A Drive to New York

Funny all the things you realize whenever you take a ride from Point A to Point B. All you have to do is keep your eyes open and your brain engaged.

For many years I've heard people ranting all about how we depend too much on our cars. We ought to build mass transit, they say, and isn't it a shame that city to city passenger trains have all but disappeared? In my case, that theory got put to the test this last weekend. Not for the first time I drove from suburban Washington to suburban New York and back. From this experience and others it has become sadly clear that trains have serious limits.

There are, of course, places where mass transit makes a lot of sense. Many trips into Washington D.C. have made it obvious to me that, without the Washington subway system, the city would be jammed into a perpetual state of gridlock. When I need to go downtown on a workday, I wouldn't even dream of driving a car.

The key here seems to be density. If there are a lot of people in close proximity to each end of a train ride then a railroad connection may be justified.

In theory, that means that city to city rail transit should also make sense. In the real world, though, It doesn't seem to work that way. It does, of course, if you are a business traveler going from city center to city center. If the cities involved are close enough together, like Washington and New York, going from Union Station to Penn Station simply beats the living daylights out of going from Reagan National Airport to LaGuardia. The train is comfortable and, if you take it, you don't have to endure the cab ride from LaGuardia into Manhattan. Even the expense, particularly if you are on an expense account, is endurable.

Then there's travel for the rest of us. How many people who live in the Washington area live near Union Station? How many people who live in the New York area live in close proximity to Penn Station? Not a lot, I can tell you. Many (most?) of us have to travel ten, twenty or even thirty miles just to get to the station. Twenty-first century metropolitan areas cover a lot of land area.

So, in most cases, the only way to travel from one city to the other is to drive. This is even more the case if you are driving as a couple or have kids. The one person, one way, non-premium fare from Washington to New York is over $60. Make it two people, two ways and you end up spending about $250. just for city to city transportation. Moreover, you then have to get to and from the station. From where I live - Silver Spring, Maryland - that means a cab to the Metro station and a subway to Union Station on the Washington end. On the New York end it means getting off of Amtrak in New York and getting onto the Long Island Railroad, followed by a cab or family pickup upon reaching my Long Island Railroad destination. Last weekend, this was my sister's house in Amityville. Also keep in mind that all of this entails constantly nursmaiding a lot of luggage.

Driving to Amityville and back isn't a piece of cake either. For one person to drive there and back in a reasonably fuel-efficient car (I drove a Honda Civic this past weekend) it can cost about $40. in gas and $40. in tolls. But for two people or three or four the rate stays about the same. Moreover, when you get to your destination, since you have your own car with you, you can make side trips - pretty important if, like my wife and I, you're visiting a whole bunch of people, none of whom live anywhere close to a railroad.

In other words, for all but a limited class of travelers, city to city rail transportation is not an option and, very likely, can never be an option. That's actually too bad because the drive is dreadful.

Depending on traffic, it can easily take five or five and a half hours each way. As for scenery, there are some pretty stretches of road (example - crossing the Susquehanna River on the Tydings Bridge) but they are balanced by some areas of absolutely stunning ugliness. Examples of the latter include the drive through Baltimore, the area around the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the entire section of the road that starts around the southern tip of Staten Island and ends at the western boundry of Long Island's Nassau County.

This last makes a point about the wonders of urban life.

New York may be one of the great cities of the world and Manhattan is, indeed, awesome but surrounding Manhattan is the industrial region in northeastern New Jersey and the often ugly and always congested boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens (ugly from the highway anyway - and often ugly even when you get off the highway). People complain a lot about sprawl and often seem to want to return to a vanished golden age when everyone lived within the boundaries of relatively compact cities. If New York is any example, that's fantasy. I can't see any way that you can have Manhattan without the miles and miles of industrial and residential sprawl that surrounds it. It's the industry that supports the beloved central city. As for the surrounding outer boroughs, if you don't have them, you don't have housing for the workers needed to make Manhattan viable.

So what else can you learn when you keep your eyes open on the drive between Washington and New York? Well, there's a lot you can learn about government and about infrastructure - some of it a bit surprising.

