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Mass Transit Drawbacks
To The Editor:
I can scoot into the city in about 1-1/4 hours by bus and subway. What's more it only costs me 2 bucks. Even so I prefer to travel by car and am adamantly opposed to the mayor's congestion pricing proposal because as economical, efficient, and environmentally friendly as mass transit is, it's also the most miserable and unpleasant mode of transportation on Earth, outside of being shot out of a cannon. First there's the noise produced by the cars clattering along the tracks and the unintelligible PA announcements which are so deafeningly loud that I can almost guarantee that all people who ride subways regularly, for several years, have a degree of permanent hearing loss, which is an easy enough thing to test for if any statistician out there is of a mind. Next, there's the commuters themselves, who make bus and subway rides additionally unbearable by yelling into their cell phones or cranking up the volume on their iPods so high that you feel like you've got on headphones too. Commuters' manners are typically atrocious too. They cough without covering their mouths, wipe their runny noses on their hands and sleeves, and engage in a whole bunch of disgusting habits like picking snot from their noses, wax from their ears, and dandruff from their scalps, and then holding up and examining the nasty stuff, especially if you happen to look their way for a moment. For it almost seems as if commuters engage in these stomach-sickening behaviors as a means of getting nearby commuters not to look at them, in order to maintain a level of privacy, as I've begun to suspect, partially in an effort to explain how they could possibly behave so disgustingly, on average, without exhibiting any shame. Last but not least, subway and buses are unpleasant to ride in on account of all the ads that are plastered above the seats, and elsewhere. The latest trend is to make every ad in a subway car or bus tout the merits of a single company or product, making even the most level-headed commuter begin to feel like they're being brainwashed, or severely imposed upon in the very least. Contrast this hellish environment to the comforts of commuting in a car, with cushy seats, either by oneself or in company with an equally civilized and reasonably sane passenger or two. Sure, there are annoyances, too, associated with driving autos, like traffic jams and radio DJs who never play any music, insisting on hogging the airwaves with their high-strung, bigoted rants instead. Still, all things considered, traveling into Manhattan by car is infinitely superior to going by mass transit, and will continue to be so even when congestion pricing goes into effect, as it most likely will. In the meantime, though, let's continue to petition against the proposal, possibly suggesting to the mayor that he ride the subway, himself, for a bit longer than two or three stops. Let him get a cramped pad in Eastern Queens, for instance, and commute into the city at rush hour like you and I have to do. What's more, let him don a disguise so that riders near him won't treat him with deference and respect, but with malice, suspicion, and habitual hostility.
At the end of one week of this, he'll be piping another tune about his congestion-pricing proposal, or my name ain't, |
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