By Julie Shapiro
Taxi drivers honked and traffic cops shouted Monday morning at the congested intersection of Albany St. and South End Ave.
One cab driver, heading away from the intersection, rolled down his window and leaned out to advise taxis heading in the opposite direction.
“You’ll have to turn around,” he yelled to the line of cabs that were brought to a standstill along Albany St.
The source of the chaos on Albany was one block north: Liberty St., a key artery for traffic into Battery Park City, was closed from West St. to South End Ave.
Monday was the first day of Liberty St.’s closure, scheduled to last for 30 days. The construction includes utility work related to the larger West St. promenade project. Surface work will raise the level of the road 3 ½ to 4 feet to match the elevation at the World Trade Center site, said Adam Levine, a State Department of Transportation spokesperson.
The backups on Albany St. started early Monday morning, said Dino Geangello, a security guard at the World Financial Center garage on Albany St. Cars and trucks waiting to get into the garage must undergo a security inspection, which slowed the traffic flow.
“It’s nuts, nuts, nuts,” Geangello said of the traffic. In his 14 years working at the garage, “it’s never been this bad,” he said.
Commuters and residents alike were inconvenienced by the closure.
Tahir Khan, who works in the World Financial Center at Dow Jones, drives in from White Plains each morning.
The traffic near Liberty St. is “the last thing you need in your commute,” he said. “It looks like a crazy mess.” Khan has grown used to traffic signs changing without notice, and can never be certain where he’ll be able to make a left turn or a U-turn.
“There’s no plan,” he said. “You never know — it’s just day to day.”
The bollards blocking off Liberty St. diverted buses onto Albany, including the M9, M20 and several school buses.
Albany is narrower than Liberty and so is less equipped to handle the increased traffic. With cars and trucks parked along the street, there is only room for one lane of traffic in each direction.
The D.O.T. promised that parking would be prohibited on the street, leaving room for four lanes of traffic. However, there were no signs or cones until Wednesday morning, leaving cars and trucks free to line the street earlier in the week.
Ironically, when the no parking signs appeared on Wednesday, they were affixed to cones that blocked off part of the street. So, even with the parking ban, the westbound side of Albany St. still only accommodated one lane of traffic.
Also, the D.O.T. scheduled traffic agents to supervise the intersection of Albany St. and South End Ave. from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., but the workers arrived late Monday and Tuesday mornings, Levine acknowledged.
Tom Goodkind, a Gateway Plaza resident and C.B. 1 member, is not pleased with the project’s rocky start.
“They shut down our main street,” he said.
He is also skeptical that the work will finish on time.
“When you hear the state say six weeks, you can’t imagine it’ll actually be six weeks,” he said. “We’ve been through this before, and it can be longer.”
There is some confusion about the duration of the project. An announcement on the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center’s Web site says the project will last 30 days but that buses will be diverted for six weeks. The Metropolitan Transit Authority decided on the six-week figure just to be safe, Levine said, but the D.O.T. still expects the project to last 30 days.
Goodkind and several other community members criticized the wording of the notice and Goodkind said the work sounded like an unnecessary inconvenience. After all that the Downtown community has been through, he said, D.O.T. should reconsider more disruptive construction.
“Disruptive” barely begins to describe Community Board 1 member Bill Love’s experience. Love, who lives in Gateway, awoke at 3 a.m. to the high-pitched beeping of trucks backing up at West and Liberty Sts.
“There’s been a lot of that lately — all hours of the night,” said Love, who lives on the 31st floor.
By the time the Liberty St. work drops off, the early-morning work at the World Trade Center starts up.
“It’s difficult to sleep soundly,” Love said.
There are no official “quiet hours” during which construction must cease, said Levine, of D.O.T. The truck backup alarms are a federal requirement, he added.
The Liberty St. utility work is part of the reconstruction of the West St. promenade, which began June 1 and will be completed by the end of 2009, according to the L.M.C.C.C. Web site. The project will restore West St. to eight lanes and modify landscaping and pedestrian bridges.
