5 Things about New York City that make America Great (and 4 that remind me of Europe)

A street vendor hawking umbrellas near Union Square.

In some ways, New York is the most American of cities. Its energy, drive and optimism are emblematic of the American spirit. It is also the birthplace of many great American institutions that have yet to disseminate across much of the rest of the country, like taxi cabs that take credit cards. But with its high density, multitude of languages and pedestrian culture, New York is also the most European place in America.

Below is my list of the top 5 things that make New York (and America) great, and the top 4 things about New York that suck (and remind me of Europe).

–Things that make New York (and America) great:

1: 24-HOUR SUBWAY

The London Underground closes at 11 PM. The Paris Metro stops service at 1AM. And thanks to shoddy maintenance, Berlin’s S-Bahn doesn’t run much at all these days. But while European countries are content to shutdown their subways every evening, New York is the city that never sleeps. Thankfully, neither does its subway system. If you either work the graveyard shift or are just part of the bar-and-club crowd, the world’s only 24-hour subway means you’ll never have to pay price cab fares or wait hours for the morning’s first train.

2: ENTERPRIZING STREET VENDORS

Every major city has street vendors selling “Gucci” bags and shoddy watches, but New York has vendors that sell things you actually need. Take umbrellas for example; no matter where you are in Manhattan, the second a raindrop hits the ground vendors appear on every corner selling umbrellas for only $5. Then there are the fruit and vegetable carts located all over town. I’m not sure about the rest of the city, but the one at my corner is open 24/7, rain or shine. Some might call it crazy or suspicious, but I like to think of it as an example of the American entrepreneurial spirit. One thing is certain: you could never buy a tomato at 3:30 AM in France.

3: FREE DELIVERY, EVEN FROM MCDONALDS

You can get any food you can imagine in New York, often at any hour of the day. And because of the high density and cut-throat competition, restaurants have to deliver—for free. This is even true for McDonalds! I’ll have a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, please—delivered.

4: TAXIS TAKE CREDIT CARDS

Chalk this one up to Mayor Bloomberg. As of 2007, taxi cabs in New York come equipped with interactive terminals featuring GPS, video programming and credit card machines. Now you never need to worry about having enough cash before hailing a cab: just swipe and ride. If only other cities were so civilized.

5: BARS OPEN UNTIL 4 AM (sometimes)

While not unique to New York strictly speaking, 4 AM bar closing times are nevertheless a great institution. Back in my home state of Michigan, the neo-prohibitionists in the state legislature force bars to shut their doors at 2 AM—which means last call comes at 1:30. In New York, 1:30 is nothing more than the half-way point in a good night out. Unfortunately, increasing neighborhood activism means that precious few new 4 AM liquor licenses are issued by the city. The new norm is trending towards earlier closing times. Damn neighborhood associations!

–Things about NYC that suck (and remind me of Europe):

1: CREDIT CARD MINIMUMS

You would think that a city built on banking and finance—where even taxi cabs and street merchants accept plastic—would be paradise for credit card users. But alas, this is not the case. At restaurants and bars across the city, European-style credit card minimums are the norm. I don’t understand why the New York banks that earn a percentage of every credit card transaction allow their rules to be flouted in their own back yard. This is the birthplace of American Express for crying out loud!

2: LACK OF TOILETS

A city that houses 8.3 million residents, 2 million daily commuters and tens of thousands of tourists produces—to put it bluntly—a lot of shit. Early on, the massive market of human needs was exploited by pay toilet operators, like they have in Europe. But this inhumane practice was banned in the 1970s, thanks to the efforts of the Committee To End Pay Toilets In America. Unfortunately, many merchants in New York today do not live up to the promise of free toilets. They build small restrooms and keep them poorly signed and dirty to discourage use.  The net result is that New York City suffers from a chronic restroom shortage. Often the only place to pee is Starbucks, and the lines for their bathrooms are killer.

3: RESTRICTIVE LIQUOR LAWS

New York City might be home to the Godless East Coast Elite, but that hasn’t stopped the city from embracing puritanical liquor laws straight out of the Bible Belt. Liquor cannot be sold in grocery stores, or any store that also sells beer. The few stores that do sell spirits cannot open before noon on Sundays, and often close by 8 or 9 PM in the evening!

