The Most Inconvenient Commute Contest!

far from the worst, but at least for posterity ----

because i work 2a-10a, I'm planning my reverse commute after (chelsea to bay ridge) to be a walk to wall street pier 11 and then the water taxi. we'll see how that works out. I think the wait at the pier will be horrendous.

there was a pretty funny moment a few minutes ago on Good Day NY, when the ever-perky Jodi Appelgate asked the Office of Emergency Mgmt. guy, "Is it safe to get in a car with strangers?".

His response: "New Yorkers are a special breed." or something to that effect.

The great news is that I have my digicam. so my flickr should be fun later tonight.

i walked from red hook to the local "carpool staging area," which was deserted save for two parks dept employees. so i walked up and over the brooklyn bridge where i slipped and fell in someone's vomit. (i almost punched marty markowitz standing there with his bullhorn: "c'mon brooklyn, we'll get through this. let's get this resolved quickly." really helpful marty, you are a saint.) anyway, then up broadway through to the village for work.

total time: 2 hours. not too bad, i'm sure someone will top it.

Easy. All I did was walk from World Trade PATH over the BK Bridge to DUMBO. I guess I don't win sh*t.

Sure, I had to talk from Second and Houston to Houston and Bowery, and wait a couple of minutes for a cab there, but once I was in the cab, traffic flowed freely, and we dropped off and picked up with regularity. Hell, when one of the passengers (willingly) tried to overpay, the cabbie refused, saying "too much!" Sure, it cost me $15 rather than $2 to get to work, but no problem at all.

It was kind of a pain, and very cold, to ride my fixed-gear bicycle from SoHo to 72nd and York. The real kicker was I had a 9AM meeting so I had to wear nice clothes. Toussaint can kiss my ass.

Ha, I have you all beat. I wrote an email to my boss saying that it was too cold to bike in and then I went back to sleep. I just woke up and walked to my dining room table to "work from home". Now I am emailing away while listening to NPR and drinking nice tea, all of this in my birthday suit.

Flaming City - I'm staying home, too (though I'm clothed). I can work from home without a problem and plan to for today, at least. I feel for the people with presence-intensive jobs who had no choice but to show up today.

Toussaint and his band of union thugs should be jailed. The workers are barely skilled and are as replaceable as a Bic pen. Eventually they will all be replaced by robots. They are but cogs in the machine. They will be crushed.

Note to TWU members... shoulda paid better attention in school and get a real job.

Telecommunting will make this illegal work action a moot point.

Fine 'em. Jail 'em. Fire 'em.

Homer Fink
Publisher, Altruist, AMERICAN

Try walking 34 blocks and 8 avenues from the UES to Julliard with a cello on your back and a backpack on your stomach... yes... i really wish i played the flute instead right about now.

I rode the bike into work today from Park Slope into Midtown. Overall, it wasn't a bad experience. Cold, but not bad.

What I can say however is the behavior of the people on the BRooklyn Bridge was extremely prototypical of the selfish pricks who inhabit this city. Hundreds of people were walking in the bike lane even though there really weren't many people on the bridge, compared to a typical summer weekend day. The huge numbers of media types, the endless parasites that perpetuate and glorify human suffering, was shocking.

I wanted to slap Marty Markijew and his filthy grandstanding.

Yes, this city sucks and most of the people here will live miserable lives and die alone and forgotten.

nothing like some French Chocolate for christmas..

i was going from 14th and 8th to 60th and 3rd...so i knew i had a trek. i saw a group of business people standing on the corner of 14th and 8th piling onto a private coach bus provided by their company..so i figured i would try to blend in and pile on with them..but they kicked me off, so i walked across to 3rd and took a cab from E23rd to 60th...i bet if i got ahold of some crutches people would pick my sorry looking ass up...if it's still on tomorrow i'm taking my longboard.

