Tag Archives: Transportation

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FAST AND FREE BUSES

When Zohran Mamdani claimed victory Tuesday in New York City’s mayoral race, he led the crowd in a chant of three of his relentless campaign taglines.

One was for freezing the monthly rate in rent-stabilized apartments.

The second was for providing free universal childcare. 

Both of those promises addressed his overall theme of making one of the nation’s most expensive cities more affordable for people who work there. 

The third might surprise people who don’t live in or near a big city. 

Making buses fast and free.

When people worry about making ends meet, of course they think of where they’re going to live. Then come eating and healthcare, two things that are much more in the jurisdiction of federal and state governments. And childcare is a worrisome essential for any family with or thinking about raising children.

But transportation is often an afterthought. If I have a job, or a doctor’s appointment, or a family get-together, I’ll figure out a way to get there.

The problem is that it’s no so easy. 

The assumption in America is that everybody has a car. In suburbia, every household averages two cars – if there are teens or young adults living at home, it could be as many as four or five vehicles clogging the driveway and the garage.

But in cities, cars are a nuisance. Their main purpose is for getting large amounts of groceries or taking a weekend trip out of town.

So the idea of improving bus service in New York City – and even creating lines that don’t charge the $2.90 (make that $3 on the day Mamdani takes office) one-way fare – resonates with   city residents.

It goes to a larger issue that doesn’t just apply to New York. 

For too long, we’ve relied on automobiles as our main source of transport. We’ve been sold on the idea that they are about our freedom to travel in the style we want – in a capsule that’s heated or cooled to our specs, with our music or our talking heads, eating whatever we want.

But is it freedom?

When I think about what time in my life I would love to get back now that it’s becoming a more precious commodity, it is not the hours I’ve spent playing video games or watching the Mets lose. 

It’s the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent sitting in traffic. Moving 10 feet at a time. Swearing at people cutting into my lane. Not knowing why this is happening – is it construction, is it an accident. One time, I swear, it was people watching a very attractive woman riding a horse on a bridle path adjacent to the road.

So the idea of making buses fast and free has quite the appeal. If you can get from your house to where your need to go quickly – without worrying about congestion, gas, mechanical issues and finding a parking space – you might sign up for that. 

In the process, you’d be saving yourself some money and – as a nice fringe benefit – help combat climate change.

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One issue I harp on is that there is often a lack of imagination in considering new public transportation. As I’ve said before, innovation in transportation has come at nowhere near the speed of innovation in telecommunications.

It doesn’t even have to be some new form of transport – like a maglev train or a vacuum tube. 

In Los Angeles, there’s a proposal to put up a gondola service from downtown to Dodger Stadium more than a mile away. It seems like the kind of imaginative idea that would help L.A., especially given it’s troubled relationship with auto.

The problem is that there are environmental concerns, particularly among residents of the city’s Chinatown. I’m not sure how a gondola would be worse than the exhaust from hundreds of cars on Alameda Street, but that’s something better suited for the folks in the community to sort out.

The important thing is that people are starting to think about this problem – particularly areas that have been bypassed in previous projects.

In New York, there’s a proposal to use abandoned freight tracks to connect neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn via light rail. It seems like the line won’t take forever to build and could give people a way to get places without going through the mishegas that is Manhattan Island.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle are extending rail services further into their outskirts and suburbs. Austin, Atlanta and Madison, Wisconsin, are working on major bus rapid transit projects.

A lot of these projects derive their funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that President Joe Biden – you know, the guy your TV talking head thinks didn’t do anything worthwhile – signed into law in 2021. That act also is responsible for the traffic congestion around construction zones around the country – which isn’t fun but still somewhat better than a chunk of interstate highway collapsing in the middle of the night. 

New ideas should be encouraged – and it’s great that some of the new projects will be here before 2028. But old ways of getting from here to there can and should be modernized, made more efficient, expanded and cost a lot less.

Zohran Mamdani understands that, when it comes to creating an affordability agenda for one of the most improbable political runs in American history, boiling it down to “fast and free buses” works nicely. 