4: HORIBLE SERVICE

There are two kinds of waiters in New York City, the ones who are bad because they are overly smug—typically found at your pricey 3-star restaurants, and the ones who are bad because they are perennially out-of-work actors—who are found everywhere else. The horrible European-style service found across New York City is a real stroke against New York’s otherwise unparalleled restaurant scene. Instead of being a gastronomical nirvana, it is more like the snooty restaurant scene in Paris, but with hotdog carts.

Previous topics mentioned in this post:

#6. Chargebacks and Credit Cards

€1. Pay toilets

The American Dream is alive and well

Cooler heads previal

Walking down Broadway in 90 degree heat earlier this week, I came to have a deeper appreciation of the American retail tactic of luring customers into shops by blasting air conditioning out of open doors. As it was particularly sticky that day, I was happy when my walk brought me to the boutique-lined blocks of SoHo. It seemed that the high-end clothing shops there competed not on products, styling or price, but on who could blast the coldest air onto the sidewalks.

Sure, flooding the sidewalks with 62 degree chilled air might not be the most efficient thing in the world, but that day—thanks to the valiant efforts of the retailers—the only climate change going on was the transformation of those few blocks of Broadway from a completely miserable climate to a moderately tolerable one.

The pleasure and anticipation with which I walked by each clothing boutique made it all the more startling when I came across one with its doors sealed tight. Surely they weren’t trying to hoard all of their precious cooled air inside for themselves? Such a thing would be un-American.

But as a small, hand-written sign in the window made clear, the store in question was not selfishly keeping its chilled air locked up inside. Rather, they were sparing potential customers from an uncomfortable shopping experience on account of the fact their air conditioner was broken.

You would never see such consideration in the hot, sticky shops of Europe.

God Bless America.

Previous topics mentioned:

€4. Inadequate air conditioning

Correction: There is one thing good about Pennsylvania after all

Last week I wrote about my drive from Michigan to New York. You can read the previous posts here and here. Last weekend I had to make the drive again. This time I got off the highway and drove some of the more scenic roads of rural Pennsylvania. Turns out, I was a bit hard on the Keystone state. Driving a second time I came across one thing about Pennsylvania that makes America Great: A Drive-Thru beer store.

Previous topics mentioned in this post:

#2. Drive-Thrus

#16. Cheap gas

Yellow Journalism Watch: New York Times continues its assault on the freedoms of motorists

For a paper based in the most pedestrian-oriented city in the country, the editors at the New York Times sure have it in for America’s motorists.  For the last few weeks, the Times has been running a series called “Driven to Distraction” about the extreme dangers purportedly posed by motorists who chat on their cell phones or hands-free devices while driving.

If you want to recap all the stories in the series, you can find them here. But I’ll save you some time. Every story is heavy on anecdotes, sensationalism and sentimentality, light on statistics and completely devoid of level-headed analysis. Needless to say, there is almost no mention of either the tremendous economic and social benefits the ability of motorists to talk on cell phones brings to society or the fact that our roads today are safer than they have been in decades.

The latest salvo from the Times recaps how New York cabbies have been prohibited from talking on cell phones or using hands-free devices for nearly a decade, but almost universally ignores the ban.

Predictably, the author ledes with emotional anecdotes:

The ambulance arrived at the scene minutes after the cabs collided, one yellow taxi T-boned into another in a busy Manhattan intersection. Shattered glass covered the street as a woman, still in the back seat of one the cabs, clutched her neck in pain.

A cabby paced beside his wrecked car, an earpiece dangling from the side of his head. An emergency worker, Ralph Ortiz, asked him what had happened.

“I was on the phone,” the driver told Mr. Ortiz, who several months later said he was still stunned by the response. “I didn’t see the light turn red.”

What the story doesn’t point out is that despite the “epidemic of gab” that has resulted from the wholesale disregard of the cell phone ban in cabs, traffic fatalities over much of that period have actually declined. That is, even though cell phones have proliferated over the past decade, the roads in the New York are as safe as or safer than they were before the ban. This is not surprising, as it mirrors the national trend: American roads are safer today than at any point since 1960.

Down-Escalators revisited

Q:What is the one thing better than down-escalators?

A: Escalators that are outside.

The American spirit never ceases to amaze me. The other day while wandering around New York’s financial district, I stumbled on a set of escalators on an office plaza’s sidewalk.

