The Friday after Thanksgiving is the traditional transition from one type of holiday consumption to another. But "Black Friday" is also the day when the city takes advantage of drivers who think the regular workday is a holiday and fail to feed the meter or move their car for alternate side of the street parking. The Times has long been obsessed with how much money the city takes in on the last Friday of the month.
But the real story of yesterday's Thanksgiving holiday was how New Yorkers got around the region. It began with the predictable lament of car drivers stuck in ... themselves (NBC4), but then quickly morphed into the realization that even taking into account high gas prices and traffic, public transit is still far more expensive than driving, as many Friends of Streetsblog pointed out:
I could have traveled one way from NY to MD for $800 by rail. A family member drove 4 hrs to pick us up instead saving $600.
Trains should be so frequent during holidays it is $20, instead our policy for trains encourages car use by maximizing profit instead of mode share 😡
Our own old man editor took his family of four up to Uncle Fred's in New Canaan — total round-trip cost for all four adults was $114 in money and more than five hours in time, compared to about $50 and two-and-a-half hours in a car. He did an epic thread throughout the day which documents just how difficult and costly our supposedly pro-transit elected and appointed officials make life for those of us who want to do the right thing and ride the trains and buses instead of inflicting a car-based lifestyle on our neighbors:
At the very least, perhaps the MTA could make it more affordable for families to use transit.
In other news:
A Newark cop ran over a pedestrian and brought his body to his mother's home to figure out what he should do. Well, that was bad. He's now being charged with vehicular homicide when we all know he would have gotten off free if he had just said, "The guy came out of nowhere." (NY Times)
Seriously, the only other transportation news yesterday was the Thanksgiving parade, which is really just a bunch of cars dressed up to look like they're not cars, though most coverage (NY Times, etc) focused on the balloons. Oh, but not everyone.
"In Stockholm, people really thought that congestion pricing would be the end of the world, the city will come to a standstill, no one would be able to get to work anymore and all the theaters and shops would just go bankrupt. None of that happened."
