Stuck behind Christmas.

Another brief one today -- tied up with work, and with getting stuck in traffic. 

How stuck? 

How about train crossing stuck? 

Well, as you can see, that was just a commuter train. It was not one of those eight-mile freight trains that make you late on Tuesday when you left the house Monday. 

Slower than that, a good deal slower in fact, was when I got stuck behind Santa Claus. 

No Santa visible in this photo, true -- but the ambulance is the back of the line. Every year the volunteer fire department gets Santa to ride around on a flatbed, accompanied by lights-flashing siren-booping vehicles, to every street in town. He waves at all the adults and passes out candy to the children. And he rides at about 10 mph.

I didn't care. I think it's great. It was nice to sort of feel like I was part of the parade, one that was longer than the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade last month or the Tournament of Roses parade next month. Strange times we live in. 

God bless our firemen. It's good to know that whatever else is going wrong, Santa Claus always comes through.

Subway etiquette.

[Freditor's Note: Below is an entry I wrote for the old, defunct blog, edited and updated with more current information. The parts about stupid behavior by New Yorkers are, as they say in the trade, evergreen.]

Now that winter is in full swing and the holidays are over, the subways are more crowded than they have been in months. In addition to the working commuters we have the tourists, the city’s idiot students, the unfortunate homeless, and the full-blown pants-pissing bums (Alcalde de por Vida de Blasio's favorite constituency) zipping around our tunnels and bridges. Let’s all make an effort to improve our trip by following certain rules of etiquette. Ten, in fact, that seem to require a review.

1. No more garlic, people. We’ve talked about this before, but now I’m serious. Some of you are clearly scoffing garlic cloves like potato chips. And you may want to look at your cumin consumption as well.

2. Boys, the backpacks have to come off in the car. Ridership is calculated based on the number of people, and geared up like a one-man band you’re taking up the space of three. What’ve you got in there, anyway? A piano? No one is going to steal it, although if you leave it on I may open it up to dispose waste materials. Off with it!

3. While we’re talking to the boys, remember, guys, you do have to give up your seat for ladies, especially those who are old, pregnant, crippled, or carrying babies. Not just the ones that are cute. In fact, here is the hierarchy of who gets to sit:

Old crippled ladies with packages
Old crippled ladies
Old crippled men with packages
Pregnant ladies with packages
Pregnant ladies
Anyone carrying a baby
Anyone who looks sick
Old crippled men
Crippled ladies
Crippled men
Old ladies
Old men
Little kids
Ladies
You

Note, though, the trump card: Bums who have pissed or puked on themselves get the magic pass to go anywhere they want. They sometimes exude such fragrance that they clear out entire cars for themselves. You may find this enviable, but the side effects are grim.

4. One word: pants.

5. They’re not kidding about moving to the center of the car so that others may board. I promise you we will let you out at your stop. Grand Selfish Station, wasn’t it?

6. I’m sure your text conversation is enthralling, but it’s a good way to have your phone stolen. And it makes you less aware of the people around you. Which is one of the reasons you’ll get your phone stolen. Look, it was bad enough in the old days when you just had your iPod Shuffle on and couldn’t hear anything; now you’re using your iPhone to render yourself blind as well as deaf. And people wonder why accidents happen on the subway.

7. Begging on the subway is illegal. Don’t do it. Has it ever occurred to you that you would be able to make more money for the same effort with one of those… what do you call them… jobs?

(Side note: I heard years ago that taking pictures of bums is illegal in New York. I am not sure if it's true, but don't let the cops catch you at it! And if you are a bum, don't take selfies.)

8. The rat and the cockroach you feed with your garbage today will send its grandchildren to your apartment building tomorrow. I know garbage is an issue, with the MTA recently giving up its dumb idea to remove trash cans from its stations, an idea that maybe got you in the habit of tossing your trash on the tracks in revenge.

New York, New York, it's up in your face
People throw crap all over the place
It's like they all quit the human race
New York, New York, it's up in your faaaaaace

Think of the broader issue and suck it up. (I don't mean physically suck it up, but on that topic...)

