Lightning struck near one of the main hubs of the Long Island Rail Road last night during rush hour, which means that a commute that usually lasts from about 5:15 to 6:30 desk-to-door took me until about 10:50 instead. I’m positive that LIRR decision-makers made a lot of awful decisions during this process and all year round, but it’s not them I’m really angry at, because they’re not responsible for the philosophical underpinnings of why they don’t have the money that would have been required to prevent this from happening in the first place, where individual bad decisions wouldn’t matter as much as they did and do because the whole operation would be better on a structural level. And here is my rant on this topic.
I’m actually a lot better off than most people because I work in One Penn Plaza, the skyscraper on top of the LIRR commuter destination Penn Station. I don’t even need to go outside to get to the trains — there’s an entrance to Penn right from my building. Thus I have a journey of about three minutes from desk to train platform, unlike people who have to worry about walking and subways and such from elsewhere in town. So I heard the train was suspended at about 5pm, where normally I’d leave my desk at about 5:15 to catch a 5:23 home. So I just hung out for a while. Around 6:10 a fellow stranded coworker told me that they’d announced on the LIRR website that service should be resuming in about 15 minutes, so I went downstairs to Penn to check out the big board of departure times over the police barricades (they weren’t letting anyone else into the LIRR area). It said the next train to my stop was at 6:53, which I figured could be a reasonable estimate rather than just some number that went up automatically. So I bought some baby stuff in the Duane Reade down there and came back out to wait. At about 6:25 or so they threw some trains up on the board, then took them down about five seconds later, then put a few back up again. AT 6:29 they announced a 6:21 train on which my stop was the second stop. I hopped on, got a great aisle seat right next to the bathroom, fired up my Mad Men Season Two Disc One DVD, and away we went…
Fast forward to TWO FUCKING HOURS LATER, spent mostly parked in various locations, when we FINALLY arrive in fucking JAMAICA, which is usually not even the fucking HALFWAY POINT of my commute. Our train can’t even fully platform, because the train ahead of us hasn’t fully left the platform yet. After another half an hour of sitting around, they open the doors to the cars that are on the platform so people can get out and walk around, at which point the platform PA announces that service has been suspended again. After about another half hour of hesitation and bathroom-line-waiting, I decide to take my chances with taking a cab home from Jamaica after hearing a new announcement that they’ve completely powered down the tracks because people have gotten out of trains stranded on them and are walking around down there, which is basically a sign that nothing will move for hours and hours. But when I get to the street I discover that about 10,000 other people had this same idea. Asking my wife to come pick me up would be stupid because she’d have to bring the baby, and I’m guessing it’d take her half an hour just to get NEAR Jamaica Station at that point, since all the streets around are crowded with stranded commuters, horrendously inconvenienced locals, cars, cops, cop cars, buses, ambulances, barricades, taxis and gypsy cabs trying to score fares, significant others and car services trying to pick people up, etc etc, and I can just imagine the baby deciding she doesn’t want to be in the car anymore at that point and spending the next hour or so screaming. So I’m debating what to do–do I take the E back to Penn and sleep at the office? Do I take it someplace else in Queens and try to get a cab from wherever that is? Do I call one of my city slicker friends and try to get a place to crash? Then I look up and see I’m about two feet away from a bus stop for a route that goes to Floral Park, about a five minute drive away from where my mom lives. So I get on the bus and give her a call, and once I reach the end of the line she picks me up and drives me home. I walked in the door approximately four and a half hours after I normally get home.
FUCK THE LONG ISLAND RAIL ROAD, but more pertinently, FUCK THE REPUBLICAN PARTY from Ronald Reagan onward for deliberately refusing to invest in this nation’s vital infrastructure, because their primary goal is to take money from poor people and give it to rich people, and the means to that end is to completely delegitimize government as a solution for social problems since solving social problems costs money that could otherwise be handed to rich people, and the best way to delegitimize government is to make sure everyone’s interaction with any government or quasi-government agency is unpleasant and failed so that people think “government is the problem,” and the best way to do that is to refuse to fund vital services from public education to mass transit and transportation infrastructure because they are most people’s main daily interface with government power.
Tags: real life
Just think when all the infrastructure of the old cities rots away – oh wait it is – go to St. Louis! And just think when they turn off your gas and electricity. just sayin’…
It’s just insane. Apparently, a lot of red-staters would rather grind their roads to gravel than raise taxes and give gubmint the money to maintain them. That’s how far the anti-tax crazy has gone. All to keep t-bone steaks out of the undeserving clutches of “strapping young bucks”!
Amen. Atlanta’s public transit is largely based on infrastructure from the early to mid-’70s. The last time there was a burst of major rail construction was the mid-eighties… otherwise this city limps along on graft & handjobs, begging for favors from those outlying counties populated by the original White Flight: a bunch of corrupt, xenophobic frog-faced S’uthern shitbags who’re afraid to share resources with a largely black/immigrant/non-honky (& occasionally gay) populace. And since graft breeds graft, the black Repubs are just as in it for cash as the white. Meanwhile the working class are left trying to manage a single public transit system for a HUGE working class pop. on fuck-all funds.
Don’t get me started on the bike trails, or the state selling all its water to Coca-Cola while one of the major tourist stops in the country has been struggling w/ drought conditions for four years. Don’t get me wrong, I -love- my broken city: I’m just glad I don’t -have- to rely on MARTA or the (as yet still imaginary) Beltline. As a country kid, I’m grinning with hayseeds in my teeth ’bout being able to ride elevated rails and all, but that’s strictly as an idle passenger– there’s no novelty in it for those without a choice. I feel horrible for folks who -do- have to deal with it every damn dawn to dusk. Esp. during Braves season.
Sorry you had such an awful commute, Sean. I swore off public transit here in Miami a few months ago when it took me 2 hours longer than normal to get home than if I’d just driven my car. (and this wasn’t because of an accident; it’s just the normal shitty mass transit situation here.)
I was really upset and livid, especially because of how powerless I felt to just get freaking home,so I sympathize. I can’t imagine how shitty it would be to get home at 11 at night.