The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Today’s post is populated by a few ‘odds and ends’ images left over from the longish Pittsburgh walk which I was describing to y’all last week. I’m a bit out of touch with those posts, as I’ve been ‘on the road’ for the last week and administering Newtown Pentacle remotely.

As those posts were going live (WordPress allows me to schedule publishing details), a humble narrator was actually back in NYC for a few days to handle some business, so it’s a bit of an understatement to say that I’ve got a lot on my mind about all that I saw and experienced there.

Initially, let’s just say that as this ‘little froggy’ has escaped that proverbial pot of boiling water which gets subtly hotter minute by minute more than a year ago – the same pot which all New Yorkers live in – and it was startling to experience how much of a roiling boil the City is in right now. Apparently, I got out just in time.

More on that in a couple of weeks after I’ve gathered my thoughts, but I was frankly staggered by how much rapid decline I was witnessing, and exactly what has occurred to ‘Home Sweet Hell’ in just the last 14 months. Wow.

Pictured above are Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tunnels, which allow vehicle traffic to punch through Mount Washington and enter the South Hills region of the Pittsburgh metroplex. This is what ‘rush hour’ looks like here.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One of the things that really hit me, as is usually the case when you haven’t been dwelling within NYC for a while, is the constant hum and standing wave of 35-50 decibel background noise. I’ve become acclimatized to a quieter environment in the last fourteen months, and that din of noise splashed over me as soon as I opened the MOP’s window after having crossed the GW Bridge on my way back to Queens.

In the shot above, that’s the off ramp for the Liberty Bridge that I’m walking under, a span which guides vehicle traffic into the Liberty Tunnels from the peninsular Downtown section of Pittsburgh.

One of the other things which just blew me away was that there was visible smog. Haven’t seen visible smog in NY for a good thirty years, but that’s the consequence of ‘traffic calming’ for you. Maybe slowing traffic down to a crawl, sequencing traffic lights to cause maximum idling time for trucks and other heavy vehicles at intersections… all that jazz… maybe that was a bad idea from an air quality point of view. I’ve got photos of the murky pall hanging over the place, of course.

Wow. There’s several reasons I left NYC in the first place, but I hadn’t reckoned on the reemergence of Smog as an environmental problem in the 5 Boroughs. I guess that since Tammany Hall is back in power, so too are other historical features of the big city.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I drove back to NYC from Pittsburgh, which is a back and forth trip of about 800 miles. Over the course of that entire back and forth journey, the Mobile Oppression Platform (a Toyota RAV4 hybrid) used about two tanks worth of gas, which equates to about 28 gallons of fuel. It’s a 14 gallon gas tank that’s hidden deep within the MOP, one which offers a MPG number of 39.5 mpg during the summer and about 37 or so mpg during the cold months. A full tank gives me a range of better than 400 miles after a fill up.

Just moving around in the heavy and slow moving traffic of Queens and Brooklyn (LIC, Astoria, all around the fabulous Newtown Creek) last week burned about 3/4 of a tank of gas, which was largely consumed in idling time at lights and sitting in traffic. Again – the car is a hybrid – so my engine jumps over to electric when it’s stop and go, but it still burned down the equivalent of about 350 miles worth of gas in the ‘Vision Zero’ zones of NYC.

Coupling that with the basic unavailability of a place to just pull the car off the road for a minute, let alone park at a meter, meant that the engine was working harder and far more than it does here amongst the steep hills of Pittsburgh, where I go to a gas station about once every two weeks to fill up the tank (and that’s usually just a quarter to a half tank ‘top off’).

Observationally – the ‘two wheels good four wheels bad’ crowd have actually caused air quality in the City to drop, which is kind of hilarious when you think about it. Childhood asthma rates must be rising and having soot rain from the sky is always fun. Desirable outcome for the policy of any advocacy group which cloaks itself in environmentalist rhetoric should include improving things, not making them worse.

Back tomorrow with something unrelated, but this whole experience is a subject which I’ll be talking about again fairly soon, once I’ve got some of the photos developed. I guess you really can’t go home again.

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