It’s not so much that New Yorkers should hold him – and the rest of us hold our elected officials – to it. It’s that we need to put the car in the garage and help them get these plans in motion.

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MAKE AMERICA GREATER

There are just four days left in the Biden administration and it is my intention to enjoy each one as a gift.

A decent, hard-working man – perhaps a bit too old for the job but still good at it anyway – graced us from noon ET on January 20, 2021 to this coming Monday at noon. Like every other presidency, Joe Biden’s wasn’t perfect. But it came as close as any in my lifetime.

Joe Biden guided us gently out of the gloom of the COVID-19 debacle inherited from the guy who’s replacing him. They might be a pain in the butt, but all those highway construction projects you see are making our roads – along with the rest of our infrastructure – more suited to the century we’re now a quarter of the way into.

He stood for Ukraine when Vladimir Putin got frustrated by waiting for his imperial dreams to come true. He combatted climate change and showed respect for people who have been traditionally belittled in American society.

The American economy is the strongest in the world. He managed to blast America’s way out of the pandemic-induced recession and then brought the growth lower with a brief spike in inflation.

That spike, however, did in both him and Kamala Harris. And so we get Trump again for four years – assuming the blowhard makes it to age 82.

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Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama spent way too much of their presidencies cleaning up the messes left by their predecessors.

Biden, of course, had the aftermath of the pandemic. Obama faced both the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and an American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I suspect just about everyone reading this and liking it agrees there will be an equal or worse clusterfuck to deal with four years from Monday.

And yet, that’s the mistake we make and the other side doesn’t.

We concentrate on fighting them. They fight us – don’t get me wrong – but they also develop new, crueler, stupider ideas to foist on both the left and the cucumbers who voted for them in November. 

There will be a lot of angst to go around. But part of their gameplan is to frustrate us – to make us concentrate on their latest perverse idea or vendetta.

Right now, you’re seeing it with the wildfires in Los Angeles. How California is a failed liberal experiment and the disaster is due to a combination of its godlessness, diversity and economic initiatives. Just check out some of the comments from Wyoming Sen. John Horsesasso.

It’s meant to drain our energy. And it has to, at least to some extent. You can’t claim to be a decent human being and then deny aid to Los Angeles, or just uproot millions of people living and working here peacefully because they didn’t get the documents you demand. Or tell women they risk prison or worse if they try in any way to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy.

But we need to be better this time. And the way to do that is to think about what we want to do to make America greater.

See, I think Peruvian restaurants and Hmong gymnasts and Somalian-born soldiers make this country great. Not McDonald’s or Walmart or Tesla – or not by themselves, anyway. 

And it certainly is not a hateful convicted felon who is absolutely clueless about what it takes to lead an amazing land.

So we need to advance our agenda. To come up with ideas we think will improve our country and, maybe with it, the world. 

They don’t have to be popular now. Some absolutely won’t be. But we need to advance the case so that we can sell them from conviction and evidence. And begin the process of educating and converting some of the just shy of 50% of American voters who actually chose Trump over a really smart, energetic woman.

Over the next five weeks, I’m going to put forward some ideas I’ve thought about as ways we can show how we’re looking toward 2100, not 1900.

The ideas:

— Universal basic income: This is what Andrew Yang promoted when he ran for president in 2000, and then got weird. 

Both liberals and conservatives have reasons to like this idea. But Trump and his supporters will see it as free money (that they don’t think they’re getting) and squawk.

— Police reform. I bristle every time I see a car with one of those black versions of the American flag and the blue stripe in the middle. As if policing in this country should go unquestioned and unfettered. 

But when you see three or four cops together, do you feel safer? Or nervous? And do the answers depend on what you look like? Frankly, few things are in more need of improvement in this country than how we police ourselves.

— Immigration reform. Trump and his minions don’t want to reform immigration. They want to abolish it – unless you can make a considerable donation to the GOP after you get here. The question of how we treat people coming here, for more than four centuries, is one of our greatest dilemmas. 

We should aspire to be better than that – this doesn’t seem like that intractable a problem if we come up with creative and humane solutions.

