People have been asking what it’s like at the center of the 2005 New York City transit strike. But actually, for me, it’s something like being in a bubble. With the new people we’re hiring we’re about to open our first TPM offices. But for the moment, I work mainly at home, which is downtown, actually in the teens.
When I was out in the neighborhood yesterday — i.e., not during rush-hour — there was nothing to see that would make you think things were anything but normal, other than the little ‘closed’ signs hanging from the subway entrances. If anything the streets seemed more empty than usual. As I said, though, in a bubble, or rather, in the center of the storm.
The craziness is getting in and out of the city or between the different boroughs or rather anywhere that’s more than ten or twenty blocks and thus not an easy walk in sub-freezing temperatures (26 degrees right now). My wife, whose commute is only about thirty or forty blocks, asked me to wish her luck when she left this morning.
It was a surreal feeling since I knew I was in the center of a city whose civic metabolism had been turned upside down. Just not for me; I was lucky.
