Social distancing has uncluttered New York's iconic Brooklyn Bridge — and some architects have plans to keep it that way

• The Brooklyn Bridge is a New York City icon that hosts thousands of pedestrians, cyclists, and cars on any given day.
• While cars remain confined to the lower level, pedestrians and cyclists share a narrow wooden walkway on the upper level.
• The coronavirus pandemic has emptied out the usual crowd — and some architects want to keep it that way permanently.
• The New York City Council and the Van Alen Institute commissioned the "Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge" competition to inform future renovation plans.
• Proposals to make walking across the Brooklyn Bridge a better experience range from eliminating car traffic altogether to adding dedicated lanes for pedestrians and cyclists.

The 137-year-old Brooklyn Bridge is one of New York City's best-known landmarks, but if you've walked across it in the past few years, you know it better as a metaphor for pre-pandemic Gotham: a cramped nightmare.

The bridge is divided into two levels — the lower level is reserved for car traffic while pedestrians and cyclists share the narrow walkway on the upper level.

The width of the walkway varies between 10 feet and 17 feet.

I recently walked across the bridge while the city was in phrase three of reopening and it's again a metaphor for the Big Apple: far less crowded now, and socially distanced. At times, it was still a delicate dance to avoid cyclists in the narrower parts of the walkway, but it felt like a better way to experience the bridge.

With that in mind, the New York City Council and the nonprofit architectural organization, the Van Alen Institute, have commissioned the "Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge" competition, geared toward rethinking the iconic bridge's design. Deborah Marton, executive director at Van Alen, told Business Insider that making the Brooklyn Bridge a better experience for pedestrians was at its core.

Marton said that while there are no immediate plans to work with New York's Dept. of Transportation to change the infrastructure of the bridge based on the winning design, she believes elements from these ideas might find their way into future renovations.

The Dept. of Transportation has toyed with the idea of expanding the pedestrian promenade for years, but here's what a walk across the bridge looked like in 2019:

An August 2016 proposal from city officials to expand the promenade said that "stopping for picture taking creates pinch points and conflicts with walking and cycling," while in December 2018, the bridge got so crowded, the police had to intervene to disperse it.

In April 2020, while most of the city was on lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, the throng was down to a trickle, Business Insider's David Slotnick previously observed, adding that there was still a handful of commuters and people exercising on the bridge.

This is what the bridge looked like last week, without the usual crowd and steady stream of cyclists:

Two compelling designs from "Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge" came from finalists Scott Francisco and Arup + BIG.

Francisco and his team at Pilot Projects Design Collective, who are in favor of giving pedestrians and cyclists their dedicated space, are among the architects proposing a bridge overhaul.

Francisco proposes separate bike paths on both levels that would add walking space to the crowded boardwalk. He is also in favor of adding lookout points to the promenade for visitors to enjoy the view. There would still be several lanes reserved for car traffic on the lower level.

To add to the walkway experience, Francisco's design includes tiny, biodiverse micro-forests that would line parts of the walkway. The proposal, titled "Brooklyn Bridge Forest," aims to use sustainably sourced wood for any of the additional planks. Francisco said this would involve extracting a limited amount of wood from a local community in Guatemala while supporting its conservation efforts.

"Our change is quite, in some ways, minimal, and we were trying to celebrate the historic Brooklyn bridge. But we need to make it work, we need to make it respond to the current conditions of the time," Francisco told Business Insider.

He estimated that planning, engagement, and construction will take just shy of four years, and he shared the mock-up with us, pictured below:

Design firms Arup and Bjarke Ingels Groups, on the other hand, are teaming up on a "Back to the Future" design to propose a bigger change for the bridge — completely eliminating car traffic. They agreed with Francisco in creating a dedicated pedestrian walkway on the upper level, but they also had a couple on the lower level.

The principle behind the design is to go back to the roots of the bridge as primarily for transit and pedestrians, not cars.

At its peak in the 1940s, Arup Project Manager James Conway told Business Insider, the bridge carried over 425,000 people per day on four lanes of mass transit, including the Subway and streetcars. Now, that number is about 125,000, even though the city's population continued to grow, and Arup's design wants to remedy that.

Conway said Arup "would like to reverse" this dynamic, which suggests the bridge in particular and New York City in general "has become better at moving cars than they are at moving people." This was the inspiration for the "Back to the Future design," as Arup calls it.

The Dept. of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment.