Lane reopened on ramp to Throgs Neck

Throgs Neck Bridge crossers, rejoice. Your drive just got easier.

Twenty months after a construction fire on the bridge led the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to limit access to the crossing, the agency Tuesday reopened a second lane on the Cross Island Parkway's northbound ramp onto the bridge linking Queens and the Bronx.

The parkway entrance to the Bronx-bound lanes has been limited to one lane since August 2009, shortly after a construction worker's torch ignited a three-alarm fire that shut off access to the bridge from the Cross Island. The MTA already had planned to reconfigure the Queens approach to the bridge as part of a $100-million project, which still is under way.

Since that summer, the Cross Island Parkway on-ramp has become a major traffic choke point. Backups routinely stretch for a half-mile or more as cars on the parkway merge into a single lane to get on the Throgs Neck.

The reconfigured on-ramp moves the merge point several hundred feet closer to the top of the ramp, MTA Bridges & Tunnels spokeswoman Judie Glave said. The design is meant to reduce the number of accidents that occurred when vehicles merged into bridge traffic, especially Bronx-bound trucks.

Jim Ferrara, president of MTA Bridges and Tunnels, said the agency is looking at how to improve traffic flow on the bridge and ramp "now that construction work on the Queens approach is winding down and we have more roadway to work with."

Robert Sinclair Jr., spokesman for the AAA, said the change was a "major step forward in improving the safety and movement of traffic." The single-lane on-ramp not only caused delays, he said, but left some drivers vulnerable to rear-end collisions on the right lane of the Cross Island. It's been terrible."