After school yesterday, the pickleball gang was meeting at the new pickleball courts in Buccleuch Park-- fourteen new courts!-- and Buccleuch Park is in New Brunswick, adjacent to the Rutgers College Ave campus-- so the perfect distance to bike ride from my house in Highland Park . . . this would be a great warm-up for my hamstrings and hips AND I wanted to do the right thing and not add more traffic and pollution to the general mayhem that is New Brunswick/Rutgers at the start of the semester so I took a look at Google Maps and noticed that the shortest route was one I had taken before-- you go across the Route 27 bridge from Highland Park to New Brunswick, and then you go past the homeless encampment and through a tunnel that goes under the bridge and then you take a narrow, overgrown, pavement path in between Route 18 and the south bank of the Raritan River-- and the path is definitely decrepit and ruinous and in disrepair, full of trash and overgrown with ragweed and poison ivy, but it's not closed-- so I rode this path, which I hadn't been on in many years-- since COVID?-- and I passed some sketchy looking holes in the fence and a homeless guy actually shooting heroin-- the needle was in his arm-- and I had to pass very close to him because the path was so narrow and I didn't want to fall down the cliff and into the river--
and I finally got to the stairs which lead to a bike path bridge over Route 18, and then this bridge connects to the Rutgers campus bike path-- but when I reached the top of the stairs, the gate to get out was chained and padlocked--
so after going through all the stages of grief and doing a lot of cursing-- I could SEE the Rutgers children and see the Rutgers buildings, but I could not escape the caged bridge and there was no way across Route 18 there-- it was a multi-lane freeway under and overpass with a high concrete divider in the middle-- so after much profanity, I texted the pickleball crew, told them I would be late-- and carried my back back down the stairs, rode the overgrown path, passed the homeless guy-- who had now set up a tarp and was shooting heroin again . . . I had to walk my bike past him so as not to run into him-- I said, "right behind you, man . . . the gate was locked!" but he didn't seem to feel my pain-- and then I biked all the way back to the bridge, crossed over into New Brunswick proper and biked through the College Avenue campus to the park, where I played some pickleball, and then I biked home in the ensuing darkness, using the New Brunswick bike lanes-- but there were some assholes parked in the bike lanes in places so I yelled at them-- and my next move is this: I'm going to write an irate letter to the city of New Brunswick-- they either need to indicate that this bike path is closed or they need to clean it up and open the gate-- but this anecdote is a microcosm of our bike paths in Middlesex County-- there are some decent ones but none of them connect particularly well and there are always dangerous unprotected sections and it's really not viable to bike places unless you're willing to risk your life . . . so that's one of the many reasons everyone is in their car creating traffic (some of the other reasons are that people are stupid and people are lazy).
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