Never Again, New York City

#3 in the drivers seat

A few days ago, we had the misfortune to be assigned a load to Brooklyn, New York. No, we've been through parts of New York before, and upstate New York is beautiful, but we've never had to drive in downtown New York City before. Not only was this delivery right smack dab in the middle of Brooklyn, it wasn't even delivering to one ofour typical locations - it was delivering to a hospital!

The trip went smoothly until we crossed from New Jersey into New York and headed for the city. We exited the interstate into Brooklyn and immediately knew we were in trouble!

The city streets are very narrow and lined with parked cars on each side, and some random cars stopped in the middle of the road as well. The traffic seems to think that following normal rules of the road is overrated, and generally has no respect for stop lights, road markings, or slow moving semis. Taxis and personal cars zipped around us without caring about little details like driving on the correct side of the road! The roads were certainly not built with large vehicles in mind, and it's nearly impossible to turn from one city street to another without taking the whole intersection. Several times we very nearly hit or scraped against parked cars, impatient taxis, and careless pedestrians.

When we finally arrived at the delivery location, we found it to be a small inner city hospital with one loading dock directly off the street. We had to block traffic in all directions and back up across the entire intersection, and our front end still hung out in the street even when we were fully backed to the dock. We were relieved to be there at last...until they told us that nobody was available to unload our trailer and asked us to come back in 4 hours. What?!

Downtown Brooklyn 

Of course we couldn't stay there, so we had to find somewhere to go park for a few hours. The nearest safe place to park was about half an hour away, but we didn't even get halfway there before we were stopped by a low bridge ahead that we wouldn't be able to clear under. We tried another route and ran into the same problem. We also got into road construction in an area that blocked off the road and left us a passage so narrow that our front corners were nearly touching the wall and our back tires were rubbing against it! We managed to back through an intersection and get turned around, and ended up pulling over on the side of the road and parking with the cars for a couple hours.

When we returned a few hours later, backing into the dock was even more difficult due to the increased traffic in the area. Don ended up helping the staff unload the trailer, and even with his help it took them about four hours to get us unloaded and reloaded. When we finally left, it was mid-morning in downtown Brooklyn and traffic was even more insane! The interstate was only about 3 miles away but it took us an hour and a half to get there through the narrow, crowded streets while dodging the hordes of rude, impatient drivers and pedestrians.

We finally got out of NYC and breathed a deep sigh of relief. We don't want to ever go back! It's bad enough driving through that city in a car, but navigating it in a semi was a nightmare!