9. About food: Food? Really? You like eating in gym locker rooms too? Or on the can? Jeez. I once saw a guy carrying a full paper cup of soup, no lid (he was eating lunch), on a standing-room-only train, swaying with his messenger bag in the other hand, inches from me in my good suit. What country could he have come from where that would be considered a good idea?

10. Public displays of affection on the subway should go no further than a fist bump, handshake, or peck on the cheek. No one wants to see you get biz-zay on the D train.

Thank you, and let’s make this a better, cleaner, more polite year. Damn it.

Welcome to New York.

I took the photo below a couple of weeks ago; I'm sure by now the joint is all decked out for Christmas.

This is not from the factory that makes Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, but I must confess every time I see that PABT it's the first thing I think about. Which probably says more about me than anything else.

No, PABT stands for Port Authority Bus Terminal, the huge terminal in Manhattan at East 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, right near Times Square. The view above may be the first street scene you travelers by bus see after you disembark. Prior to that you'd see some street scenes between the Lincoln Tunnel and the garage from your bus window, and those would make you wish they would turn the bus right around and take you home. But what you see when you leave the terminal itself is much more exciting, if not much more clean.

The PABT itself is pretty lousy. Oh, sure, this picture makes the PABT look all glamorous and everything, but it's awful. Built in stages over the 20th century, the building includes bad examples of about every style that came along, as detailed in this article on the site Failed Architecture. The biggest sin may have been to make crap brown the predominant color. Mass Transit and Earth Tones are not really pals.

Many people hate the current Penn Station, which is buried underground at Madison Square Garden. They call it a dump. They say it's an oversize subway station. They say (as did architecture historian Vincent Scully), "One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."

I say: It beats the Port Authority.

I've complained about the PABT before. I've called it strange. I've noted that "graceful as a bus station" would be a bad simile. I will confess that it is much less scary than it was in the 1970s, as the FA article notes.

I do have one unusual PABT story from a couple of years ago. I had attended a function in town after work, but left early to get a bus home to my Hudson Valley town. When I got to the terminal I found out that the Shortline Bus I had intended to take did not actually stop in my town, despite what the schedule online said. I had to wait for almost an hour for another bus.

There was a young couple hanging around that night who had clearly been overserved, wherever they had been. The pretty young blond lady was particularly hammered, in my opinion, and I have good reason for that judgment. While I was going down an escalator to go buy a snack, the couple got on behind me and began walking down the steps. The woman stumbled and suddenly came crashing down next to me, her long hair pouring out in front of her onto the steps, the escalator's teeth at the bottom racing up quick. Her bewildered look showed a complete lack of comprehension as to what had just happened. The man she was with was still several steps behind.

If I had not been there to grab her hand and haul her up fast, I am certain her hair would have been snarled up in the mechanism. I don't think it would have killed her, but she would have been injured.

It was pretty lucky that I was there, that I thought fast. Fast thinking is not something I'm known for. Sometimes I think the whole reason fate or God got me stuck there that night was to save that woman from her injury. Whoever she was, I hope that the evening's adventure put her on a path to a better place.

Better than the Port Authority, anyway.

Hobroken.

Looks like my working from home led me to miss all the fun in Hoboken yesterday.

I went through Hoboken to get to Manhattan for years. On our side of the scenic lower Hudson Valley, you have a choice if you want to take a train to Manhattan: Cross the river by car and pick up a train that goes straight to Midtown, or take a train close to home that goes through New Jersey. Used to be you would have to go through Hoboken, then take the PATH train to Midtown or to downtown; then they opened Secaucus Junction, which offered a transfer direct to Penn Station.

I expect Secaucus is going to get a lot more business starting tomorrow.

It's hard to tell from this or the other pictures, but the tracks are below the platform, and the tracks end in a large springlike cushion that helps stop a train coming in faster than the regulated 10 miles per hour. I can't understand how this happened.

Before the train gets into Hoboken it runs slowly (very slowly, if you have an important meeting first thing in the morning) along a stretch where there is nothing but switches and control towers and stuff that I have no idea what it is. There is no way that this train blew into the station without being seen moving too fast. Was there was warning? Did someone announce on the PA at Hoboken, "Get the hell away from Track Two!" Not from what I've heard.

