Larry Shah, who has sold posters outside City Hall on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge for the past eight years, said the crowds on the bridge this weekend were unlike anything he had encountered before.

“Yesterday was horrible,” Mr. Shah, 66, said, adding that his business suffered on Saturday as a result. “If there are a lot of people, they are just pushing and going across the bridge. There were a lot of people, but not a lot of buyers.”

Andre Goetres, who was visiting from Germany, called the slalom course of bikes and pedestrians “quite annoying.”

“You have to walk to the left and to the right, and there’s those bikes that nobody has their eye on,” said Mr. Goetres, 38, who lives in Berlin. “I prefer the Williamsburg Bridge.”

But visitors like Mr. Goetres will likely have a hard time finding respite elsewhere.

“Right after Christmas, the crowds tend to build in anticipation of New Year’s Eve,” said Christopher C. Heywood, a spokesman for NYC & Company, the city’s tourism marketing arm. He added, “You’re getting a very strong mix of day trippers coming in from the tristate region, but you’re also getting a lot of international visitors coming for holidays.”

In Times Square, there have been an average of 353,540 pedestrians each day in December, marking a nearly 6 percent increase from last year, according to the Times Square Alliance.