Unconventional Speed
Brooklyn NY
22 hours after my day started, its easing into the final hours, or even minutes. The first predawn light is making its way over the horizon as 6:00 am nears. My day isn’t beginning at this time, its ending and I like it that way. It was a High Speed day in comparison to the near tedium of last two weeks.
Things have been slow in the cycle courier business, at least for Dragon Fly, my current employer. I can hear you scoffing to yourself asking how a guy riding a bike (that doesn’t even coast downhill) can know anything about Speed.
Speed is one of the few American principles that wasn’t perverted by the treacherous whores and thugs who hijacked this once-great nation of ours. It used to be By the People for the People, now it’s By Haluburton and Big Oil for Haluburton and Big Oil – now buy shit at Wal-Mart on a credit card so we can rape you for 30% interest and sell your children into prostitution in a darkened whore house with no door in a forgotten Third World military dictatorship where they only take American Cash. Places where only a fool asks questions or makes eye contact. They know who are already just by looking at you, there is no need for talk. Shut up, sit back and watch NASCAR on that Big Screen TV that you will never pay off – even in 2 years when you throw it away for a new one.
Keep ignoring that we’re in the early stages of World War III.
Speed. I may only be traveling at 25 or 30 but that’s through traffic moving 5 to 10 MPH average, passing between taxis whose opium-addled drivers try to smash messengers for sport. The NYPD will pull you off of your bike or try to ram you off of the street and arrest you for littering as your crumpled body is splayed in a puddle of your own blood.
Slicing both eloquently and violently between and around police cars, ambulances, the big trucks the ghetto trash who drive while smoking crack, drinking 40′s and rapping into borrowed Nextels. Or maybe they’re the suburban kids living on Daddy’s money … smoking crack, drinking 40′s and rapping into borrowed Nextels. Dodging j-walking pedestrians who stumble clumsily into traffic and wonder why they’re slammed by heavy steel driven by crazed savages with Nothing to lose and have no time to waste. I think Bloomberg once said in reference to cyclist and pedestrians being killed on the streets in full view of the money-spewing tourists “New York is a Dangerous City”.
They know nothing of speed.
We in the Courier Business, and many NYC dwellers know about Speed. We have our own brand of unconventional speed. Going fast in fierce conditions that change with each tick of the second hand. You plan to zoom around the cop, between the tourist bus and USPS truck – all at full speed on a bike with no brakes that doesn’t coast, under inhumanly tight and unreasonable deadlines – when you’re suddenly faced with the decision of slamming into the moron with the coffee and headphones who decided to walk into traffic without even thinking of looking or through the moose-sized, bottomless chasm of crushed and broken pavement surrounding a mysterious steel gate in the middle of the street.
That’s nothing. Just a warm up. There are 50 more blocks to go and it’s only going to get faster and weirder.
That is speed. It’s Unconventional Speed and it’s more addicting and more lethal than any substance, any rush. Anything. Last summer two messengers were killed in the same month – I think 4 died total but I’m not sure. There are no telling how many are injured or harassed because no one keeps track.
That is Speed and that’s how we handle things here.
NYPD vs Bloomberg
MANHATTAN, N.Y. — Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the other day a proposed tax or fee on cars and trucks entering Manhattan from 86th Street and south. I might have the streets wrong but it was something like that. The congestion pricing, as it’s known, will be in effect from 6am to 6 pm on weekdays.
The fee, which would be waived for taxis, is $8 for passenger cars and $21 for trucks. I need to check these numbers. Its is based on similar fees charged in London and other progressive cities as a means of controlling congestion, pollution and other problems that arise from cars.
Supposedly, the fee will be enforced electronically by cameras similar to those used for traffic signals. I imagine this bypasses the NYPD and their ineptitude in enforcing traffic laws. Right wing groups of course oppose the idea of anything that reduces the number of cars on the city streets. I have no idea how anyone who lives in NYC can think more cars is a better idea. Nevermind the environmental effects and all of that, from a civic planning point of view, its insane to have cars. Period.
The congestion pricing is awaiting approval from Albany.
Opponents of the fee call it a “tax on the middle class.” That seems a bit like right-wing/Jesus/Big Oil spin to me. Other than delivery trucks and those who need cars and trucks for work (i.e. electricians and plumbers), who actually drives into Manhattan other than wealthy people or the criminal element? A vast minority of don’t New Yorkers drive or even own cars. The taxes the car people pay don’t cover the cost of road maintenance and forget the noise, pollution, congestion and other problems from cars. I’m glad the city has started to turn around a bit and join the 1970′s – far from the days when bikes were prohibited from Midtown and pedestrians were herded dangerously into cattle barriers to get around. Maybe some day NYC will catch up to the progressive cities but probably not in my lifetime.
besides, the FDR Drive will be out of applicable zone for the fee so it’s still possible to drive from Harlem to Brooklyn without paying anything more than the standard tolls.
The mayor also introduced other means to cap the city’s excessive production of carbon dioxide and other green house and smog-producing emissions. I’ll get into his proposals later – he neither invented anything new or found new uses for existing technology. But, coming from a Republican, anything even remotely green and/or sustainable is shocking.
This month is Bike Month in NYC. Part of me is glad they’re trying to get people out on bikes but, I know the reality of riding a bike in NYC. It’s dangerous but nowhere near as dangerous as riding in the average suburb. Cyclists are seen as dangerous criminals by the right wing goon squad, frat boy NYPD. The bike lanes are the most dangerous and debris-strewn part of the street and often have police cars blocking it.
If the NYPD is going to maintain its usual unchecked harassment of cyclists, will there be mass arrests for “parading without a permit” and “riding out of the bike lane” this month if more people are on bikes? Shouldn’t the judicial system do something to impede the excessively wasteful practice of NYPD harassment? Why is it I’m pulled off of my bike in traffic for maybe thinking of committing a minor traffic infraction that might or might not exist meanwhile a motorist can run a red light, killing pedestrians and that’s OK?
I’ll never understand that.
SO the NYPD wants to add more cars to the streets and reduce the numbers of we dangerous cyclists but the mayor says he wants to reduce the number of cars, traffic and CO2 emissions (I’ll believe when I see it).
Does this mean the NYPD will expand its autonomous, unchecked, reckless harassment of the law-abiding citizenry by not only breaking laws (or selectively enforcing the laws it creates as it goes along) but completely acting counter to no only City Hall but Albany? Will there be a military coup run by the NYPD to turn this former Great City into an autonomous police state?
I know its far fetched and maybe even crazy, but not impossible.