But didn't the engineer know what was happening, and call in "Hey, I can't stop!"? He was treated at the hospital and released, so it wasn't apparently a terroristic action. Those guys usually make sure they get killed along with a lot of people. (I admit it was my first thought when I heard the news.)

So there's a million questions right now and very few answers. I feel terrible for everyone involved, from the woman who was killed to the many who were injured to those who are just going to be terribly inconvenienced. There's no way into town that is not jam-packed at rush hour, and when something happens that disrupts one of the travel methods it makes the others more miserable for everybody.

For the record, the train that crashed was on the Pascack Valley Line, which is not the one I took. But the woman who was killed was not actually on the train, but on the platform. Hoboken Terminal averages 15,101 passenger boardings each weekday, and everyone I know up here who's taken the train has been through that terminal. I guess it could have been me, but as always, it could have been anybody.

Solidarity for workers!

In New York's Hudson Valley, New Jersey Transit is the train service of necessity for rail riders on the west side, and many thousands here and in New Jersey itself rely on the trains to get to work every day.

So the rail workers' union is showing their solidarity with their fellow workers like this:

Yes sir, the rail guys are going out on an strike on Sunday if they don't get what they want. So, all you people who have to get to work in the city---you can kiss their gold-plated butts.

Okay, I'm not sure if their butts are gold-plated exactly, but it has been my experience that government workers get all kinds of benefits and privileges that workers in the private sector do not get. When someone who has gone to work in any kind of government agency moans that they would have been a rich CEO if they hadn't devoted their lives to public service, I laugh. Yeah, and I could have been a famous movie star if I'd only moved to Hollywood.

The inconvenience will be staggering, maybe insurmountable. You already can barely drive into Manhattan, and the buses are already packed.* The rail workers are planning an action that is going to cost people money, and maybe some of them their jobs.

Now, I'm not saying these rail guys don't work. Maybe there are goldbricks in the pile, but you find that anywhere. It's a job with lousy hours, it requires real skill and technical knowledge, it requires outdoor work in all weather, it's occasionally dangerous, and sometimes people pull an Anna Karenina on the tracks and you're the first one to see it. (Ew.) So there's a lot about the job that makes a nine-to-five desk jockey spot look enviable.

That said, their benefits beat anything you can find in the private sector. They are compensated pretty well and retire young. And they are not underpaid compared to other workers.**

Frankly, government workers in all stripes have done little to inspire me to support them in this job action. It doesn't affect me, since I'm working from home these days, but it does affect 308,523 other people---and it's hard to believe the union is considering them as fellow human beings who need to get to work. More like hostages.

And they say capitalism is heartless.

------

* Maybe the 1.6 million people in Manhattan, who hate the bridge & tunnel commuters, will laugh at us suburbanites, thinking we should live near our jobs like they do, but they're the same people who fight more and higher housing construction in Manhattan's 23 square miles. So where would they like the commuters to live if they all moved to Manhattan, hm?

** By the way, a round trip from Mahwah to Hoboken costs $21.50, so the train is not a bargain as it stands.

How old is this bus, anyway?

One way to tell if your commuter bus is 20 years old:

Looks 90's to me. Early 90's.

I could be wrong -- that fabric may have been something bought up cheap on sale, and the bus is only 10 years old. Or it may have been ahead of its time (it is a little Bugle Boy-esque) and the bus is actually 30 years old. Or they may have reupholstered the 70's-era seats, and the bus is 40 years old. Who knows? Buses all look like people who get to a certain stage of decrepitude and go into a holding pattern.

All I can say is, the moment I saw this, one familiar tune popped into my head:

Ports authority.

Was passing through the wonderful Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan the other day---really, if you like brown, you must come see it---and noticed a new addition to the decor:

Yep, a stand-up recharging station for your various electronic devices.

At first I thought this was a stupendous idea. Then it got downgraded to a merely good idea the more I thought about it. It's a little strange, which is like everything else in the PABT. My thoughts went like this:

Like most places built before 2010, the PABT only has whatever electrical outlets are needed for its maintenance staff. Now that everyone has some kind of rechargable phone and/or tablet, people are often seen in public buildings sitting on the floor like bums next to an electrical outlet that for decades was only used to power a vacuum cleaner and a floor buffer. People in nice business suits are sitting on newspapers so they can be by their phone (which only has a short power cord) while it's charging. Now that the weather is cold, the bums are moving back in, and there may be fights over floor space.