Take the roads. Everyone loves to hate the New Jersey Turnpike and everyone loves to point out how corrupt and incompetent the government of New Jersey happens to be. Well, I know little about the New Jersey government but, at this point in my life, I've probably driven the round trip length of the Turnpike from the Delaware River to New York at least a hundred times. You know what? The Turnpike is an excellent road. It's a toll road but the tolls are comparatively reasonable and the revenue from them seems to be well spent maintaining a New Jersey Turnpike that, overall, is well designed and well maintained. There are regular rest stops along the highway and, if you break down, the road seems to be patrolled by guys whose job it is to pull to the side of the road and help you. I don't know what this service costs but, when you need it (within limits), who cares? How many other roads offer such service?

Then, to take a comparison, you cross the Verrazano Bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn. Crossing is free heading west to east but costs you $9.00 going from east to west. What's the money spent on though? Certainly not on the upkeep of the bridge. The Verrazano is one of the great suspension bridges of the world but it's a safe bet that one day it's going to collapse for the lack of a paint job. I'm not joking here. Thirty years ago the elevated West Side Highway in Manhattan was closed after a truck fell through the roadway. The highway's steel supports had simply rusted away because the authorities hadn't protected them by painting them on a regular basis.

Not painting economically essential structures so that they will eventually collapse seems to be the way things are done in New York City. On the way home, my wife and I made a side trip into Queens to go to a wool store on Jamaica Avenue. While my wife bought wool, I waited outside and, with nothing else to do, started eyeballing the Jamaica Avenue El running about twenty feet over my head. You would not believe the rust I saw. I'm not taking esthetics here. I'm talking about serious structurally damaging rust on critical economic infrastructure.

To get back to tolls, there were other tolls on my Washington to New York drive besides the ones I've already mentioned. Some are reasonable. Others, though, really drive home the absolutely amazing rapacity of certain governments.

Here I'm talking about Delaware.

To go about 90 miles on the well designed, well maintained New Jersey Turnpike you are charged $4.25 each way. On the well designed and, mostly, well maintained 110-mile section of I-95 going through Maryland, there is one $5.00 toll, charged to northbound travelers only.

In the middle, though, you have Delaware.

Delaware is a state that is proud that it does not charge sales taxes to its citizens. Obviously, the citizens like this. The merchants like it too, since this lets them lure shoppers away from Maryland and Pennsylvania. Well, fair enough. If Maryland and Pennsylvania wish to use their sales taxes to put local merchants at a competitive disadvantage, it may be foolish but that's not any problem of Delaware's.

Still, like all governments, Delaware needs to raise revenues. How do they do it? Well, one way they do it is to pick the pockets of out of state residents.

About 12 to 15 miles of I-95 are routed through the northern fringe of the state of Delaware. Since this section of the road is, mostly, useful to get through Delaware rather from one Delaware destination to another, it doesn't take a genius to realize that it's more likely to be frequented by out of staters than locals.

So what kind of road is it? Overall, I think it accurate to say that it is the most poorly designed and most poorly maintained section of I-95 between Washington and New York (actually, from other trips I've taken, I'd lay odds that it is the most poorly designed and maintained section of I-95 between Florida and Maine).

If you run into traffic jams between northern New Jersey and the Washington Beltway, the tie-ups will most likely be located in Delaware. In fact, often they are actually caused by Delaware - specifically by the too-narrow toll plaza you go through every time you pass through the state. For little over a dozen miles of badly maintained, often congested, road you are hit with a $3.00 charge each way. If the infamous Jersey Turnpike charged this much per mile, my $4.25 toll would be about $18.00. I know it sounds like the most dreadful pun but on I-95 the state of Delaware really does engage in a most blatant form of highway robbery on a daily basis. Moreover, since their victims tend to be people from other states nobody seems to be in a position to do anything about it - even though I-95 is a federal, not a state, highway.

When you take a long drive, as your transmission goes into "Drive" your brain often goes into "Neutral." You only keep your eyes open to see signs, potential hazards, and golden arches. You shouldn't. Just keep your brain in "look at what's around me" mode. It's amazing the things you see and the things you realize.