— Getting around. It’s believed one of Trump’s first executive orders will be to maximize oil production and end credits for electric vehicles – the short-sighted, idiotic “drill, baby, drill” mantra.

Let’s get past both those forms of transportation – there have been few innovations in creating new ways to go places compared with communication technology. Let’s encourage imagination.

— Kindness. Mean will be in power starting Monday. Mean will be the default approach of the White House, Congress and Supreme Court. Mean will drive the stories you see on the news and the attitude of the plurality. If you don’t believe that, explain why a house near me still flew its “Fuck Biden” and “Fuck Kamala Harris” flags as late as New Year’s Eve. 

We have to create new, innovative ways to be kind – to look out for people who are pariahs to the MAGAs. Kindness is our not-so-secret weapon for making America greater – a task that will be easier once we get past Trump and his ilk.

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IT’S A TRIP

Communication technology has radically changed in my lifetime – think cellphones, 84-inch TV screens, the whole freakin’ Internet.

But we’re pretty much using the same transportation technology that existed since before I was born.

I don’t imagine a President Kamala Harris is going to be as bold as to push for magnetic levitation, vacuum or anything else short of the impossible (see: “Star Trek,” transporter). So I’ll settle for improving and rebuilding our systems of getting places – and that’s a commitment that will be more of a continuation than a change.

President Biden should go down in history for what’s he captained in terms of infrastructure. It might be frustrating to get stuck in traffic caused by the umpteen highway improvement projects around the country. 

But making these roads safer and more efficient is a job that’s long overdue – and Biden did all this while boosting employment and, yes, keeping the inflation inherent in such an expansion in check. (Yes, we had inflation problems, but those were more about supply chain shortfalls caused by the pandemic.)

Improving highways isn’t the best way to meet our nation’s transportation needs. The idea is to get more people out of cars rather than into them in order to combat climate change and move people more efficiently. But that will take time.

Fortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has been clear-minded about pushing for alternative fuel – particularly, electric – vehicles. And it’s making a difference – there are lots more hybrid and electric vehicles on the road. People are starting to realize how much better life can be when you don’t need to unburden yourself of $40 or $50 to fill a gas tank each week.

Harris wants to expand the network of charging stations so that you’re never more than a few miles away from one. Her administration would also need to push automakers to improve battery life and length – long-distance trips are still a problem because of limited vehicle range.

Biden’s being a train freak has been a boon for public transportation. Improvements in intercity rail and commuter lines were prioritized – New York and New Jersey are finally building a new tunnel to replace century-old infrastructure under the Hudson River.

Now it’s time to expand. Europe and East Asia thrive on high-speed rail. There’s no reason the United States can’t. If it took less than five hours to from midtown New York to downtown Chicago by train, wouldn’t you rather take that than schlep to LaGuardia, wait for a 2-hour flight, then schlep from O’Hare to the Loop.

Secretary Pete Buttigieg – whose high profile has been a reassuring sign that Biden and Harris took transportation seriously – has pushed for an expansion of high-speed rail projects across the country. It’s going to take a while to build them – probably beyond the lifetime of many of us.

But let’s at least start.

One other transportation thought.

This summer, New York was on the verge of a bold experiment, the kind that doesn’t happen often in this country. Like several other cities around the world – London, in particular – New York was going to initiate congestion pricing – making drivers pay a toll to enter midtown and lower Manhattan.

The idea would be to unclog the narrow streets of the nation’s largest city, making it easier for vehicles that absolutely need to get around. Nothing terrifies me quite like seeing an ambulance stuck in gridlock on an impassable side street – imagine the poor person fighting for his or her life inside.

People who live in the suburbs squawked. How dare New York charge us extra to bring our pickups and SUVs into town? (Forgetting how they bar non-residents from using their parks and pools.) So the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, caved and put off the plan’s implementation.

Should Harris win the White House, she should push to get the experiment started. And she should also, after making sure officials keep their promise to fund mass transit with the revenue from the program, pump federal money into the city to help improve the subways and buses.

Getting people from here to there – safely, quickly and cleanly – appears to be a goal of the Harris-Walz campaign. And let’s face it, it’s the only campaign thinking about something that serious.

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