Escape from New York City

On Friday, July 1, 2011, at about 3:00 P.M. we left our hotel in midtown Manhatten heading for our next stop in north Jersey. We were not going far. We had a hotel reservation in Red Bank, New Jersey, near the Garden State Parkway. We had made a hotel reservation fairly close to New York City because we wanted to spend most of the day in the city.

We had a Garman GPS navigator that had proven fairly reliable at getting us where we wanted to go. I made the mistake of trusting it to tell me the best way out of the city. The navigator directed us toward the Holland Tunnel . Seemed like a reasonable idea since we were starting on the West Side. But the street in front of the hotel (40th Street) is one-way east. Following the navigator's directions, I ended up on the East Side, going north on 1st Avenue.

The navigator keeps trying to get me to head back to the west, toward the Holland Tunnel. I keep missing the turns because I can't see the street name until it is too late to turn. Traffic is not too bad here.

After I miss the turn onto 57th Street (westbound), the navigator recalculates and tells me to turn left on 61st Street. This seems like a dumb suggestion, because 59th Street is also westbound. Why wait until 61st Street? I turn left onto 59th Street, heading west.

Big mistake! 59th Street immediately forces me to make a U turn onto the approach to the Queensboro Bridge. There is no exit.

Click on the image to see an enlarged copy.

We get a good view of the Roosevelt Island Tram from the Queensboro Bridge. (This is what my family refers to as "Seeing a little bit of ____," something that has happened more than once.)

So now we are in Queens, to the east of Manhatten. But the navigator still wants us to take the Holland Tunnel on the west side. It accurately guides us to the Manhattan Bridge. Traffic back into Manhattan is heavy and slow, but it does keep moving. We get to see a little bit of midtown Manhattan from the bridge.


The Manhattan Bridge drops us off at the Bowery and Canal Street. We get to see a little bit of Chinatown. The navigator still wants to get us to the Holland Tunnel, across town.

Now the navigator leads us into the worst traffic jam I have ever seen. This is the city that invented gridlock. We get to experience it first hand. It's sit still and pull up one car length (when you're lucky.) When a traffic light turns green, we can't move because the street beyond the light is full of stopped cars. Eventually people start to pull into the intersection even though the street ahead is blocked, thereby blocking traffic on the cross street.

We see "To Holland Tunnel" signs, and the navigator accurately tells us the same direction. But we can't move. On the radio we hear a traffic report telling us that there is a one hour delay outbound at the Holland Tunnel. What a joke! At the rate we are going it is a 48 hour delay. And there does not appear to be any escape route. One side street is blocked, with a construction crane in the middle of the street halfway up the block. Others are full of cars sitting still.

Now I'm sitting in the right hand lane of a three lane one way street. The navigator says to turn right, onto another three lane one way street. On my street two lanes can turn, going onto the one way street to the right, which is blocked with traffic. Each time the car in the right hand lane of the cross street pulls up a bit, the car on my left cuts in front of me into the right hand lane of the cross street. In about ten minutes, three cars do this. I haven't moved. A guy gets out of the second car back from me and comes up and taps on my window. Against my better judgement, I lower the window. He politely asks me not to let them do that. (In New York City, you have to drive like a New Yorker!)

Drawing on my experience from years ago in Boston, I get my bumper in front of the bumper of the next car trying to cut in front of me and manage to make the right turn.

At the next intersection, I eventually find myself at the light in the right hand lane. The cross street is one way to the left. The light changes to red for my direction. Miraculously, the cars ahead of me move ahead leaving the intersection clear. The pedestrians have not yet reached the middle of the intersection. I pull into the intersection and turn left across the two lanes of stopped traffic. The street ahead is farily clear. I have no idea where it goes, but it has to be better than where I am.

Once I am out of the gridlock area, the traffic is not too bad. I think that's because I am headed back to the east and most people are trying to go to the west to the Holland Tunnel. I find my way to the Brooklyn Bridge eastbound. Traffic is not too bad in this direction. (Who wants to go to Brooklyn for the Fourth of July?) The bridge dumps us onto the Flatbush Avenue Extension.

I'm thinking that my best bet at this time is to take the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Staten Island, and from there take state route 440 over to New Jersey and the Garden State Parkway. Actually, I had thought of taking this route earlier, before succumbing to the instructions of the navigator, just because I wanted to go over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I should have listened to my intuition.

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is magnificant. Once the longest suspension bridge in the world. It was a thrill seeing it up close and driving over it. Traffic was not bad on this route. We arrived at our hotel in Red Bank, NJ, beside the Garden State Parkway about 6:30 PM. Altogether it had taken about three and a half hours to make a trip that would have taken perhaps one hour under normal traffic conditions (even normal conditions for New York City!)

Driving through New Jersey and Delaware the next day we saw a lot of serious traffic congestion, but it was all in the opposite direction. People trying to get to the beaches. I can't imagine wanting to go to a beach badly enough to endure this traffic. Fortunately we didn't have to.