ok i love NYC but its roads are a total disgrace. they're worse than roads in philly and i pay far higher taxes living NYC than in philly. funny that today i had to drive to queens to see if i could get my rear passenger tire repaired since it's been having a slow leak for the past 2 weeks. so i'm told that the tire is pretty bad and it's a sidewall leak that can't be repaired, and the guy shows me the inside of the tire and i quietly thanked the stars it didn't crap out on the van wyck. after paying a small fortune for a replacement, i drove a bit in queens, went to the largest korean grocery store i have ever seen, and then hightailed it back.
on the way, i was treated to the worst roads i have ever experienced. the BQE, going west and east, is an expressway that i've known for some time is absolutely abysmal. once i tried to play a CD and the car was banging up and down over the joints in the road and the unpaved sections and potholes that the CD was skipping so much that it couldn't even play for a second until i took an exit. well the roads were worse than the BQE. i had to take a weird off/onramp to the LIE and i hit a stretch of the road that, coming around a bend, must have been at least a foot of water deep. i thought my car was going to stall out. the entire several hundred yards was just me plowing through the water until i could get onto the next expressway. coming across the roosevelt bridge, i hit an enormous, unmarked pothole the width of my car and the depth of hell that made the most hideous sound ever. i was coming back from the tire replacement and i thought wryly that i should probably turn around and have them now check out both of the front tires. the whole trip was an absolute disgrace.
turns out the river i had to navigate was also extremely filthy as when i got out of my car, the entire right half was covered in white residue. what a mess. seriously, if you own a car here, you can't expect it to stay pristine. mine has dents and miscellaneous scrapes all over it. just taking it out for a drive guarantees that something will damage your car b/c of the ungodly state of the roads. and one other gripe that nondrivers can relate to -
why is it that there's construction constantly on the same roads year after year and nothing gets fixed? i remember living on 10th street and 5th ave - every year there was construction outside my window on 10th street. the jack-hammering would go on for weeks. i couldn't get any sleep at all in the early mornings. and this was an annual event. why can't they just FIX the damn problem? instead of coming back and reopening the road and paving it up only to reopen the road again and again, repeating this whole inane and infuriating process? same thing with the BQE. they've been working on the same stretches of road for a year now. there is NO improvement at all. same areas blocked off, same open joints and broken pavement. whoever is running this - i guess it's DOT - i mean i really question the judgment.
well my consolation is that i've bought the motherload of korean food and so i'm going to go have a phenomenal lunch. btw the luc besson movie, "Angel-A," is pretty good. it's in french, set in paris, and about a perpetual liar who's about to off himself whose life changes when he meets quite a heavenly creature. gets my recommendation.
weird story for the day:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_and_Barney_Hill_abduction.