Hey, NYC? Just ... go away, OK?

[unixronin]

I'm tired of NYC trying to be the tail that wags the dog.  If it's not one thing, it's another.  You've got the Mayor going around the country making illegal straw-man gun purchases in an effort to blackmail gun dealers into accepting intrusive monitoring of their business that he has no legal authority to do.  You've got NYPD stealing legally-owned Harleys from their owners because of alleged irregularities in the way the VIN numbers are stamped, to the extent that Harley-Davidson sent out letters for all of their registered owners to carry certifying that yes, they really do own the motorcycle they're riding.

And then there's the carpool thing.  NYC will ticket you for riding a motorcycle in a HOV/carpool lane.  Federal law says you're legally permitted to do so.  (It's Title 23 United States Code, Section 166.)  NYC will ticket you anyway.  Last month's American Motorcyclist, which I just now got around to finishing, has a story about a woman who got ticketed by NYC for riding in a HOV lane and fought the ticket.  It took her three years, but finally she beat it, and a NYC administrative board acknowledged that she was exercising a legal right under Federal law and dismissed the ticket.

Most cities would, at this point, concede defeat and accept the inevitable.  But not NYC.  NYC is now trying to overturn the Federal law and get the Federal government to declare motorcycles a danger in HOV lanes nationwide.  Because NYPD wants to be able to keep writing HOV-lane tickets to motorcyclists... apparently, because they can.

You go to hell, NYC.  And NYPD specifically.  You want to be asshats in your own city, hey, that's your problem.  But you don't get to export your asshattery and make all the rest of us in the US live with it too.  We're very glad to have places that Are Not NYC.  And you can't have them.

Disclaimer:

If you live in NYC, and you like NYC, that's fine, I don't have a problem with that.  It's your city, you're allowed to like it.  But I don't have to live in your city, and you can't force me by exporting it to me.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

A large part of the problem with mass transit in the US is the mass transit agencies themselves. The worst examples of the attitude that "this job would be great if it wasn't for the customers" isn't to be found at your local fast-food outlet any more, it's the people who "work" for many big-city mass transit agencies. SEPTA (Philadelphia) is about the worst but the MBTA is pretty bad too. I tried commuting from my apartment in Belmont to a job in South Boston for a year and a half by T. It was sheer hell, to the point where "no T commutes" was a requirement when I went looking for a job again. A trip that might have taken half an hour by car often took three times that, and that was with one theoretically-frequently-running bus and one subway ride. The bus that serves my neighborhood was supposed to run "Every eight minutes or better" according to the schedule and often left me waiting for half an hour. And that's before we got into the chronic delays on the Red Line. You can't tell me it's lack of funding because the T fucks up even the stuff that costs zero money--like communicating to the passengers just why it is we're sitting between stations and when we can expect to be moving again.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

SAMTRANS gets its fair and deserved share of the hate too.