It had not occurred to me that someone would build escalators—usually found in airports and shopping malls—outside. But it makes perfect sense. Why should we be deprived of mechanically aided pedestrian transportation simply because we are outdoors? Thanks to American outdoor escalator technology, we are not.

God Bless America!

MINUTEMEN UPDATE: Senators aim for national texting ban

The privacy of the American motorist to do as he pleases in his own car is under attack again. This time the threat comes from straight from the United States Senate.

The New York Times reports that a group of senators have introduced a bill that would require states to ban texting while driving or face punitive cuts in their highway funding.

Under the measure, states would have two years to outlaw the sending of text and e-mail messages by drivers or lose 25 percent of their highway money each year until the money was depleted.

If this scheme seems familiar, that is because it is. In 1984 the Federal Government used the threat of withholding highway funds to impose a national drinking age of 21 on unwilling state legislatures.

First they used highway funds to take away our right to drink. Now they’re using them to curtail our right to communicate in our own cars. Next they will be banning fatty foods, imposing coke taxes and regulating the consumption of red meat that keeps us Americans big and strong.

Enough is enough!

Call your senator and tell them to keep their noses out of our automobiles.

Michigan to Manhattan: A cross-country scorecard of what makes America great (Part 2).

This is the second of a two-part series recapping my move to New York. If you missed part 1, you can read it here.

Eastern Pennsylvania

After refueling at the Flying J, things in Pennsylvania went pretty smoothly. That is, they went smoothly until about hour seven of my journey, when I decided to turn off my audio book (Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money) in the hopes to catching All Things Considered on the local NPR affiliate.

After about 10 minutes of searching, I finally the local NPR station, WVIA. Turns out that not all NPR stations are created equal. After years of counting on finding reliably excellent programming on Michigan Radio (WUOM) at any hour of the day or night, I was horrified to find that Pennsylvania stations broadcast marginal music programs during prime drive-time hours.

I struggled to find an acceptable NPR station all the way through Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Observations/Score card: Eastern Pennsylvania

Things that make America Great: none.

Things that DON’T make America Great: Marginal NPR affiliates that give public broadcasting a bad name (you know who you are WVIA and WXPN).

The Garden State

By all accounts, New Jersey dramatically exceeded expectations.

I had never been to New Jersey before (save for Newark Airport), and kind of expected it to be a mix between drab 70s sprawl and an early industrial wasteland that never quite got cleaned up. Oh, and I expected there to be lots of train tracks and oil storage tanks.

But in reality, my trip down the Garden State’s parkways was remarkably scenic and enjoyable. The lush hills and sometimes dramatic vistas reminded me of Northern Michigan, but with wider (and better) roads, nicer cars and charming infrastructure projects dating from the New Deal.

All and all, driving through New Jersey was a pleasant experience. If only they had a decent NPR station…

Observations/Score card: New Jersey

Things that make America Great: beautiful highways and byways.

Things that DON’T make America Great: Unacceptable lack of decent NPR stations. Isn’t New Jersey home to some of the East Coast Liberal Elite? Where do they get their marching orders if not from Robert Siegel and Michele Norris?

New York City

First of all, they charge $8 to get into New York City. You know a place is going to be pricy when they have a cover charge just to take the tunnel into town.

Beyond that, navigating the streets of New York to my new apartment was much less stressful than I had imagined. However, New York’s draconian anti-cell phone laws required me to repeatedly drop my phone whenever the police came near.

Fortunately, the police seemed more concerned with driving around the city at high speed with their sirens than with pulling me over for using a cell phone, and I was able to make it to my new apartment accident and ticket free (though more than a few cabbies tried to crash into me).

Observations/Score card: New York City

Things that make America Great: Free-for-all streets where lanes are merely suggestions, 24-hour subways.

Things that DON’T make America Great: Cover charges, oppressive European-style anti cell phone laws.

The war on driving

An American’s car is his castle, and that castle is under siege.

The assault on American motoring practices began last Saturday when The New York Times published its lede story on the dangers of driving while talking on a cell phone.  The Times continued the theme Monday, citing recently released study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that claimed drivers distracted by their cell phones caused 955 fatalities in 2002—still far short of the 100,000 people killed by doctors every year—but still nothing to sneeze at. Pointedly, the study concluded that there was little to no safety improvement between drivers talking with a handset and those using a hands-free device.

