Discussion with several co-bloggers and Friends of Crescat impels me to make a bit clearer my real complaint about the NYC transit system. It's not about the time it takes to get from place to place, or the dirtiness or the grittiness of the experience. I understand that these are values being imperfectly optimised subject to important budget constraints, and I don't ask urban politicians to be miracle-workers.

My complaint about manhattan transit is largely the lack of transparency-- maps aren't always available until after you're through the turnstile, but if you're a midwestern rube like me, you have no idea until you find the map whether you want to go uptown or downtown in order to be able to connect with the J or the 6 or whatever it is you're pursuing. And since you frequently have to decide which way you're going before you can go through the turnstile . . .

And of course it's all the worse if the express trains are running local, or the local trains are running express, or the R is running as the Q, or whatever other chaotic reformulations seem to happen daily. Those who know the system well can easily adapt and adjust, but it punishes planning and newcomers.

This is particularly frustrating given the very welcoming layout of the streets of much of Manhattan. 53rd and 3rd. 12th and 1st. The grid makes it easy for even a novice to get from place to place, so long as he stays out of the West Village. But the sheer opacity of the train system is really quite exhausting.

[Not nearly as exhausting as missing your train to New Haven from the Harlem station because as you were standing up to board your once-beloved canvas bag manages to lock itself onto the bench, strapping your shoulders to the bench and immobilizing you as the train pulls away. Eventually I wriggled free, but I will never trust the bag (or the bench) again.]

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 3.23

Thronged by adorers, I've detected
another, freakish one, who stays
quite self-absorbed and unaffected
by sighs of passion or by praise.
To my astonishment I've seen her,
having by her severe demeanor
frightened to death a timid love,
revive it with another shove-
at least by a regretful kindness;
at least her tone is sometimes found
more tender than it used to sound.
I've seen how, trustful in his blindness,
the youthful lover once again
runs after what is sweet, and vain.

Charles Johnston, trans.

Some time ago, Raffi and I blogged about what made an ideal subway system. Now Quaker asks what it is that I find so confounding about Manhattan's.

1: Some train is always being re-routed or replaced for the day. I'm sure that for those who have the whole train system memorized, when the J replaces the E or the A or the F it's simple enough to figure what that means, but for those of us who just memorized the two trains we needed to get home from the airport, this sudden wrench threatens to derail our ability to get home.

2: Too many stations go only uptown or only downtown, forcing those of us who are accustomed to the more open-minded stations of Chicago or D.C. to keep trotting up and down into the cold trying to find a door that won't take us to only to Brooklyn.

3: Express trains? Local trains? They're never where they're supposed to be and it's never obvious where they're going to stop. I expect this sort of hasty chaos from buses, but trains are supposed to be reliable and fixed. This is what makes up for the lack of the ability to ogle street-life as you travel.

Just to prove that we Nozick-leaners (policy only - I swear I'm more Oakeshott meets Lasch at heart) are also opposed to horrifically stupid jingoism on the right, let me point to this asinine article by Ben Shapiro. And this fantastic rebuttal. Look, loving America might mean never having to say your sorry, but certainly sedition should be held to higher standards than vague disagreement. If we were to oppose sedition, we'd want better advocates than Shapiro to define it. And the analogies! To compare active secessionists for whom Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to Senators who asked that our troops not terrorize "kids and children, you know women" is more than ill thought: it is base. Shapiro should grow up. Loving this strange and difficult country takes more work than those rightist juveniles might assume, and every time they diminish the effort, they turn more of our friends away from the free consideration of its beneficence. Hey - maybe we should charge those rightists with sedition? Nah. Better not give them ideas.