Traffic and the Planet

Jeanette Sadek Kahn, former head of the NYC DOT, quite possibly the least functional government agency in the modern history of NYC was interviewed by Fareed Zacharia this weekend and she illustrated plainly why NYC traffic has been a disaster for decades.

This is the woman who ballooned bicycle traffic all over the city without requiring any licensing, insurance, or safety requirements for equipment. This released a horde of unqualified crackpots to terrorize already unsafe streets.

Now she is a backer of a completely non-functional plan to charge a fee for the use of certain city streets. This hairbrained scheme called “Congestion Pricing,” is being championed by the DOT and another non-functional entity called the MTA both of whom are looking for different results that if achieved, will cancel each other out.

The hole in the donut is that the MTA, which runs all the public transportation, like the buses and the subways is looking for the income from the charges to cars venturing below 60^th street to pull them out of their financial hole and the DOT is looking for the streets to be cleared of traffic.

The problem is that once the streets are cleared of traffic there won’t be any fines so the MTA will get nothing. On the other hand, if the MTA does get its money, it will mean that we still have rising congestion.

This doesn’t mean we should bury our heads in the sand and throw in the towel. There are solutions, if only we had politicians with the guts to go for them.

The best long-term solution and one that has been suggested for years is to ban most street parking in Manhattan for most private cars. This would require civic leaders with huge stones because it would need an enormous outlay in funds to build municipal garages on the outskirts of the city to provide cheap parking for all the out of city cars that would ordinarily be looking for a place to park in Manhattan. The idea of providing public transportation for all those drivers who come from a thousand locations is just untenable. Add to that, the solution of what to do with all those cars has to be located near their destination but just outside the city itself where some kind of  “continue the trip” solution like buses or monorail could be  added. The big problem with this kind of solution is that it requires a huge initial financial outlay with no guarantee of success. Congestion Pricing, on the other hand comes with very little outlay but an almost complete guarantee of failure. There is one more “ban the parking” fly in the ointment and it is that many Manhattanites own cars and there just isn’t anywhere near enough off-street parking to accommodate them no matter the cost. This is the other aspect of the problem that terrifies politicians. Most of these car owners vote and they don’t care about traffic problems as long as they have free street parking for their cars until they use them on weekends.

There are two possible solutions to this problem, and both involve more off-street parking. One is to build huge storage garages that would accommodate long-term parking and the other is to force builders to include more parking in any building planned for construction or major renovation. We had a law like that several years back, but the real estate industry is strong enough politically that it seems to have neutered that legislation.

And yet there are a number of ways to solve this problem if we can keep people like Janet Sadek Kahn and her like out of the discussion. If we can’t, we can look forward to a city in which the streets are jammed with parked cars and public amenities and there is no way to get anywhere in a timely or cost-effective manner.

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Biden’s plan for forgiving student loans isn’t going to work, except possibly at the ballot box and maybe not even there. Whether factual or not it looks like they are just throwing money at a problem that needs thought.

For one thing, just figuring out what, why, how and where to get a student loan is a complicated matter. There are interest rates starting at around 1.76% for variable up to 9.93% for fixed. There are choices of when to start paying back and how much of education costs will be covered, but that’s not really part of the problem now. What Biden must consider first is whether or not what he wants to do is legal, or will the courts throw it back in his face. He must also determine if the loans were actually used for education and did the borrower’s graduate. The plan already has provisions that speak to the borrower’s current income but there is nothing that deals with why we are looking to forgive loans that were pretty much given without any conditions to anyone who claimed they wanted to go to school regardless of whether they went or not.

The people who didn’t go to college, who just went out and got a job with less potential and whose tax dollars went, in some cases, used to pay for these loans are now faced with their tax dollars going to forgive these loans. These guys are going to be well and truly pissed, with good reason.

So what to do? It seems to me what we should do is to forgive all future interest payments but that could also be a costly maneuver because the government will have to reimburse the private loan companies that were involved in the process going into the future and that could come to big bucks.

It was a rash promise by Biden at the time but then that’s what politicians do to get elected.

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NASA’s big push for the latest launch test to the moon makes the sad statement that we as a government are looking for another place for humans to live once we have destroyed the earth. To me that is exactly the wrong plan for our future. Instead of wasting trillions on these rocket programs that will give us a far from ideal place to live in the eventuality that the earth is no longer habitable, how about spending that money on keeping the earth habitable. I mean we already know that this planet will sustain human life if we just treat it right and we already know how to do that.

I’m an old man and am pretty sure I will never have to face this, but if I were much younger, I would not want to spend money or energy to create a living space on what we have seen of the rest of the universe. It all looks like a maximum-security prison. Far better we should take those trillions and develop the energy sources necessary to provide power to the planet without creating an atmosphere that will destroy it.

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Roy Blunt, Idiot from Missouri, was asked about the documents found in Trump’s possession at his club in Florida. Instead of giving an honest opinion he immediately began babbling about the fact that he was a member of the Intelligence Committee, and he was outraged that the FBI hadn’t told them anything about the raid. Really?  This moron who somehow managed to grift his way onto a committee called “Intelligence,” is expecting us to believe that he knows nothing about an affair that has been the principal news in the entire country for the past two weeks just because the FBI didn’t hand him an engraved explanation. Doesn’t this fool read? Doesn’t he listen to the radio or watch the tube? Electing idiots like this is, why the GOP is stuck with Donald Trump dragging their party through the mud.

Blunt is so dumb he tries to sell the idea that the investigation has dragged on for two years just so it could last until the elections and push other problems into the background. Host George Stephanopoulos was forced to point out that the investigation has dragged out so long simply because Trump refused to hand over the documents he had stolen.

Amazingly, Blunt admits to having been a college President at one point. I wonder what that degree is worth?

Editor’s Note:

The Curmudgeon will not be publishing for the next two weeks. He and Mrs. Curmudgeon have flown to Miami to welcome Gianni William DeSeta, their new grandson to the planet.