So making it an unattractive place for sightseeing is probably a plus.