I flew up to New York today to see my grandma for her birthday. She mentioned that I seem to be full of complaints lately, which I've noticed too. I've become pretty grumpy lately, and I think it's part of the Great Change. Some of it stems from personal stress – there's a lot of stuff I need to do right now as part of this process – but some of it stems from the experiences I've been having lately, working for an NGO to try to stem the tide of horrific legislation, confronting far greater challenges to the civil liberties I treasure than I ever thought possible in the United States, and worrying about how I'll be able to fix all this (and be a happy healthy person in the process) .
But I can still appreciate and report on nice things, a tale of which I shall report here. Unfortunately, a complaint is going to need to precede it, but then again if something hadn't gone wrong there wouldn't have been the occasion for someone else to have gone above and beyond to fix it.
I flew into LaGuardia and met my mom at the gate, who had arrived from somewhere else. It was pleasant to have her there waiting: one of my favorite feelings is the happy rush you get from being met at an airport by someone who's glad to see you. It happens for me less and less these days because I fly so often on my own to all sorts of farflung places. And when it does happen, because of the new security measures, you never get met at the gate. But because she had arrived on the same airline she was able to be right there. It was a nice change. (And there you go – I just said something nice.)
We then set off to figure out how to navigate local transit to get to Brooklyn. The subway unfortunately doesn't get all the way to the airport, but there are buses that go to subway stops. But even more unfortunately, these buses don't take dollar bills even though a ride costs $2. And still more unfortunately, despite this rather stubborn insistence on taking only (a rather heavy handful of) change, we weren't advised that we needed it when the information desk told us what bus to take. On the plus side, the buses do take Metro Cards, but again, misfortune frowned upon us when we were unable to find a newsstand that could sell us a card good for just one ride (in fact, we had to walk to another whole terminal to find one that could even sell us any cards at all – what a huge waste of time.)
After we gave up the fruitless pursuit for the correct Metro Card, we went to the bus stop, clutching our two singles each, and saw the right bus pull up. Then we discovered we needed change. So we ran into the terminal and luckily found a change machine (that thankfully was not out of change), and when we came out, the bus was still there. At least mostly. It had pulled away from the curb but was stuck in traffic. I knocked on the window but the driver refused to open the doors. MAYBE this is MTA policy, but in most of the places I've been drivers have been willing to pick up passengers as long as it was reasonably safe to do so, especially when service is less frequent than every five minutes or so.
Meanwhile, the Avis shuttle bus driver, seeing this take place, jumped out of his bus. "Get on, and I'll try to catch up with him at the next stop." We did, and so did he. It was tough, what with traffic and an extra stop he had to make that the MTA bus didn't and a Hertz shuttle bus inexplicably stopping in the middle of the road, but there by the Marine Terminal we managed to cut off the MTA bus with a shortcut and he got us to a stop just in time.
It was an interesting mini-adventure, shlepping and racing around LaGuardia (which itself is an interesting airport with its conflux of modern and old airport architecture). It was very nice of the Avis driver to go to the effort for us, but that said, it would also be nice if New York made things a little easier for people coming to visit (or even people who live there, for that matter).
Toward that end, buses should take dollar bills. That technology has been in existence for a long time, and most other bus systems use it. I'm struggling to imagine a compelling enough reason for the MTA not to use them. People are less and less frequently carrying a lot of change, and the amount they need to carry for a ride is becoming absurd. I think the logic is that there's little point since the locals use Metro Cards, but the tourists who've just arrived have no opportunity to acquire them before needing to ride the bus.
So toward fixing that problem, and this would be even easier to do, the Metro Card machines (which I happen to think are very nicely designed – extremely usable particularly in light of the complexity of their offerings and methods of payment) (and see, I said something else nice) should be placed in the terminal where all the mass transit information is. Otherwise there's a good chance tourists could get stuck (what if the single change machine broke?) and most certainly will end up wasting a lot of time. New York City has a very nice and otherwise reasonably usable public transit system. Why make it hard for visitors to use it? Why force them to pay extra for cab fare?
Meanwhile New Yorkers privately are willing to go all out to make things better for their city's guests, but I think it would behoove the city to make certain efforts on its own behalf, especially since it desires to have more visitors (Olympics, RNC). It's hard for them to see what a nice place New York is if they can't easily get into it.
Technically finished and posted 7/18. Mostly written though on the plane back down to Washington on 7/17.