The MTA, once again, is hitting the little people (no, not dwarves, per se; regular, everyday folks) where it hurts the most: our wallets.

They aren’t hiking the fares again, not just yet, but jacking up the price of a Metrocard is but one way to deplete the ridership’s funds. By curbing essential bus and train service, the MTA is denying New Yorkers the opportunity to easily travel to where is the best (perhaps this should be in quotes … read: highest paying) — or only — available job.

I know people who commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx because the latter borough is where they found work, despite that they already lived in Kings County and therefore could not easily relocate closer to work; nothing locally or in Manhattan availed itself to them, so they took what did.

To take a job in Queens is truly a last-ditch desperation move for anyone in Brooklyn because of the near-impossibility of travel between the two boroughs. The MTA’s infrastructure is woefully inadequate to provide a conduit between the two Long Island counties in the Greater City of New York. The G-train is a pathetic joke.

While it is already vexing to travel hither and yon in New York, the loss of mass transit services highlights an even greater concern: by stranding people in their own locality, it makes apparent the dearth there of viable employment and satisfactory grocery stores, and exposes the woeful lack of the most rudimentary elements of a functional community — schools, Post Offices, pharmacies, hardware stores, etc.

New York City may occupy a relatively small square-mileage of land, but it is a dauntingly expansive metropolis … particularly when one is forced to travel for miles — without the aid of a car — just to find the one place that offers the appliance, foodstuff or service one seeks. If a person has to first walk a mile to get to a bus to take to a train that will take them to another borough where they will then have to walk to reach their destination, it is hardly a sign of laziness for such a trek to be dissuasive.

But when the only other option is to fester in one’s own community where the local grocery is woefully understocked and offers only rank, unfortunate produce and suspect meats … where there is no Post Office or annex … where there is no pharmacy … where the local school is a violent trap full of underachieving miscreants bound for nowhere (I hate to oversimplify, in this case, because none of the kids in NY public schools deserve to be forsaken, but neither do I have room to expound without lengthy digression) … what choice does anyone — who isn’t willing to settle for the pathetic offerings at their fingertips — have but to travel far to get what they need?

Exorbitantly inflated rent is already a massive disservice to community well-being. Massive rents marginalize people to fringe areas — with inadequate public transportation — where there is no local investment because no one has money to invest. And there is no investment in these areas by people with money or by the rich politicians who are in a position to divert funds to building the community. Instead, the marginalized are placated in their poverty with welfare and subsidized subsistence.

If the MTA is going to hog-tie the people who depend most on its service, it is well past-due that the communities in which these people will be stranded are given some real relief. No one should have to walk more than a mile for good produce, quality meat and other essential groceries. Ideally, in a city so replete with avenues for employment, very few people should need to walk more than a mile to get to work. Obviously certain circumstances thwart that mentality, like the desire for exorbitant wealth that puts people on the corporate track, although vast riches elude all but very few of the people toiling at nothing concrete or measurable in the corporate world.

Imagine if specialized laborers were permitted only to work where they live. It would increase the quality of their work because how well they do affects them, their loved ones and neighbors … and it would increase demanded for more skilled workers in every community. (Sure, the argument could be made that there wouldn’t be enough work to sustain the workforce, but New York is infrastructurally decrepit enough that this idea could sustain a large workforce for a good while.)

Instead, we have droves of people squandering their potential, staring at computer monitors, sitting in cubicles amidst a drab, gray office, producing nothing remotely tangible. Perhaps producing nothing at all.

The misguided belief that a corporate job is the pinnacle of employment is a very fundamental part of what causes moribund local communities. If more people strove instead to better their own environments by working within them … instead of vying for material excess … they could live well, albeit modestly, and the demand to leave the community would diminish, and so too would the demand for mass transit to carry them to other, “better” opportunities.

Tags: Brooklyn, bus, Flatbush, local, Manhattan, mass transit, MTA, Queens, subway, the Bronx, The Greater City of New York, train, walking

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 11:33 AM and is filed under The Commute, incredulity, piss poor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.