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Bike Tolls on the Triborough

With some out-of-town visitors to entertain, my destination yesterday was (where else!) the MTA’s Transit Museum. There I noticed a small detail that had escaped my notice prior — i.e., the presence of bike tolls on the Triborough Bridge. Can any transpo geeks out there enlighten us as to any more details about this? What was bike traffic like across the bridge when it opened? Was there a special toll booth, or did cyclists merge into a car lane? When was the toll scrapped? And for that matter, when did the (little-observed) policy of cyclists walking their bikes across the bridge(s) come into being?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Bicycles, Cities, Commuting, Etc., Uncategorized. 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.

2 Responses to “Bike Tolls on the Triborough”

  1. Chris Neuman Says:
    May 19th, 2010 at 10:33 pm

    I’m guessing it had something to do with Robert Moses.

  2. Charlie Parker Says:
    May 21st, 2010 at 9:54 am

    It was there when the bridge opened. On July 12, 1936 the NY Times reported that the first vehicle across was a boy on a bike and he didn’t pay the toll. An April 18, 1937 article about an automatic toll recording system implies bikes would have used the same toll booths as cars and trucks.

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