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 