NYC Mayor Bloomberg: "No Miatas in Manhattan!"
 

Speaking to the press on Wednesday, New York City Mayor Bloomberg announced that, effective 6am Thursday, awesome cars will be completely prohibited from crossing into Manhattan via any bridge or tunnel except for the George Washington bridge, which connects Fort Lee, NJ to Manhattan at the northernmost Hudson crossing, entering the Washington Heights neighborhood at 178th street, miles away from popular destinations such as Times Square, the upscale neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan or the downtown Financial District.

The Mayor's ruling affects all Mazda Miatas, as well as other popular and attractive sports cars such as the Chevrolet Corvette, Porsche Boxster, Honda S2000, Toyota MR2, Nissan 370Z, BMW Z3 and Z4, Audi TT, Mercedes SL and SLK, Mini Cooper Roadster, DeLorean DMC-12, several Aston Martin models and the Lotus Elise / Exige. Inexplicably, the Mayor also prohibited are many of the smallest, most efficient and environmental friendly vehicles on the road today, such as the all-electric Tesla Roadster and the extremely compact Smart Fortwo.

The owners of unfashionable sedans and coupes, as well as SUVs and other large, cumbersome vehicles, are unaffected by this restriction and may continue to travel freely into and out of Manhattan at all available crossings.

um...what?

Is this what a drunken rant from Joe Perez looks like?

why

Carpool rule.

Only 3 or more to a car.

Id like to live in NYC (If I could afford it), but Im pretty sure I wouldnt even have a car.

This is a joke, right?

Nope, carpooling rules in effect. Mainly because a lot of mass transit is down.

No, I'm actually somewhat sober. My drunken posts usually have much more colorful imagery.


Nope. Totally serious.

The Mayor has prohibited Miatas, Boxsters, Corvettes, S2000s, etc... If you're driving pretty much anything worth being seen in, you must go all the way around into northern New Jersey and then be funneled across one narrow bridge into the ghetto all the way in the northern-most part of Manhattan where nobody wants to be in the first place. Those already inside the city may leave, but will be prevented from coming back in.

Drivers of boring and/or large vehicles may enter Manhattan at any point and from either side via the Lincoln Tunnel, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Triboro RFK Bridge, the Queensboro Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge.

So basically, two seaters are banned from Manhattan?

Also prohibited from entering Manhattan.



Yup.

What a diseased fuckhole of a city.

Why? this makes sense considering mass transit is fucked at the moment, you know, from the storms and all. They want to keep the roads from being even more congested than usual from assholes driving to work by themselves when they could carpool into the city.

Just wait till Saturday dude.

It's the same reason he told Obama not to visit the area, he didn't want congestion, due to his entourage, when it's already horrific.

I blame George Bush.

Coupe-owner tax money spends just as well as Suburban owner tax money.

that's how i feel about HOV lanes in general. It's not up to the gov't to try to try to coax people into giving a shit about emissions and incenticize them with their own fancy fast moving lane.

It doesn't work in any city, traffic would be much better if they just opened up as many lanes as possible, all the time, to everyone.


But until then, see: Hustler's Avatar.

Barack Obama hates white people.
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1351775080

To be fair, it's got nothing to do with the environment, and everything to do with square footage.

You like math. Isn't there something like 15 million that use the subway every day? Find out what kind of square footage those 15 million take up vs. carpooling 3 to a car.

This is kinda the reason carpool lanes are for 2 or more, instead of 3 or more. It would eliminate all the 2 seaters, but that's for environmental reasons.

why ban the gayata?!

http://markosun.files.wordpress.com/...fic.jpg?w=1000

lol north

fixed

I can't imagine why you would WANT to drive in NYC anyway. I didn't like driving in Chicago, and supposedly New York traffic is much worse.

Hehe.

Yeah, I totally understand the reasons for the restriction. I've spent a fair amount of time working there, and even under the best of circumstances, traffic into and out of the bridges and tunnels is a total clusterfuck during rush hour. Without the PATH and LIRR trains running, (to say nothing of the Brooklyn MTA crossings or the Staten Island ferry) I can't even begin to imagine the scene.

I just figured I'd try to play the role of JasonC for a change, and make a big, over-inflated stink about something that's actually quite rational, painting it as baseless and discriminatory instead of fair and reasonable.

:rofl:

Funny, I thought you were doing this. :magna:

The streets of Chicago may be overflowing with the ejaculate of the homeless, but at least everyone is unconstitutionally disarmed. That will right the sins of Blagojevich.

Cherry-picking facts for fun and profit. :D


In all seriousness, it's pretty hosed down there. Here is today's subway map:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1351789463

See all the lines that are shaded out? Those are the ones which service the parts of Manhattan where most of the major office buildings are, along with pretty much everything else that people actually need to get to. And those are just the subway lines. Folks who live in the outer regions come in via PATH (trains running from Jersey) LIRR (the Long Island Railroad), or Metro north, and most of those lines are down as well. PATH will be totally offline for at least a week, LIRR is up with only one line into Penn Station, and Metro North has limited service into Grand Central.

