STRIKE!

"Millions of New York commuters are battling their way home in freezing temperatures during a strike by transit workers, which Tuesday afternoon was ruled illegal by a judge. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg lashed out at the union for "thuggishly" turning their backs on the city, adding the strike could cost more than $400 million a day."

--CNN.com, December 20, 2005

I woke up this morning early. Way early.

I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. Unfortunately, everybody else seemed to feel quite differently about the looming transit strike. I tend to see minor disasters and inconveniences as chances to escape the ordinary, slow down the daily grind, and tie the members of a community together in a way in which they were previously unbound. Obviously, for people that actually have to go to work, it's a little more difficult to see things in the same light.

Unfortunately I missed the 2003 summer blackout. Fortunately I missed the events of September 11, 2001. These were both experiences that shook New York to its foundations (in varying degrees, obviously), but that had the positive result of fostering a sense of togetherness among the city residents. I was, fortunately, living in Columbia, South Carolina two years ago when the state was struck with a freak ice storm. Sub-tropical trees were covered in ice, branches fell, and power lines came down. Thousands of houses (including mine) were left without electricity or heat. For days, "sleep overs" were common among the University faculty (where I was working at the time), which immediately led to group dinners, drinks, and late nights. It was beautiful.

So today was exciting for me. I wanted to see how the whole strike situation panned out and how people reacted.

Early in the morning I headed out to see what was going on. All cars going into the city were forced by the city to have at least 4 riders, which led to people at the bridges and tunnels searching for extra passengers to join them in their vehicles.


Scenes like this were common, as people pulled over to let others in and in this way both help stranded commuters and fulfill their own four-person minimum (the mix of people in the cars was interesting in and of itself). Traffic around the Williamsburg bridge, down the street from my house, was terrible, as the cops had to hold up all cars passing through in order to check the number of occupants in each vehicle.

Within the city , things seemed oddly normal. People were walking around the city of course, but people are always walking on the New York streets. The streets did seem a bit less crowded than they normally do, especially a few of the avenues that were completely empty of normal traffic. Beyond these small differences, however, things were fairly normal.

The only place in Manhattan that was noticeably affected was Penn Station. The Station was filled with angry and annoyed (and annoying) commuters screaming at the Penn Station employees, yelling at eachother, pushing people (me) and generally freaking out. This is understandble, I guess, judging from the number of people riding Jersey transit and the LIRR today (something like 45,000 more than usual), as well as the general bedlam at the station. Still, it seemed like people were really freaking out and blaming the wrong people. I felt badly for the workers at Penn Station.

At the end of the day, after walking for hours, checking out the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, visiting FAO Schwartz with my friend Lauren and her son, I headed down to meet up with my roommate and figure out how to somehow get home.



At the Williamsburg Bridge we got to see examples of both extorting conniving bastards as well as true examples of altruism. We met a cab driver on the Manhattan side who demanded $20 for the ride across the bridge.

$20 PER PERSON for a 3 minute ride! Theiving, highway robbing punk bastard taking advantage of cold, tired people! I met others that took the same cab ride for $20 total, a price that was divided among four riders. Well, he's the sucker. He pissed us off, as well as everyone around us, and lost the chance to make any money at all.

Luckily on the Brooklyn side we met up with the nice guys--the Red Cross was there handing out hot chocolate, tea and hot water (weird that they didn't have coffee...) to everyone forced to deal with the cold in their commute. They were smiling, and everyone that approached them was smiling too.


I enjoyed a hot chocolate.