We Should Consider Building An Interurban Trolley System

I recently joined a Facebook group of transportation buffs called "New York's Railroads, Subways & Trolleys, Past & Present" (85,000 members). The site's profile photo of trolleys crossing the Brooklyn Bridge brought to mind E. L. Doctorow's historical novel, Ragtime (Random House, 1975).

There's a scene in which a character travels from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to, I think, Springfield, Massachusetts, by transferring from one trolley line to another. That's one of the most memorable scenes in the book. It would be wonderful if a trolley system like that existed today. Such a system, an interurban one, would help reduce traffic jams and air pollution from automobile emissions.

Traveling By Bus On Dark Riverside Drive

A cautionary note: this blog post may be too New York-centric, unless you plan to visit soon and use our mass transit system.

On my way home from grocery shopping at the Target store in East Harlem on January 19, I took the crosstown M116 bus that travels along 116th Street to the West Side, where I live. The bus had a video screen mounted to the roof that faced the passengers and announced all of the stops both visually and by automated voice (female) as well as what buses and subways to transfer to.

I was hoping that the M5 bus, which I take often and that goes up Riverside Drive, would have similar screens installed.Some of these buses had roof-attached screens but they did not display transit and stop information;others didn't have the screens at all.The ones that did only featured info that told riders about bus etiquette such as not putting one's feet on the seats or not talking too loudly on their cell phone.

The thing that concerns me the most is that the street corners on the Riverside Drive route is so dark it's hard to read street signs from inside the bus. And since the drivers frequently fail to announce the stops, the on board message screens would be a big remedy to this problem.

Another remedy would be placing lighted cross street-name signs on Riverside Drive like the ones in the 34th Street/Herald Square area. Maybe the people who live in the buildings along Riverside Drive are too hoity-toity to have such signs on street corners.

Combating Monkey Butt

The first time I became aware of the malady called monkey butt was when it was mentioned in a Duluth Trading Company catalogue that offered a product that went by the name "Anti Monkey Butt Powder."

Monkey butt was described in the catalogue copy as "a term coined by bikers  to refer to soreness, itching and redness from long hours on a bike seat." (Presumably horseback riders, bicyclists, truck drivers, and writers (?) are similarly afflicted.)

The mention of this strangely named condition caused me to think back to the early 1960s when my second oldest brother Richard and his traveling companion nicknamed Lucky (who was also our sister's boyfriend at the time), crossed the country on a motorcycle from New York to Los Angeles, where my mother and I were living.

When Richard and Lucky got to Needles, California, the bike broke down a la the scene in the movie Motorcycle Diaries in which the motorcycles of Che Guevara and his traveling companion break down as they travel the length of South America. Richard asked our mother to wire them some money so they could continue on to L.A. She did and they safely completed the journey.

I now regret not interviewing my brother, who died in 1989, about that three-thousand-mile trek. I wonder what sights and adventures they encountered along the way. I also wonder how they combated the dreaded symptoms of monkey butt.