This set off  another round of calls to ban the use of cell phones while driving. Most of these people, mind you, don’t want to simply ensure both hands are on the wheel by requiring hands-free sets, they want to ban talking on the phone all together.

But as this blog has pointed out before, an American’s car is not only a machine designed to get from point A to point B, but also a personal sanctuary for eating, drinking, enjoying top-notch entertainment systems and yes, talking on cell phones. In short, an American’s car is his home away from home. And if we are going to start regulating when people can and cannot talk in their cars, we better have a good reason to do it.

But we don’t have a good reason to do it.

Whether it is closing a business deal, arranging to meet someone, reporting a drunk driver or simply ordering a pizza, the ability to talk on the phone while driving is a huge benefit to society as a whole. And despite the rapid proliferation of cell phones—and more distracting smart phones—over the past few years, America’s roads today are the safest they have been in decades.

Is talking on a cell phone while driving dangerous? Sure. But so is fiddling with the climate controls, listening to the radio or driving faster than 10 MPH. We could almost eliminate road fatalities entirely—saving 40,000 lives a year— if we simply prohibited the production of cars that could travel at speeds greater than a brisk walk. But that would not be reasonable.

Neither is banning cell phones while driving.

It is time to lift the siege on American drivers and go back to the good old days of last week, when we were all free to do as we pleased in our cars.

Previous topics mentioned in this post:

#2. Drive-Thrus

#3. Cup Holders

#9. Automatic Transmissions

#16. Cheap gas

The American Dream is alive and well. Here is the proof:

Q: How can you possibly make something as American as a Super-sized Big Mac meal with a coke better?

A: By delivering it. … for free.

That’s right. That is a picture of a real life McDonald’s employee delivering a meal, complete with delicious McDonald’s fountain drinks to a grateful customer.

Three words: God Bless America!

Michigan to Manhattan: A cross-country scorecard of what makes America great (part 1)

This is the first in a two part series recapping my move to New York.

The Departure

Moving day was quite the odyssey.

When I arrived at the car rental place on Tuesday at 7 AM to pick up my rental, I was informed that they did not have a car for me. No apology, nothing. The disgruntled sales clerk simply suggested I “call around” to other Hertz locations. He did not provide a list of numbers.

Fortunately Google picked up the slack and was able to provide me a comprehensive list of Hertz locations in the metro-Detroit area.

Two hours, and ten phone calls later, I had a car from another Hertz location – although not the car the sales person had promised me on the phone 20 minutes prior. But at this point, I wasn’t complaining. Not even Hertz’s European approach to customer service could stop me from moving to New York. I eagerly hoped in my Hyundai, drove thru the nearest McDonald’s for a breakfast value meal and ventured forth.

Observations/Score card:

McDonald’s breakfast makes America great.

Hertz Rent-A-Car does not.

The Heartland

Things went quite smoothly for the first leg of the journey. My Ann Arbor engineered Hyundai was a surprisingly nice car (blasphemy from a Detroiter, I know). The Ohio Turnpike rest stops lived up to expectations, and I was able to get a few shots of espresso from Starbucks for $2, which I paid for with my credit card.

However, things went precipitously downhill once I entered Pennsylvania.  It was a solid 100 miles into Keystone State before I came across anything resembling a standard interstate rest area/fast food assemblage. By this point the gas situation was quite dire and I was forced to refuel at a Flying J Truck Stop.

The gas pumps at the Flying J had a user interface so complicated that it made your typical automated telephone support line seem refreshing and simple by comparison. After navigating through about 6 menus and entering my zip code no less than 3 times, I was finally able to refuel my car.

Inside, the Flying J was your typical full-service interstate truck stop: a gas station expanded to include a restaurant, arcade, pay showers and a full party store. This particular location also had an impressive display of Christian memorabilia, including pamphlets advertizing “Christian Brides,” who would move to the U.S. from some distant godforsaken land (probably Europe) to marry lonely Christian men.

Because Hertz had delayed my departure, I regrettably did not have much time to explore all that the Flying J had to offer.

Observations/Score card:

Buying coffee with a credit card makes America great.

Western Pennsylvania and Flying J truck stops do not.

Check back later this week for Part 2: The Garden State and the Big Apple