Maybe an infrastructure crisis as well. I'm undergoing culture shock, getting used to the Chicago El again with its interminable delays and snail's pace speed at its fastest, an hour to an hour and a half (each way) from Evanston to downtown Chicago (15 miles) on a good day, after two weeks travel that included a lot of hither and thithering on the Paris and Rome Metros, where you never have to wait more than 4 minutes for a train and generally less, and where a 25 mile trip from, say, Central Paris to the suburb of St.-Denis takes 20 minutes. (And no waiting time.) Also the trains are quiet; I can't listen to my Pod when the El goes underground, but the Paris Metro and even the grungier Rome Metro (they haven't mastered anti-graffiti technology there) run at a little over a whisper. Also those train systems are cheap -- a single ride on the El is $2, on the Rome Metro, one Euro, now about $1.30. The Paris system is old, too, about contemporaneous with the El, 1890s.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> We had transit chaos in NYC today after an intense
> overnight
> rainstorm dumped 2 inches of rain in an hour.
> Subways were flooded;
> the official line was that about half the system was
> shut down; word
> on the street is that it was higher. Street traffic
> was horrendous -
> worse than the last transit strike. Subway watchdog
> Gene Russianoff
> says that the Transit Authority is facing more of
> these intense
> storms. You've got to wonder if this was a climate
> change event, and
> there's lots more of this to come.
>
> Doug
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