New York City began its new policy of congestion pricing this week, where motorists are charged a $9 toll to drive into Manhattan. The idea is to reduce the traffic that chokes the city’s streets. New York is following the lead of other big cities around the world like London and Stockholm. Revenue from these tolls will be used to enhance the city’s bus and subway systems to lure motorists into mass transit.
I drove into Manhattan once, in 2007. Never again.
Our family took a trip to see the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. The kids and I had never been to The Big City so we decided to drive the four hours down to Gotham and see what all the fuss was about.
I never planned to drive into Manhattan. I thought we’d drive into New Jersey, park the car there and take a bus into the city. But somehow I missed a turn, got into the wrong lane and before I knew it we were crossing the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge. It led us right into the middle of Manhattan and the hayseeds from Iowa were rolling down Broadway like the Clampetts.
I had no idea where we were going. I just wanted to get out of there, and a cop in an intersection encouraged me in no uncertain terms to move it or lose it.
I found a parking garage and did not dispute the extortionist hourly charge. And judging by the looks of the guys who ran the garage, I had no expectation that we would ever see our luggage — or our car — again. We just wanted off the street and out of the traffic.
As the old Broadway musical goes, “We tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York,” walking around for hours, riding the subway, craning our necks to look at all the tall buildings, eating hotdogs from sidewalk vendors and just generally enjoying ourselves.
By late afternoon it was time for the hayseeds to leave. We found the parking garage and, to our great relief, our car was still there with all of our earthly possessions still inside.
We hopped in our car and headed out once again on the streets of New York, this time looking for the quickest way out of town. I don’t know how, but somehow we got on the Major Deegan Expressway that took us through the Bronx and right past the historic original Yankee Stadium. It seemed like a fitting end to the day which had started out in the town where baseball was supposedly invented in 1899.
Most residents of New York, Chicago, Washington and Boston don’t even need cars. They have excellent mass transit — primarily subways — to get them around easily and relatively inexpensively. It’s nearly impossible to park a car on a residential street in any of these cities, and if you can find a parking place, you need to take out a second mortgage to pay the monthly rent. And if you think you’ll just park for a minute in a no parking zone, think again. Your car will be gone when you come out — and not by regular thieves. In these cities there are private towing outfits that are notorious for driving around looking for illegally parked cars to haul away. It will cost you hundreds of dollars and hours of time to find your car and rescue it from the impound lot.
We returned to Manhattan in April 2015. This time we left our car in Washington, D.C., and boarded Amtrak at Union Station near the Capitol. A little more than three stress-free hours later it deposited us in Penn Station, in the bowels of Manhattan underneath Madison Square Garden. We saw a big stage production at Radio City Music Hall, the Broadway musical “Beautiful” and one of David Letterman’s final TV shows, where we were seen briefly in the audience just six rows from the stage. When we were done we just hopped into a cab that dropped us off back at Penn Station.
The Big Apple is a great place to visit. It’s even more delicious when you don’t drive there.
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