On Being a New York City Driver

I have driven mountain roads in Vermont that are less treacherous than driving down any of hundreds of miles of supposedly paved streets and highways in the city of New York. Having had recent occasion to travel to the U.S. mainland, that is to say, to New Jersey, I got a lesson in just how corrupt, arrogant, blithely dismissive, elitist and, yes, as far as I am concerned, literally criminal the caretakers of our city, "the greatest city in the world," are. In our neighbor to the west, roads are silken, the lane markings clear in daylight, sparkling at night, bedecked with lovely embedded sapphire reflectors, potholes rare. On a typical rainy night in New York, on the other hand, (and, yes, an older driver I--apparently unlike the city's DOT--am perfectly aware that older drivers have diminished night vision), my hands tense on the steering wheel as I squint through my windshield trying to determine where there is a lane to take. The lane markings have faded to near invisibility. There are no reflectors. Mine is not the only vehicle proceeding tentatively trying to find the right arc, or near careening, trying to stay within lanes that do not exist. But, then I remind myself, I live in a city whose mayor is having a blood feud with the driving public. Fresh paint for traffic lanes is not on his to-do list.



As I thought back to my voyage to East Brunswick, New Jersey, I calculated the initial cost of my journey before I had even left the city. Eleven dollars in EZPass tolls, two charges of $5.50 to go through the Midtown and Lincoln Tunnels. Where does that money go? Aren't the funds raised by tolls supposed to be dedicated to the upkeep of roads? (When I asked my mechanic if he could tell me, his response was, "Don't ask that question. They'll kill you. Besides, I sell lots of tie-rods this way.") The evidence of my senses tells me that not a penny has been spent on our roads, and I'm not talking about seasonal potholes, the alleged ravages of a hard winter. Our roads are in a near-permanent state of (benign?) neglect. To cite just one example among dozens that come to mind, going into Queens from Manhattan, the approach ramp to the Triborough Bridge (Unlike others, I will not dishonor Bobby's memory by attaching his name to an urban ruin.) has been--how to describe this accurately--rutted, caverned, rubbled, cragged?--for years, for as long as I can remember. My Nissan doesn't just stutter, tremble and shake; it is wracked to its core, its shock absorbers tested beyond their limit. One of the richest cities in the world. America's first city.

The various "Authorities" collect millions of dollars and apparently just pocket the money. Talk of opening their books is met with the kind of dark laughter you might imagine would come from the owner of one of the city's carting services if you asked to opt out. There is no outcry except for the sad seasonal plea from New Yorkers to fill those potholes that are destroying their vehicles, sending their hubcaps frisby-ing off to curbside, endangering their own lives and the lives of nearby pedestrians. The answer, when there is one, is a tarpot and a thin skim fated to fail within days.

With the nation, state and city hovering near bankruptcy, we will, of course, be told that there just isn't enough money in the budget to repair our roads. This always raises the question of why repairs weren't made when we were rolling in tax dollars. And, yes, the wearisome rhetoric about stimulus money being devoted to our infrastructure needs certainly comes to mind. We're all holding our breath waiting for that to happen, perhaps concurrent with rubber wheels on elevated trains and bullet trains to East Brunswick?

Nope. I want to see the books. I will risk my life and humbly request that I see where my toll expenditures, gasoline taxes, registration fees, etc., go.

And then there's our mayor, a man who considers himself presidential timber. We have now long been treated to the prospect of one of the nation's richest billionaires having a major snit because he could not get his way on a commuter tax. Even more outrageous, however, is the man's implementation of a series of obvious mandates to his obedient commissioners designed to make driving in Manhattan a hellish experience. Again, there is a sad, vast richness of examples to cite. He has essentially set up virtual roadblocks in Manhattan reminiscent of the barriers separating Gazans and West Jordanians from Israelis. In part, these take the form of the lovely plazas he has designed. Not quite the open plazas of Italy and Spain, these are cement triangles planted in the middle of major thoroughfares such as the one in Times Square where feckless New Yorkers are invited to sit on cheap folding chairs and breathe in the automobile exhaust being expelled from long lines of vehicles stuck in the traffic jams that the squares themselves have caused. Major avenues that once allowed three or four lanes of traffic now accomodate only a single lane. Unbelievably, traffic islands replete with new plantings have now cropped up on these avenues, and, as if the islands themselves do not take up enough space, they are lined with parking spaces so that the one lane through which one is forced to navigate is reminiscent of nothing so much as a the chutes that lead cattle to slaughter. Might as well fill the coffers with parking fees and violations as well; just add them to the nightmarish mix.

Another device recently implemented to cripple traffic is the imposition of bus lanes forbidden to ordinary vehicular traffic. The notion that 34th Street, for example, is still a cross-town throughfare is silly. Like many of the nearby avenues, most of 34th Street now accomodates only a single lane of vehicles. Like Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, the mayor must frolic in his City Hall office, giggling at the world he has created, the pain he has caused his hated outer-borough drivers, basking in the afterglow of virtue he has demonstrated by commuting to work on the IRT for five minutes rather than using his one of his Rolls-Royces. In spite of feeble attempts to pose as a man of the people, just folks, the truth is that everything this mayor does is designed to lubricate the wheels of government for the profit and gain of his cohorts--from planting trees to abolishing smoking in public places to banning transfats and imposing taxes on soft drinks. These are all good things, but to believe that these are mayoral fiats from a self-envisioned benevolent dictator is naive. He has paved over the city with high-rise luxury apartment buildings, fantasizes filling them with his true constituents, and then doing whatever he can to make their lives even more comfortable. A social program for the rich.

No one is more anti-automobile than this writer. I am sure that before our century is out, privately owned automobiles will have become as quaint as typewriters. They are an economic, environmental and social scourge. Just give us a way to get to our destinations that is fast, clean and efficient: trolleys, jitneys, light rail, bullet trains, you name it. Give me a way to get there and I will await the amnesty on illegal possession of the private automobile. What we are in fact being treated to are outrageously regressive taxes on the poorest New Yorkers in the form of higher bus and subway fares, cutbacks in the very forms of transportation they are being exhorted to utilize. The poorest, lowest paid New Yorkers face ever greater chunks of their paychecks going to subsidize a transportation system that exhausts them even before they open the doors to their workplaces. But don't think about switching to a car. It's a battlefield out there.