Aydin
Rice King
Registered: Jul 2001
Location: China
Posts: 11795 |
I'm not weird, okay?
Posted on Wed, Aug. 20, 2003
New Yorkers are anomalies amid auto-loving Americans
By Michael Powell
WASHINGTON POST
NEW YORK - As America has long suspected, no one here can drive.
Lawyers, doctors, day laborers, actors, psychotherapists: New York City has more able-bodied, nonlicensed, car-phobic adults than anywhere in the United States. Approximately 25 percent of the inhabitants possess a driver's license.
Caroline Hwang, 33, a novelist and editor, is one of New York's carless millions. She lives in Manhattan and walks, hails cabs and uses her subway card. She packs her beach towel and takes the Long Island Rail Road to the Atlantic Ocean beaches and bums a ride when friends insist on one of those bucolic weddings north of the Bronx. As a teenager in Wisconsin she had a license, but that seems so yesterday.
"I asked my boyfriend recently if I could sit in the driver's seat. I couldn't remember which was the accelerator and which was the brake," she recalled. "I feel like New York City is set up for people like me."
Bill Bastone runs TheSmokingGun.com, a whimsical investigative Web site. He grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, a couple of blocks from the elevated No. 7 train, which rolls right into Manhattan. He went to New York University and worked for the Village Voice. He neglected to take driver's education in high school, and that was destiny. He is 42 and does not have a learner's permit.
"I don't remember dreams, as a rule, but the only ones I do recall are about out-of-control auto wrecks," he said. "So maybe I need to sit down and talk to someone about this."
Or maybe this car-and-license thing is more proof that New York floats somewhere off the East Coast. For most Americans, the car -- the Mustang, the Bronco -- packs as much iconic wallop as a horse for John Wayne. But not here -- in New York, you are defined by the IND, BMT or the IRT trains. When electricity failed last week, those carless commuters were left with only foot power.
New Yorkers plan work and play around their inability to drive. They vacation on Fire Island, because no cars are allowed. They tend to travel east to London, Paris or any other European city with a good subway system instead of heading west, say, to Utah or Wyoming or Nevada, all of which have long highways and no Yellow Taxis.
Ask Jimmy Breslin, this city's most famous newspaper columnist, why he does not drive. The 74-year-old Newsday writer begins: "I started out at a house on 101st Avenue in Queens and right there the Q-8 bus stopped. The A-train was over at Liberty Avenue. I mean, a car? There was no need. The transportation was wondrous.
"Besides," he added, "I worked the night shift at the Long Island Press, and I needed to save my extra (cash) for beer."
SEIU Local 32 BJ went looking recently for a few good labor organizers to unionize custodians in the wilds of New Jersey and Long Island. All refused.
"They simply don't drive," noted Richard Schrader, a union consultant. "I had one guy, a great prospect, but when he gets off the bus in Glen Cove, where's he going?"
Driving in New York is not natural. Periodically, the men and women at the city Department of Transportation measure the average speed of a car traveling across midtown, which they invariably find moving at the rate of a Galapagos tortoise. Then there are other problems: alternate side of the street parking, rapacious meter maids, $100 parking tickets, exorbitant insurance rates, incomprehensible and contradictory highway signs and the fact that no car in New York ever stays in its lane.
"It's bad enough to sit in the back of a taxi and watch," Bastone notes. "Who wants to be part of that?"
Even romance bends to a license-less rhythm. Chris Policano, 42, serves as chief spokesman for the City Council. A decade or so back, he asked his beloved to marry him. She said yes, but set a condition: He must obtain his driver's license.
"I'd had learner's permits, many, many permits," he recalls. "But scheduling the road test was so daunting. There was that parallel parking thing."
As it turned out, Policano took his road test along the Brooklyn docks in a blizzard. The test officer wanted to get home and said to skip the parking. So Policano is a licensed driver. But that fact has not transformed his life. "You know," he said, "it's a lot easier to say 'Taxi!'"
Jeri Drucker grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a regional hot spot for the driving-challenged. She is planning her son's wedding on the far side of the Delaware Water Gap. It is a logistical nightmare. Her sisters do not drive, nor do her adult nieces or her uncle. Her stepsister drove in Los Angeles once, but she moved back to New York and gave that up.
Drucker plans to rent something akin to a school bus to haul her family out there.
"My father had a license," she said, "but that was a long, long time ago, and he never drove. Maybe this is inherited?"
In this unlicensed wilderness, the city's hundreds of auto schools hang shingles like lanterns for the auto-phobic. As Ira, an instructor at the Bensonhurst Driving School, said of himself, "I'm not a teacher, I'm a psychotherapist."
There is the man who has had learner's permits for 17 years and comes in each April for a lesson or two before he decides he cannot handle it and disappears. And there are legions of 58-year-old accountants and 62-year-old lawyers who see retirement approaching and start thinking Boca Raton, Fla., and Tucson, Ariz., if only they could drive.
"We have 75- and 80-year-old students," said Wilma Valenzuela of the Professional Driving School on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. "They always ask, 'Do I drive right away?' I say, 'Not if you haven't driven before, you don't!'"
Some drivers come in for late spring tuneups. They have licenses but have never used them and now need to get to the Hamptons. "We take them to a quiet street, sip a cup of tea and let them ease into it," said Elizabeth Lim of the Grand Prix Driving School.
All of which is very nice. But as this is New York, a tincture of belligerence can sneak into conversations with the license-less. As in, "Why should I drive?"
M.P. Dunleavey, an editor and Manhattan native, recalls relatives poking fun at her for being thirty-something and not having a license. "I didn't think it was funny," she said. "There was something gauche about having a car. It was so -- suburban."
Joe Dunlap, 34, has spiraled through the city as a bike messenger, traveled the world and now is studying to get his master's degree in education. Someday, maybe, he will get a license.
"If I get bored and I'm like 50," he said. "I just might do it."
Stranger things have happened in New York.
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09-29-2003 03:47 PM
