Overly Ambitious Onion Truck Shuts Down Brooklyn Bridge

DUMBO, BROOKLYN — Thick afternoon traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge came to a total standstill for nearly an hour Tuesday while police forced an 18-wheeler loaded to the brim with onions, which had no business being on the bridge in the first place, to sheepishly back down the bridge and the Sands Street on-ramp, a witness told Patch.

Tobias Brusegard, in town from Canada, said he watched the whole mess unfold from the back of his Uber.

Apparently, the onion truck driver realized too late that his massive maroon cab-piece wasn't going to clear the Brooklyn Bridge's 11-foot height limit (having ignored ample signage along the way), and found himself stuck in the middle of the bridge around 1 p.m.

So police officers had to intervene in the idiocy, Brusegard said, and help the driver slowly inch back in the direction from whence he came.

"After sitting in traffic for 25-30 minutes" on the Brooklyn side of the bridge, Brusegard said, he watched cops let some cars through to clear a path for the semi.

"They then stopped us where we were on the Tillary Street ramp, where I took the pics, for another 15-20 while the NYPD backed him down the Sands Street ramp," he said in an email.

The NYPD's press office was not able to provide any official information about the incident. However, an (audibly overworked) police spokeswoman did send us a link Tuesday night to the Department of Transportation's rules for the Brooklyn Bridge, which include a strict ban on all commercial trucks. Despite these clear rules, she said, blunders like that of the onion truck driver are not uncommon.

"He probably got up there and realized he couldn’t go over it," the NYPD spokeswoman said.

An army of Reddit know-it-alls who stumbled across Brusegard's photos had some insights and theories of their own to add. A few highlights from the thread:

"I used to live on Adams Street and my living room window looked out over the bridge. Definitely a regular occurrence."

"This happens a lot. It causes a ton of traffic on the BQE entrance as well as the street entrance to get the truck down from the bridge. There are signs at both entrances, on Sands St and from the BQE. Truckers know that NYC is a nightmare with routes, but that s--- is clearly posted everywhere possible."

"This also happens on the Henry Hudson parkway. A few months ago a huge truck got on and realized it couldn't fit in the underpass. Luckily they stopped instead of ramming into the underpass. But they blocked up traffic for hours."

"There's no way in hell all of those onions were going to a single location just off the bridge in Manhattan. That truck was probably headed to a distribution center in NJ. Unless the next Marvel movie has some onion disaster scene shooting on location today."

"Those onions are filled with cocaine."

"Well, that driver gets to tell people for the rest of his life that he personally shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, which is kinda cool."

"The Onion Knight loses the Battle of the East River. First Blackwater Bay now this ... it's been tough times."

As long as we're indulging in some healthy speculation here, we might also mention that on the very same day as the onion truck incident, a particularly revolting piece of pro-Hilter/Trump graffiti happened to show up along the pedestrian walkway of — you guessed it — the Brooklyn Bridge. Coincidence?

Photos courtesy of Tobias Brusegard