Back in February, I documented a brief and stupid saga involving the vending machines that allow you to buy MetroCards to ride the New York City subway. Now, thanks to William Finnegan in The New Yorker, we have some more context about those machines. Hilarious context. Enlightening context. Sad context.
If you’re a diplomat on U.S. soil, you can steal, plunder and murder to your heart’s content without having to face the legal ramifications of your actions. But, by God, you better pay your parking tickets in New York City.
A sixth New York City cab driver has committed suicide after falling into significant financial straits. It’s the latest in a string of deaths that, according to driver advocates, is connected to the proliferation of ride-hailing apps in the city like Uber and Lyft.
The New York City subway system is a mess, and now instead of reading about why that is, you can play a very simple game and experience it yourself. It’s called “MTA Country,” and it’s hell. It’s tongue-in-cheek solution, revealed once you win the game, isn’t any better.
It’s the fifth suicide in five months. Yu Mein Chow, a 56 year old living in Queens, was found dead in the East River on May 11. Having spent $700,000 on the coveted medallion that would allow him to operate a cab in the city, he found that he just couldn’t make enough driving his cab to make it worthwhile. With no…
This’ll impress virtually zero of you, especially routine two-wheel commuters, but I have delightful news to share. I recently retrieved my bike back from my hometown in Michigan, more than a year after moving to New York City, and I used it this morning to commute to work. I didn’t die, and it was rad.
In October, General Motors made a big splash by announcing it was applying for a permit to test autonomous cars in New York State, with plans to deploy vehicles on the busy streets of Manhattan in “early 2018.” But more than six months later, the automaker has yet to receive final approval for the necessary permit to…
The quickest way by car to Harlem in rush hour from, say, 18th Street in Manhattan, used to be straight up the gut on Sixth Avenue, before you entered Central Park’s Center Drive, which eventually dumped you onto Malcolm X Boulevard. That route, though, was partially banned a few years ago, and, soon will be banned…
In a beautiful example of purely nepotistic synergies, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will drive the Formula E race car of Nelson Piquet Jr. up the West Side Highway in New York City in honor of the New York Auto Show this week. Guess the subway’s gotten that shitty, huh, Cuomo?
The New York City subway’s array of problems—dysfunctional signals, relentless delays, overcrowded trains—is well-known, but the Village Voice has another premise to add to the list, and it makes a whole lot of sense: the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the system, is literally running the…
On the heels of my widely-discussed and widely-shared ranking of all of New York City’s parkways and highways, I present the only correct ranking of the bridges of New York, of which there are 39 that matter, and thus are worth ranking.
December 15, 1973, was a chilly and cloudy day in New York City. The city’s fortunes had already begun to take a downturn. A single dump truck, overloaded with more than nine tons of asphalt, rumbled down the old elevated West Side Highway, which promptly collapsed. And in a moment of almost hilarious corruption that…
Despite “free” and “airlines” rarely belonging in the same sentence, American Airlines will start serving free beer and wine on certain flights from Chicago to New York in April. Of course, “free” is an illusion to make us think corporations are less terrible than they really are, and we’re paying for it somehow.
Running from the police is a bad idea, especially after you’ve stopped, handed over your driver’s license and given them time to sit and process your information. But, people still do dumb things all the time, like this BMW driver, whose escape was captured on video.
It turns out that if you’re going to do something extraordinarily stupid in a car that results in a cop being injured, one of the busiest and most surveilled places in America isn’t the best place to try it. Two suspects have been arrested in connection with Sunday evening’s Times Square burnout and hit-and-run of a…
A New York City cop has been injured after trying to stop what appears to be a Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG from drifting through Times Square, and the incident was all caught on video.
Severed fingers. Calves sliced open by discarded glass. Smashed-open skulls. Workers crushed to death beneath heavy and unsecured containers. And a swirling history of organized crime. These are but some of the horrors that face the employees of private New York City waste collection companies, brought to light by an…
