Stimulate This!

Amid all the jockeying, bobbing and weaving going on among our mayor, the New York state legislature and Governor What’s-His-Name, the utter irrationality of even thinking about starving, slashing, overpricing and cutting back on our miraculous public transit system is hardly ever acknowledged. If there is one thing that makes this behemoth of a city even marginally functional, it is the 468 subway stations and innumerable bus lines, not to mention ferries, bridges and whatnot, that make it possible to live and thrive in New York City without owning a car, paying for it and going bald trying to park the damn thing.

Our carbon footprint is thus vastly lower than any biped’s in the suburban wastelands or middle America, not only because we don’t drive but also because we can live stacked up vertically rather than in individual, nuke-fam ranch houses whose heat escapes directly into the biosphere.

We should be seeing state and federal pols line up to beg us to keep using our public transport and offering to pour upkeep and staffing funds into it. They should assign more cops to keep out pickpockets and beggars and teach subway etiquette in grade school. Other city mayors and planners should be taking courses in how to lay out an underground and rail grid to make their own tumbleweed-strewn public spaces more interesting.

Instead, the quasi-governmental MTA has to beg and scrape together capital and operating funds year after year, gouge users and threaten the apocalypse with depressing regularity. Where are the stimulus funds that could be dumped immediately into this gaping maw of fiscal need and rocketed directly out again as boosted purchasing power to replace the nation’s disappearing wealth?