Oops!

Once again, @coreykilgannon has proved to be the muse for another posting, this one about a tractor trailer hitting an overpass on the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County, coming apart causing a fuel spill plus a spill of the truck's cargo, 42,000 pounds of French fries. Who gets 42,000 pounds of French fries all at once, assuming there was only one company they were being delivered to: a MacDonald's/Burger King refrigerated warehouse? The truck was coming from Maine, where of course potatoes are a big export of the state.

I don't know if it's just in the New York area where you find roads labeled parkways. Do they exist in other parts of the country? Parkways in New York have notoriously low overpasses, such that tractor trailers cannot squeeze under them. Parkways were designed to be roads of leisure when they were built, inviting a drive through the country for the weekend motorist. They were meant to be bucolic, for cars, and cars not traveling very fast at that. They generally have a lot of curves to discourage speeding.

The driver of the ill-fated tractor trailer above was from Tennessee, using a non-commercial GPS that guided him onto the parkway and its destiny with an overpass it couldn't travel under without shearing  off the top of the truck off. It's a somewhat common accident in the New York area. There are sufficient signs warning that no commercial traffic should get on the road, but the best laid plans and warnings can go unnoticed.

Despite the moronic remarks of the U.S. Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, New York does not have "racist roads." The remark stems from the belief that Robert Moses built the Southern State Parkway connecting Queens with Nassau County and a gateway to Jones Beach with low overpasses to purposely keep buses, and therefore Blacks, from getting to Jones Beach from New York City.

The truth is, Moses and his designers did what they did to keep the great unwashed out of the suburbs, and the great unwashed were whites, as well as Blacks and Hispanics who were used to going to NYC beaches, principally Coney Island and the Rockaways by subway from fouling up the atmosphere in Nassau County. It was feared they would descend onto the beach in an armada of buses since they didn't own cars. Well, that certainly changed.

When Moses was NYC Parks Commissioner and he got rid of the sheep in Sheep Meadow and grew a nice lawn, he posted signs that there was to be no walking on the grass: STAY OFF THE GRASS. When Tom Hoving became Parks Commissioner under Mayor Lindsay he invited everyone into the park and allowed concerts, etc. Moses built a lot of projects for the public, but he didn't particularly like the public. He liked projects.

Aside from the accident, a larger question remains. Who gets 42,000 pounds of French fries? Delivered to just one address? 42,000 pounds of anything in one place seems remarkable. It reminds me of the Harry Chapin song about the truck that slipped its gears in Scranton, Pennsylvania and dumped 30,000 pounds of bananas onto the pavement. Name of the song? 30.000 Pounds of Bananas. Who gets 30,000 pounds of bananas?

Think of the scene in the movie Goodfellas, I think, where the driver goes into the diner, leaves the keys to the rig in the ignition, and purposely has the truck hijacked by an organized crime crew. What if they goofed up and targeted a truckload of bananas and French fries? It can't always be electronics. They'd be the Gang that Couldn't Steal Straight.

And since one thing always reminds me of another, and I mentioned Robert Moses, I think of the seminal book on his life by Robert Caro before he got hung up on Lyndon Johnson. When the NYT reporter Emma Fitzsimmons joined the staff, fresh from Texas, and took Metro mass transit as her beat, she was handed a copy of Caro's The Power Broker to learn how New York got the way it is.

I just finished watching the Nova documentary of London's Super Tunnel, the building of their 26! miles of new subway line with 10! new stations, connecting Heathrow Airport seamlessly to other branches of what the Londoners call The Tube. The Underground.

Started in 2009 with Boris Johnson, the then mayor of London, the project was expected to cost $20 billion. It finished in 2023, a year behind schedule and $5 billion over budget. It's called The Elizabeth Line, and the Queen, in one of her nearly last public appearances, drew back the drape on the sign, launching the service.

It is a remarkable tale of engineering that in addition to the tracks, tunnels and stations, gave the Brits a new fleet of state-of-art high-speed trains and cars. 70 trains, 700 new cars, all built in the country.

All going through the system at the expected rate of 24 trains per hour! There really is another rain right behind this one.

Despite being over budget, consider what they got, vs. what we get for our money.

The 2nd Avenue subway, traveling a paltry two miles in Manhattan cost $4.45 billion. In case you're bad at math that's $4 billion, $450 million, making it the most expensive rail project in the world.

Consider the recently opened East Side Access that allows LIRR trains into Grand Central Terminal at 46th Street and Madison Avenue. It cost $12 billion and is really one station. 

It seems in New York, we just don't always get the Everyday Low Price.

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