UP FOR A WALK?
Authority aims to create pedestrian path on Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge
The state Bridge Authority wants to add a walkable area to the Kingston Rhinecliff Bridge, allowing the Hudson River span to be part of the Empire State Trail announced last year by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The authority is seeking a $5 million grant from the state Department of Transportation’s Alternatives Program to help pay for the $8.2 million local project.
The east-west bridge spans the Hudson River between the Ulster County town of Ulster and the Dutchess County town of Rhinebeck and is about 210 feet above the water at its highest point.
The Ulster Town Board endorsed the Bridge Authority’s grant application last week.
In a letter to the town, the authority’s special projects manager, Chris Steber, said the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge project will include improvements needed to allow “pedestrian access to the span, as well as provide improvements for bicyclists.”
Steber wrote that the plan calls for:
• A 4-foot-wide path for pedestrians, with a concrete barrier to separate them from traffic, on the southern side of the bridge.
• Wider shoulders on both
sides of the bridge to allow more room for bicyclists.
• Message signs to communicate with all users of the bridge.
Information was not provided about where people who want to walk only the bridge portion of the trail would park their vehicles. The approach to the bridge on the Ulster County side is a divided highway, and the approach on the Dutchess County side is a two-lane state route with little available room for parking.
There also was no immediate word about when the project might start or be completed.
Cuomo announced the Empire State Trail in January 2017, saying he hoped to create a 750-mile system that connects existing and planned trails from New York City to the Canadian border in the Adirondacks, and from Albany to Buffalo.
Cuomo’s plan calls for 350 miles of new trails, with most of the additional local system on the east side of the Hudson River. The local portion of the trail is proposed cross from Dutchess County to Ulster County at the Walkway Over the Hudson; run through Ulster County on existing or planned trails, winding up in the town of Ulster; then cross back into Dutchess County via the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.
The Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge is about 1.5 miles long. It opened in February 1957 and had 755,731 vehicle crossings in its first full year of operation. In 2017, there were just under 8.2 million vehicle crossings.
The Walkway Over the Hudson, a former railroad bridge linking Poughkeep-ise and Highland, opened as a pedestrian span in the fall of 2009 and now operates as a state park. It is not open to motor vehicles.
There also is pedestrian access on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, which spans the Hudson River between Greene and Columbia counties. The walkable area on that bridge includes scenic lookout points and is part of the Hudson River SkyWalk, a pedestrian trail linking the Olana State Historic Site in Greenport to the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in the village of Catskill.