The headline is lifted from a piece in The Atlantic about Noo Yawk Gov. Kathy Hochul croaking what would have been the nation’s first first congestion-pricing plan for traffic, charging motorists a fee to shoulder (fender?) their way into the ultra-swank Manhattan central bidness district.
The idea was to reduce traffic and pollution while raising money to improve the subway system.
Author Sarah Lasgow concedes that such a scheme could work in very few places in the Land of the Free. But one of them should’ve been the Big Apple, with its wide variety of transportation possibilities, among them subways, buses, and commuter rail.
Yet even if congestion pricing were only ever implemented in New York City, it would have been a signal that U.S. politicians could shake up the nation’s rigid transportation systems in the service of cutting back emissions. That cars appear to have won out even in New York shows how little room there might be for us to try anything different.
Sigh. I’m strictly a hick from the sticks, a rube who’s never even visited Noo Yawk, but I remember being seriously impressed with the mass transit in San Francisco during my first visit, back in the Seventies. I drove to that hilly town from Colorado in a Datsun pickup, four-speed manual, and was I ever glad to park that rig for a spell and find some other way to get around, something that didn’t involve me trying not to stall out as the light turned green on some ski slope of a Gay Bay intersection.
The bus system we had in Bibleburg was a bad joke, one that told you what you already knew: You want to get around in this town, you best get you a car, son!
But in San Francisco bus travel actually seemed feasible, to say nothing of a whole lot easier on the clutch. Plus, if you were lucky and happened to be at the right stop, around 10th and Judah, you might see some giant bald woman in black leather with a little dude on a leash, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Now and then she’d pop him on the noggin and he’d bounce up and down, grinning like a jackass eating yellowjackets.
This is about the time I realized that Gilbert Shelton was not always working strictly from imagination when he penned The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
Speaking of ways to get around, especially to places where juicy artisanal tacos are sold, my man Mike Ferrentino has a delightful piece up on NSMB about achieving the flour tortilla state of mountain biking despite the braying naysaying of beautiful hippie taco vendors and broplow drivers.
Mad Blog Media 
Andy and Liz, up in Seattle, have been without a car for over 2 years. Light rail, busses, and shank’s mare gets them where they need to go. Liz rakes a bus to wotk in the morning and walks home, weather permitting, on a multi use path around Lake Union.
Well, Washpo CEO is living up to expectations.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/06/nx-s1-4995105/washington-post-will-lewis-tries-to-kill-story-buzbee
I enjoyed Mike’s piece, and the flour tortilla state of mountain biking is a good place to be.
103 on the back patio.
Good for Andy and Liz! I always thought it bordered on the criminal that there was no light rail along Colorado’s Front Range. Herself could’ve caught the train from Bibleburg to south Denver when she worked at the Colorado Library Consortium. It would’ve made a lot more sense than driving, especially in lousy weather.
The new hires at WaPo aren’t exactly covering themselves with glory, are they? They’re covering themselves with something, but it sure doesn’t smell like glory. I may have to croak my subscription.
Mike has The Touch, doesn’t he? I was so happy to learn that he was still bashing out the word count. The taco intro was genius. Just so happens I made some basic ground-beef tacos on Tuesday. I used Garden of Eatin’ blue corn taco shells because they were what I had in the pantry. Don’t tell Mike.
Our 1987 Hyundai Excel died from a hunk of rebar to the harmonic balancer in 1995 with just over 120K miles, and I was already biking it all over Dallas county as it was. The roughly $2K cost to repair or replace the engine for a car with a loan value of $600 just didn’t make sense considering the price of a bus pass even in Dallas. I haven’t driven since.
Occasionally I wonder what I’d do if/when the Subie croaks. I’m definitely not excited about the prospect of acquiring another motor vehicle. We could easily be a one-car family — Herself has a Honda CR-V, which is six years younger than my 2005 Forester — but I don’t much like it.
I seem to have all these bicycles cluttering up the garage for some reason. Maybe I could put those to work for local excursions and rent something for road trips.
Man, bicycling to the Foods Hole and back in 100° temps would be a bit of fun. Standing at the checkout in a pool of my own sweat and stinking like a billy goat would encourage a lot of shoppers to use the robo-cashiers. Or perhaps some other grocery altogether.
“…grinning like a jackass eating yellowjackets.”
I’m sure that’s exactly what I looked like after reading that line.
Mr. Supervisor, thanks for joining us. Where do you stand on the flour-vs.corn debate, taco-wise? And remember, you’re under oath.
My daughter lives in Melbourne, Australia. Their public tram/bus/train system is so good that she has never felt the need to get a drivers licence. I’ve used it when visiting & it is humbling.