Ran from Park Slope to midtown, about 8 miles. Very suprised how few bikes I saw on the Manhattan Bridge at 6:30am. I can handle it for a couple of days, but not sure I'd be able to handle several weeks of this.... 80 miles of running per week? I'd be up there with the Kenyans ! Keep the strike going, and I'm going to the Olympics ! The sweaty pile of clothes in the corner is also stopping people coming over to my cube.... nice.

The extent of our inconvenience should highlight the value of the service the MTA workers provide.

2 hour walk from Prospect Lefferts Gardens to Houston and Broadway. Probably could have gotten a ride, but decided to go for it.

Holy fucking shit, it's cold.

I was looking forward to biking to work (Fort Greene to Penn Station), but since I own a minivan, I became the Brooklyn Shuttle for my coworkers. In two hours I drove from Fort Greene to East Williamsburg to S. Park Slope to Park Slope to Brooklyn Heights. The Manhattan Bridge was empty of traffic - we couldn't believe it.

I am in full support of the TWU. If all this surplus money should either go to fare reductions, infrastructure maintenance, or to the workers. MTA executives are some of the most notoriously crooked fuckers around. I can't stand all of the racist/classist jerks who complain about the strike. The workers provide a valuable service, and they should be able to raise a family with their wages, just as teachers, police officers, city workers, garbagemen, etc. Are some of them lazy, bad workers? Of course! These people exist in every profession. But that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a modest degree of financial security for blue collar workers. Just like in South America, it's time for the working class to take a stand.


Go TWU. I'll keep driving 2 hours each way shuttling my coworkers for as long as it takes.

I'd like to add that I am very disapointed by the headlines in the papers today. Don't you all think the Post let us down with the lack of creativity? If I am going to walk 97 blocks to work, I want a great headline to great me there.

really easy commute. Just walked from Upper West Side (W74th) to midtown.

No one is saying that the TWU employees work is not valuable and no one is saying that TWU employees should not have decent wages. However, what they are asking for is absurd. We live in a country where 40 million people have no health insurange and the TWU is whining about a 1% contribution for new employees. Gimme a break, they should decertify the union and hire all the workers back with wages commensurate with private sector employees.

6:00--gypsy cab from 207th St. in upstate Manhattan to Penn Station, shared with two people we picked up on the way. $20 a head. Some absolutely silent guy, and a Swiss woman who just spent her first night in the city--welcome to NY!

I'll be taking Metro North home and back and forth as long as they are running. I'm 75% on the side of the MTA workers and 25% on the side of the MTA management--both sides have their points but the people with the crap jobs breathing fumes and soot all day win my vote for most agggrieved. Unfortunately, I think Bloomberg et al. is going to break the back of the union no matter what it takes. I think the union could end up settling for less than they were offered last night, and that's truly unfortunate.

this union needs to be broken. they do not deserve more money. there would be plenty of others including myself that would be willing to take their job!

What I can say however is the behavior of the people on the BRooklyn Bridge was extremely prototypical of the selfish pricks who inhabit this city. Hundreds of people were walking in the bike lane even though there really weren't many people on the bridge, compared to a typical summer weekend day.

deal with it, Eryximachus...not everyone is accustomed to walking in designated lanes, and people tend to naturally walk to the right. would it KILL you cyclists to walk your bikes across the bridge for a day? I really think pedestrians take precedence today.

gabyu - "Every year" in france? Don't you mean "every week"?

Why do American unions never consider the type of one-day muscle-flexing work stoppages you see in Europe all the time, anyway?

Ha...you mo-fo.s have it way too easy - Battery park to Times Square...Childs Fucking play. I don.t have work today, but it.s my girlfriend.s last day in the city and we we.re supposed to throw a christmas party.....so I.m walking from 200th street all the way down to Fulton. Maybe I.ll catch a car at 96th, but fuck man...I.m going to kill someone.

20 minutes door to door on bike from 110th to 56th. Faster than when the trains are running! Hmm...