In walks the dedicated recharging station! Or rather, in walk the electricians to install it. It's a nice gesture for the customers; you're not paying for the electricity, at least not directly. I guess it does cut down on the reasons to punch someone, so it's worth it on that score.

On this recharging station you'll note the plugs are way up there, so you can't lay your device on the floor while it is charging, just on the little table. You'll have to stand. It's too small for a lot of leaning. There's a foot rail, which is a bit helpful, but no seating. If there were seats they would have a bum in them.

The problem is that most devices take between half an hour and for-freaking-ever to get fully charged, so this will have to be a fast stop. I envision the guy whose phone has croaked; he needs to keep the thing juiced up just long enough to call or text home to let them know his bus is delayed (again). For him this is a straight-up lifesaver.

For those whose bus is not leaving for half an hour, this is an annoying place to stand while you wait.

There's still a crummy bar or two in the PABT. While on your visit to see the highlights of the world's biggest and busiest bus station, stop in a crummy bar and ask the bartender if you can use an electrical outlet while you sip your dry martini. That might work out better, although you might miss your bus.

Photo Phred.

When I was a young lad I took a couple of aptitude tests at a local college to discover what my perfect career would be. I expected at least one, if not both, would come back "Nobel-prizewinning author." Or maybe one would say "Pulitzer-prizewinning author." I would have settled for that.

"Photographer" and "Greeting Card Store Manager" were not what I expected at all.

I was disappointed at the time, but not because I thought little of those jobs---or indeed that I think little of them now. I just wanted to write more than anything.

Also, photography is very mechanical, and I am not mechanically inclined. A friend of mine took up photography, and I couldn't talk about it with him for more than a minute before he started to baffle me with F stops and aperture speeds and God knows what else.

Maybe it's simpler now in the digital age, but probably not. Light is light, and photography is all about the science of light capture. I also have never understood enough about photo composition to tell a museum-quality photography from a good vacation picture. They all look good to me. Here's a shot I took with my phone.

I call it Commuter Bus with Sunrise. Or, Antigone.

Pretty awesome, huh? Or not; I wouldn't know.

Photography is the kind of thing I would take up as a hobby, spend a thousand bucks on, and in a year the camera would have collected so much dust you could write "SAY CHEESE" on it with your finger. Probably not a career move for me.

I suppose those aptitude tests can be helpful if you really don't know what to do or what you want from your life, but they probably have some weaknesses.

As for managing a greeting card store, I think I would have to like people to do that job. Yeah, probably not a good fit either.

What is going on up there?

Never been through the Lincoln Tunnel or any major tunnel in a convertible or even a car with a sunroof. But I was traveling by bus the other day and the air conditioner was not working, so the driver popped the escape hatches for air. It was the first time I'd ever given much thought to the roof of the Lincoln Tunnel. 

I don't know why I was surprised that it was tiled the same way the walls are.

So what's above the roof? When I was a tot I thought the tunnel lay across the bottom of the river like in a cartoon; that if the sides were glass you could see out to the stuff floating by. Oysters, fish, abandoned cars, Luca Brasi, whatever. But of course the tunnel runs under the riverbed.

The sandhogs who built the thing could only work an hour a day because of the enormous pressure down there. The NYC Roads site tells us that worker safety was a premium: "The result was that the Lincoln Tunnel was the first major tunnel project to be completed without a single fatality."
 Something I didn't know was that the project was done as part of Roosevelt's New Deal package. I wonder if it would have been built otherwise. Probably, because it was needed, but since the tunnel runs from one state to another it may have required the feds to get things going. 


I think the current and previous New York mayors probably would have preferred that this and the Holland Tunnel had never been built, that train tunnels would bring people and supplies into Manhattan to be routed by onsite jitneys or something. 


But that's the difference between the 1930s and now. Back then we believed we might be small, but together we could build big projects and do mighty things: the Lincoln Tunnel, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam... Now we think we're big and mighty but the best thing we can do is tear down stuff that our predecessors built. How many great projects do you know of that have been constructed by the 2009 recovery act, hmm?