Never had a driver’s license? Wow. That’s commendable. And cheers to the Aussies for the transpo. The craze Stateside for a while was the downtown tram, intended to move pudgy tourists around from useless shop to bad restaurant. Somehow the idea that these people would have to drive to the downtown area and hunt parking before getting the “all-aboard” never seems to occur to the city planners.
Wasn’t gonna weigh in on the taco discussion since I’m up in Michigan for chrissakes and WTH would any pastie eaters know about tacos? Well we are fortunate to have lots of people south of the border move here in the past several decades and bring their skills with them. Bluegill tacos!! Ya ain’t lived until you’ve had them inside a corn tortilla wrapped in a very thin flour tortilla. Michigan cherry salsa leaking out both ends.
Adaptability! Darwinism! Everywhere you go the food is just that little bit different, a compromise between tradition and availability.
I don’t recall seeing the corn-flour tortilla combo anywhere, but Hal has.
In Arizona I’ve seen finely diced potato mixed in with the ground beef in crispy tacos. In Santa Fe you can have your choice of soft or crisp and ground beef or shredded. The Homesick Texan gives us some history of the classic crispy taco (and a delicious recipe). I had my first taco in Universal City, just outside Randolph AFB, and decided I was adopted because this surely was my native cuisine.
Bibleburg and Pueblo leaned toward the Tex-Mex for a lot of their grub. Denver stretched itself a little more. And of course California has its own way of doing things because, hey, California.
Once you settle on your tortilla the real arguments start. Shredded or ground? Red or green? Whole beans or refried? Flat or rolled? This last refers to enchiladas, which are a whole other story.
Damn herb, that sounds really good! I live me some bluegills. When I lived in Georgia all the fisher folks were after record largemouth or striped bass. I was after the record bluegill using a fly rod and bumble bee floating poppers.
Trader Joe’s used to sell a corn/flour tortilla up here. Have not been able to find it lately. Tasted pretty good and had good integrity. Unlike politics.
Yep, Kathy Hochul sucks, even if she was from my neck of the woods. Hamburg, NY just south of Buffalo, was where I spent a good part of my youth at my grandparent’s home while my parents worked out their early marital problems, usually using methods adapted from drunken sailors in a waterfront bar. Grandpa worked at the Chevy plant in Tonawanda and came home to work in his big vegetable garden. I think I inherited my love of vegetable gardens from working with him. When my grandparents got ornery, they just quietly muttered Sicilian insults at each other, which grandma would later translate for me. Grandpa would then have his one can of Genesee Beer, watch TV, and go to bed. Kathy Hochul is a politician: she does what the money and politics tells her to do, hence, for example, the Bruen decision.
Still, you have to be a few cards short of a full deck or into Mad Max driving to want to drive a car in Manhattan anyway. I’ve done it, lived, and finally decided the only time it made sense was at 3 in the morning, when everyone but the drug dealers was asleep, and with a pistol hidden under the driver seat**. And parking? Fergetit. My late brother in law lived in upper Manhattan (or lower Bronx, not sure which) for years and never set foot in a car.
** I think the statute of limitations has expired.
I always loved my visits to San Fran in the late eighties and early nineties. Landed at the airport, took some sort of public transit downtown, and spent a week at the American Geophysical Union meeting and otherwise shoe leathering it around the old part of town. A car would have been a burden.
But in most cities, a car makes sense because we have designed our cities to be dysfunctional for mass transit–sprawl, arterial and cul de sac designs, and parking minimums. Look at the money sucking Rail Runner. Mind you I love trains, but whoever decided a train was a good idea forgot about the part of getting people from home to train and from train to work and back again.
Bibleburg is one of the textbook examples of dysfunctional by design. Rusty Mitchell, the food editor at the Gazette, used to call it “a suburb without a city,” whenever she wasn’t calling it “a cemetery with lights.”
Anyone who lived there for a couple-three decades either learned all the Secret Streets that led from east to west and back again or went completely mad. North-south wasn’t much better. I-25? Bwah ha ha, etc. Nevada? It likewise is to laugh. Academy Boulevard? Powers? Ho ho ho. The mythical Northern Passage has yet to be discovered.
Down here in Duck!burg I strive to avoid the interstates whenever possible. They ain’t safe for a sober, law-abiding motorist. Same goes for stroads like Tramway, Paseo del Norte, Juan Tabo, Eubank, Montgomery, Wyoming, San Mateo, yadda yadda yadda.
Oddly, Comanche may be the best east-west route in town. Unless school is in session, in which case you have to avoid dropoff/pickup times or you get whistle-blowing crossing guards and longish stretches of 15 mph.
Whoops: Forgot to discuss tortillas. Sabroso Foods down here does an excellent flour tort’ — just flour, salt, water, baking powder, and vegetable oil. We generally get ours from Keller’s on Eubank. We use ’em for tacos and quesadillas, and sometimes just eat ’em for a snack with butter, a little honey, and a dusting of cinnamon.