As for the TWU... Those workers make a hell of a lot of money with that GED. Maybe we should all retire at 50. No, that won't cripple every municipal and federal program.

Could have been worse, could have been better.

At work they arranged a carpool but the poor woman has to drive from all over Brooklyn picking up five people before crossing into Manhattan. Traffic was horrible, but as soon as we got to the bridge then onto FDR it was pretty quick. I was an hour late today so we are getting an early start tommorrow.

walked from yankee stadium to columbus circle in about 1hour and 45 minutes. Pretty much unenventful I don't know how I'll get back home.

I think the workers are going about this wrong. 50 to 60K is alot more than alot of other hard working people make. And frankly the MTA employees I've dealt with have been downright nasty so they should have some displinary oversight. Then again if the MTA is sitting on a billion dollar surplus some of that should be reinvested in their employees.

Really, picture yourself, working at 62, underground, going up and down the dusty subway system?
Is Bloomberg realistic? Do I want a ride a train conducted by tired ol 62 year olds? We are in the year 2000, not back in the 1950's slavery time...

I always ride my bike so today is like evry day, except at night will miss the movie, and the friend I was supposed to see.

I hope there is a realistic negotiation,. But hey did I get it right? Do these guys have to pay their benefits basically out of their raise?

******TODAY HAD TO BE THE WORSEEEEEEEEE DAY EVER TO HAVE A STRIKE FOR THE MOST PART I WOKE UP AND REGRETED THE PATH AHEAD OF ME I COULDT BELIEVE THAT I WAS GOIN HAVE TO MAKE MY WAY TO WORK WITH OUT USING A TRAIN OR BUS,, AFTER A QUICK BONG HIT AND BOWL OF FRUITY PEBBLES I WAS OUT THE DOOR RIDING MY 1978 ROLLER SKATES HANDED DOWN TO ME , I SKATED FROM METROPOLITAN FRESHPOND TO BEDFORD AND METROPOLITAN WHEN IT HIT ME WAIT I DONT HAVE A JOB!!!! =0)

Gotta say, biked down 5th Ave today and it was GREAT. Cold, but great.

Why don't they shut down 5th every day? Ambulances were getting through in seconds, so were emergency vehicles, and there were lots of buses. Seriously, during rush 5th Ave should be limited to those vehicles. That'd be a great lesson to take from this.

I can't say i want to work at 62, but I can also see how it's harder for the MTA to pay for benefits when people are living 30+ years beyond retirement age. When this style of retirement system was first put in use, people lived till 60-70 max.. Now 80-90 is normal. How can people expect the same money (2%) to cover 30 years when it was originally for 10?

(Really, picture yourself, working at 62, underground, going up and down the dusty subway system?)

You bet I picture it. Only half of all private sector workers have any retirement plan at all, and most of those have a 401K will less and less contribution by their employer.

Slavery time? When current TA workers are retired at 55, everyone else will be slaving away to serve them while they kick back.

(We live in a country where 40 million people have no health insurange and the TWU is whining about a 1% contribution for new employees. Gimme a break, they should decertify the union and hire all the workers back with wages commensurate with private sector employees"

Actually we should switch to a system of universal health insurance. Not only should everyone be entitled to this but, then, we would never have to worry about that issue effecting labor discussions, and causing a strike.)

Here's someone who understands. Understand this -- the TWU benefits from the uninsured, because its members would have to pay higher prices or higher taxes if the uninsured were covered by their employer/the government. That's why the unions don't push universal coverage -- why pay for others to have something they already have? And why the union movement has split -- into unions with health coverage and rich pensions and those without.

Anonymous1: yes, it is running from WTC to 33rd -- but you have to go through two stops in Jersey first, presumably because there is no direct PATH track between the two locales.

At least that's what the PATH website is saying.

