[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, it's about ~1hour from Princeton to NYC, if you know the best routes. Longer if you don't, and at 7-8.30 in the morning, fuhgeddaboudit. I lived 15 mins from Princeton, (further north), and I always loved the area. It's not cheap, and while there is a lot of public transpo--as there always is when students are half the population, give or take--you'd still need a car.

"It's not cheap" was another major minus. My boss at the time was SVP/Operations, and his pay grade was rather above mine.

(n.b.: STILL, as I remember it, traffic into Manhattan for the bridge and tunnel crowd was still FAR better at rush hour than the equivalent hours in L.A. LA's traffic is simply mind-blowing. I had to leave LA, in '85, before I lost my mind suffering through the traffic every morning--even HOURS before work started--and turned into a TV News story (deranged woman goes on freeway shooting rampage...). Of course, as memorialized in song, LA really IS a great big freeway, and much like Phoenix, public transportation is pretty much useless unless you reside AND work in the very heart of the city.)

It pretty much has to be. Far more people work in Manhattan than live there. There's a reason the MTA is the largest municipal transit system in the world, and the city has pushed hard to get workers to leave cars at home and take public transit, or at least car pool to reduce the total number of vehicles.

The office I used to live in walking distance of closed, and I was doing the reverse commute for a while, going from Manhattan to points north to get to work.

We reside in AZ, and there is simply no such thing as relying on public transpo here. I remember when I first arrived here, I was pretty surprised that public transpo was an also-ran afterthought, because while NYC is a dense city, Phoenix and its burbs are far, far, FAR larger, physically. You can drive from one borough to the other in NYC fairly quickly. (Or bus, cab, train/subway, etc.). Here, I can have to drive nearly 60 miles one way to go from one suburb of Phoenix to another. That's large. Oh, and, of course, our population spread is mostly out--horizontal--rather than vertical, like the larger older cities like NYC, Chicago, et al.

The "spread out" is part of it. Manhattan is dense. The scarce resource is land, and it grew up rather than out. I grew up in Philadelphia, which feels smaller than it in fact is. That was in part due to city zoning regulations that forbade buildings taller than the statue of William Penn atop City Hall, so it never developed skyscrapers. That has finally begun to change in recent years, but the city still does things like insist on preserving sight lines so it's nowhere near as dense as NYC. Philly also has a fairly comprehensive transit system operating 24/7, though the subways are nowhere near as extensive as NYC's.

As you go farther west, people's notions of close change. Close for me is a ten minute walk. Close out west appears to be a half hour drive.

Eh, in fairness to Larry, he's right. It's a gorgeous area in which to reside.

That's where his office was. He had a house in New Hope, PA, and an apartment in NYC. But it is a nice area to live.

I had call to visit the Princeton office on occasion. That was fun. Mass transit from NYC stops at Princeton Junction. To get to Princeton proper, you take a one car shuttle called the Dinky by locals from the Princeton Junction stop.

That must be another brainstorm from your mayor. What a joke. Even in my youthful heyday, {mumble} decades ago, you couldn't do 35 in the city streets. That's a bloody laugh, that is. Of course, there's always THAT taxicab pilot that wants to set the record, and cheerfully exceeds 40+, while you're saying a few Ave Marias in the pax compartment.

And that was {mumble} years ago. I can't imagine it's any bloody better now.

Politicians always try to gain votes by ostentatiously locking the barn door after the horse has escaped. I believe the proximate cause for this was a pedestrian fatality. Having seen idiots in SUVs more intent on their cell phone than on where they were driving (and hearing a horror story from an old friend who nearly became a bumper ornament with her preteen daughter of one such), pedestrian fatalities are remarkable in how few there are.

(I wished I'd been a city cop there to see what my friend described. Bozo would have been out of his car, SUV towed, him cuffed and taken to the precinct, and his cell phone accidentally being crushed under my heel. And I'd have dome my best to see bozo got jail time, license revoked, and car confiscated.)

And cabbies are largely the same, save that it's harder to find one that speaks English as his native language. I live just above one of the areas called Little India, and the area I live in has a mini eco-system catering to the Indians in the taxi and limo trade who seem to operate from it, with several 24 hour delis, Indian restaurants open at 4am, and a weird little hole in the wall shop selling fresh Paan, taxi accessories, phone cards, and Indian CDs/DVDs. It opens noon or later, and may still be open at 3am because that's when it has the customers.
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Dennis