Of course, even for those folks who do manage to get into Penn Station or Grand Central, the subway lines which they normally transfer to in order go get downtown are offline.

So it pretty much sucks right now.

We finally got through via phone to the folks at CBS, which are located on Hudson at Houston. They've basically just been living at the radio station since Monday, barely getting by and feeling REALLY good about the fact that they spent a gajillion dollars on the second-largest UPS I have ever seen in my life. (Their generator is in the basement, and it is, of course, flooded.) They're in better shape than the Clear Channel folks- their building is completely dead.

ROFL:

Driving restrictions into Manhattan lead to gridlock - New York News | NYC Breaking News


I like this comment:

is this temporary?
i'm right next to 80 and my mom lives on the upper west side, so i always take the gwbride, but there are times when i leave through the lincoln tunnel.

Yes.

For those unfamiliar with NYC, remember that Manhattan is literally an island. The only ways to get in or out are by bridge, by tunnel under the river, or by ferry.

The problem is that most of the rail systems in the area are offline due to tunnel flooding, damaged track, etc. Likewise, the Staten Island Ferry is also shut down.

A great many of the people who work in Manhattan live in Jersey, the outer boroughs, Long Island, etc. They commute in and out every day, mostly by train.

Even on the best of days, traffic in Manhattan is heavy, to put it very mildly. You think LA or Chicago has traffic? HA! On normal day it can take an hour to go a mile during rush hour (eg: getting into the Holland Tunnel.)

Now, you have literally millions of people who normally come in via train or ferry, who now have no choice but to drive into the city, and because they don't usually commute by car, they don't have reserved parking spots at a garage in the city.

The island simply isn't big enough for all those cars. Thus, until the public transit systems are back online, they've had to enforce mandatory high-density carpooling as a means of keeping the number of additional cars in the city to a minimum, or else Manhattan would simply be completely gridlocked and set a new world record for the largest traffic jam in the history of mankind. Even as it is, a lot of folks who work in the city have decided to simply stay there for the duration, sleeping in their offices rather than facing 4-5 hour commutes by road.

hmmm...i was planning on coming in on saturday. something tells me that's a bad idea

Nah, you know the city. Saturday will be fine. The GW is open on both decks, and MTA up in that neck of the woods is running almost normally. The 3, B and C are suspended, but 1, 2, A and D are operating normally all the way down to 34th. (The A isn't running north of 168th- not sure why.)

cause no one needs to get into inwood. lol

Inwood? WTF are you doing out there?

They do have several more LIRR routes that are supposed to come back online with hourly service starting tomorrow, but Far Rockaway ain't one of 'em.

i'm not, but my dad and i used to live on 188 and st nick. i'd normally take the 1/9 (when the 9 existed) but sometimes, i'd take the a.

bleh.

You know, for being the two major options for getting from midtown to the Airtrain, no two lines could be more dis-similar than A and E.

The E train is fucking fabulous. New, clean, quiet... You'd think you were in Singapore.

The A train somehow manages to capture everything that is bad, wrong and evil about mass-transit. Filthy, run-down, loud, slow... You'd think you were in NYC. In the 70s.

Thank you. I designed those cars. Well, parts of them. Mostly the stuff you get to see, but completely ignore, such as the heater runs. Wasted many years of my life in the shithole that is Hornell, NY.

I also did the driver cab layouts that you probably never get to see.

Wow, that's pretty cool.

Since you were in Hornell, I assume you were working with Alstom, yes?

I have to admit, the R160 is probably the nicest subway car I have ever ridden, in any city.


Well, you can see them if you're in the front of the lead car. :D

It was Morrison-Knudsen back then. Alstom took over just after I left.

Most of the work I did was on the refurbs for the old R-44 cars, but I had started the concept drawings for the new design before I got out. My name is on the vast majority of the drawings for the R-44 cars, because I was the checker for the later part of the project. The saying in the shop was, "hammer to fit, paint to match".

Haha! So you got to work on the best of the IND cars AND the worst. :D

R-44 were a nightmare. They are so named, because the car is for light rail and is 44 feet long. The original shell was built by the Budd company, who I believe is long gone.

The kicker was (and hence the saying above), that the cars varried in length by up to 1.5 feet. Made the interior design difficult, and puting in all the equipment a huge pain. Where some cars would fit the modules fine, others didn't have enough space between the purlines (ribs of the structure). Still others had the spacing so far apart that the mounting brackets had to be extended.

Starting from a clean sheet of paper is always much easier.

Sounds like a shitty deal to be in NYC... however, I have one quirk about the gay-ban.

It prohibits sports cars or cars that are 2 seated, right? But it is encouraging uglier, older, blan, and cheap cars, right?

I get the carpool thing in high congested areas, but there are a ton of cars that fall under the "boring" list that are old, unreliable, and fall apart very easily; now they are coming out of hurricane, storm and flood damage. So wouldn't the break downs cause MORE congestion?