Brooklyn is home, Hoboken is the office. I packed my bag and got on my bike, rolled to the Brooklyn bridge where our Borough President Marty Markowitz was cheering people on through his bullhorn, "Goodmorning, Brooklyn we'll get through this, Happy Holidays". The bridge was half filled with commuters, the other half photographers and camera men. Manhattan was free of cars!! Woo hoo. I got booted from not one but two PATH stations for having my bike with me, and caught a ferry to Nojoken Hoboken; and nobody is here.

Did anyone get the Water Taxi at Long Island City? I'm wondering if that's an option for me tomorrow...

I live in Jersey and the commute to work at the corner of Houston and Broadway usually takes 1.5 hours. Today, completely forgetting about the strike, I tried to take the usual route (drive to the GWB, take the shuttle across, take subway from 175th street to work). First of all, there was a 1 hour delay getting to the bridge. When I finally realized that the subways weren't running I had to drive to the nearest NJ Rail station and take it to Penn Station. From there I had to walk 30 blocks to work. Total travel time: 4.5 hours. Sweet.

peter:

Although the average life expentancy has lengthened, it is significantly lower for people of color and those who have grown up in low-income families without access to decent health care and nutritious food. The average life expetency for black men in the U.S. is 65-68 (depending on what state you look at). Do these men deserve 10-15 years of retirement, especially if they have been doing manual labor for 20+ years? Yes!

Fact Checker.. Are you suggesting we structure our retirement plans to benefit certain races over others? While your point is noted, and lower income families without access to health care do have lower life expectancies, the MTA is an equal opp employer. Also, it's fairly evident that their health care is at least decent. So the facts you're trying to use to support your case don't apply.

Structuring a benefits package geared towards certain members over others (on any factor, race, salary, ...) is illegal in most cases..

My point simply is that the facts of the day 40+ years ago when pensions like this were first created and those of today are not the same. An employee entering the workforce now (aka "the future" that the political shysters want to protect) should know better than to expect the same coverage as our grandparents did pre ww2. Huge companies are going out of business and/or defaulting on their pensions, and to think the MTA is protected from this by a measly 1 bil in surplus is pure ignorance.

Has anyone mentioned the MTA is 22 billion in debt? Or that pension benefits are for life and the projections for "the future" have to go out 60-100 years?

The politicians are trying to make this into a simple "you have a billion that you should give to us" game. and it's not. Go spend 10+ years and get a PhD in economics, so you’ll know what you’re talking about before you try to throw facts at us again.. please

Normal Commute: M60 from LGA to 116 & Broadway - 60 minutes

Today: walked down Astoria Blvd to the Triborough Bridge, crossed the bridge on foot (no press, no crowds; great sunrise), walked around Randalls Island for a bit - had to ask for directions; they hadn't yet posted signs on how to access the bridge to get OFF of the island - crossed that bridge to 125th street. Walked to 125th & Madison. Tried to wait for company shuttle. Realized other people had already waited 40 minutes, kept walking. 125th to Amsterdam to 120th to Broadway. - 2 hr 45 minutes

I made better time than the folks in my office who carpooled.

It was weird; I was hot from the walk - I kept having to remove layers - but the bottle of water in my coat pocket froze.

Wow. Thanks to the Water Taxi folks for NOT doing anything.
No stopping at Fulton Ferry?!
They couldn't change their winter schedule?
From a business POV, it seems like they could make a nice chunk of change on an event like this.

Won't go into details of my commute (pretty hellish, but it was partially my fault for bad decision-making) or who's right/who's wrong in the labor dispute (c'mon, do any of us REALLY know what's going on behind the scenes?) but I will say this:

Eryximachus, if you hate this city and its people so much you would do well to go back to whatever barnyard/kennel/freakshow you came from, you racist scumbag.

(...Damn! Wy must I always feed those trolls!?)

to the tool who wrote about universal health care. Look at our government ... do you honestly think they can effectively manage a health care system too??? As an example, go to the UK, look at everyone's nice smile and ask yourself if you prefer to have teeth like that?

