They’re not into the swing of things.
In recent weeks, the Roosevelt Island tram has had several episodes in which it’s dramatically swayed while full of passengers — leaving commuters terrified and baffled.
“It was very scary,” Thomas Wiener, a 22-year-old masters student on the island’s Cornell Tech campus, told The Post of an experience he had on the tram on a day in September that wasn’t particularly windy.
“I [was] thinking, ‘okay, if this keeps swinging like this, I think we would hit [the tower]. At the last second, the tram got jerked back into place,” said Wiener. “A lot of people, probably like a third of the people in the car, fell over.”
On October 18, longtime Roosevelt Island resident, Jean Shea, 65, said she saw the tram dramatically swaying above her. It evoked memories of the tram’s early years in the 1990s and early 2000s when it swang aggressively before a renovation.
“I looked up and said ‘uh oh, that doesn’t look so good,” Shea, who has called RI home for 41 years, told The Post.
Another islander, walking near the tram earlier this week with his young child, looked up and quipped, “No Green Goblin incidents for us,” — referencing a key scene from 2002’s “Spider-Man.”
The famously villain cuts the tram line and the web slinger quickly springs to action to prevent the car and its passengers from plummeting into the East River.
Comic book movie references aside, the situation has become severe enough that local city council representative Julie Menin penned a letter to the tram’s operator, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, over “concerns about the safety” in late October.
Menin cited another incident just days after what Shea witnessed.
“On October 20th, a passenger suffered from dizziness and headaches because of the tram cabin shaking back and forth in an excessive manner,” she wrote, adding that a video of the swinging from that day had been circulating on Instagram.
Clips of the tram whooshing back and forth on other days have been posted on YouTube.
The RIOC replied to Menin writing “that there is no imminent threat to the health and safety of our passengers.” The RIOC did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Such assurances aren’t enough for straphangers who have had a bad ride.
“I was on a swinging tram a few weeks back in a windy day,” one person commented on the viral October video on Instagram. “All of the construction workers taking the tram home at the end of the day held on to each other while others tried to not get nauseous!”
Adding insult to injury, the swaying is coinciding with a months-long partial shutdown of Roosevelt Island’s F train subway station that started at the end of summer. Plus, holiday tourist season is getting going.
“People can’t get on and off the tram it’s so packed now,” Roosevelt Island resident Patty Fallone told The Post. She said that the line to get the tram in Manhattan can stretch a block.
Residents of enclave are getting fed up.
“Transit as a whole is a huge issue on the island right now and the swaying is a huge part of it,” Community Board 8 member Paul Krikler told The Post.
“The storm couldn’t be more perfect right now.”