There are so many jabs from bikers to pedestrians, and back and forth. The MTA should use the surplus to build bike lanes in the city, so that people aren't so dependent on projected budgetary deficits. The city would have to seize this surplus in order to provide a public service. Ultimately,bike lanes would be the start to subsidized education because there would be fewer jobs for people with GEDs and less money would be spent on energy from the grid.
I can't say whether there would be fewer or more pricks in the city, but they would at least be subsidized pricks.

bmici, could explain that again in your first language? It might make more sense!

My final exams were postponed until after winter break, too. Thanks for giving me the buttest Christmas ever. Can't wait for vacation so I can start RE-STUDYING for all these goddamned tests that I was planning to take tomorrow.

best workday ever... library employees from the three systems were instructed to go to their nearest branch to ensure continued service. so i walked about three blocks AND got to come home for lunch and the library users in my neighborhood are pretty nice. thanks, twu!!

I walked to work today all the way from 13th Street to Irving Street. Oh, wait, I live in DC now.

regular commute: subway from 190 to broadway-lafayette, 45 minutes

today: wait in my house until the guy who is supposed to be driving calls me. He calls 30 minutes after I wanted to leave, and tells me he's not driving. Thanks. Walk out the door (broadway + 196)with my husband and within a block are offered a ride ("we need 2 more!") we keep walking because we are meeting another person from our failed carpool. The three of us walk down broadway until we get to 125th. Another co-worker calls to say that she took metro-north. We turn on 125th and walk the 9 crosstown blocks to the train station. We get in line for tickets. There is a policeman telling us to buy our tickets on the train, so we head up to the platform. A train is pulling up, so we jump on and squeeze in. Nobody comes by to take our money. We get to Grand Central in about 10 minutes. Walk over to Fifth Ave and straight down to 17th, where I say good by to my husband, then I continue down through washington square park and the NYU campus. Finally get to work, total time: 3 hours.

So who wins?

clinton hill, brooklyn to 77nd and Madison. on foot. it was fun once, but to do it again would get old quite quickly.

I guess this really isn't a work commute, but this is what I did for the girlfriend last night: I walked from lafayette and canal to 26th and 6th to meet up with her at a bar she was at. From there we took a cab to 70 something and madison at which point i watched a large portion of the small amount of money i recieved from selling overpriced textbooks back to NYU disappear. Then from there to where she lives in the 90's (How a rich girl decides to date someone as poor as me i'll never know), more of my very small sum of money gone. I left her place about midnight to go back home to lafayette and canal, by the time the cab had gotten into the 20's i just told him to stop because I couldn't afford to have him go any further, and then i enjoyed my lovely walk in the cold home. I love you mta. Now get the subways running or I have no idea how I will make it to JFK for my flight on friday.

I'm self-employed & work from home. I got up, ate breakfast, and walked up one flight of stairs to my 3rd floor office. Hey! No muss, no fuss, no bus.

Stayed at work an hour and 45 minutes late to catch a ride with a coworker from MoMA back to Brooklyn. Began Operation Exit Manhattan, which lasted an hour and a half and included, but is not limited to: ten minute wait at Central Parking on 54th; multiple utter traffic standstills surpassing five minutes; angry cabbies laying on horns for extended periods; being cutoff several times, blocking our car and all the cars behind us from an empty street; being sideswiped by cab #2C94 (fucker); stalled car in leftmost lane at 59th. Sailed over Queensboro Bridge. Got lost in LIC several times, took roundabout back roads to Bushwick, arrived home in a cool two hours.

I love the MTA.

I wouldn't call my commute horrible, but it was definitely tiring and far. I walked from southeast Park Slope to Manhattan, ran into some friends with a car at Grand and Bowery, rode with them up to 21st. Walked from 21st to return some library books at 40th and 5th. Then went down to Kinko's at 20th and Park Ave South and class (the whole point of all of this walking) at 14th and 6th. Spent the night in the village and walked home from 11th and B today (got a little lost and ended up going down Smith Street until President).