White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Old-World Joys of Public Transportation

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PRAGUE — Just shout, “All aboard!” and I’m there.

I’m a sucker for trains, passionate about light rail, gooey over subways, sentimental about trams and trolley buses, and very content on a bus. I’m a public transport enthusiast.

This doesn’t mean, as critics of public conveyances so often believe, that one is against cars.

Let’s get this straight: One of the great wonders that make life in our times free and rich is the private car. It could be argued that they deserve constitutional protection, like guns and the media.

When you climb into your car, you are truly free. More, you are surrounded by your own stuff – the half-eaten candy bar, crushed tissue box, scattered CDs, and quite possibly the hair from your dog. Even if you are a neatnik, your car is your castle; safe, secure, mobile, cozy, cool.

Also, the car is a work of manufacturing genius — so much complexity for so little money. The first thing every poor person dreams of is a car.

I got my first old banger when I turned 16. It had many deficiencies, not the least of which were the mechanical brakes and the unsynchronized gear box.

But for me, it was the greatest vehicle ever built: Keep your Rollses, Bugattis and Cadillacs. I had a car. I was free. I was grown up. I was a person. The open road belonged to me, as did the toolbox, the lovers’ lane and wondrous bragging rights.

So what’s this about public transportation?

Sadly, in cities, cars have worn out their welcome. The miracle of the private car is now the urban curse. Too much of a good thing, you might say.

It’s not so much that cars are bad, but that they’re being used for the wrong things: getting to work, or getting around a crowded city.

Europe has its car problems, but it does better with alternatives. You need guts and patience to get around the Arc de Triumph in Paris by car, or to circumvent London on the M25.

In 2003 London restricted cars through a stiff congestion charge, which is now a model for the world — although Singapore did it 25 years earlier.

For political and historical reasons, Europe has the jump on public transportation. Not just its great cities but also its smaller towns, and even villages, have workable (extensive, seven days a week) public systems. A few American cities–notably Boston, New York and Chicago–offer integrated public transport, but more as a last resort than a first choice.

In Prague, I’ve just taken a tram from my Old Town hotel to the castle across the Vltava River and back. Easy and fun. User-friendly, too. I traveled here from Bratislava, Slovakia on a clean, comfortable train with a dining car and toilets in about four hours.

President Obama has talked a good line on infrastructure and green jobs. The two should be joined.

Infrastructure jobs mop up the construction-worker surplus and position our cities for a greener future. Particularly, electric buses need a new hearing. Overhead lines have worked well with two connections–like a big tuning fork–bringing in the power. But they have one weakness: They are not flexible and tend to disconnect on corners. Better engineering and batteries could solve that old bugaboo.

There is a liberal elite that worships Eurotransit, and in so doing infuriates the Europhobes.

In the 1980s, we were constantly looking to Japan to see what worked–until it didn’t work anymore. In all but air transportation, it’s time to look to Europe to see what works and improve on it. I doubt the practicality of high-speed rail in this country but electric vehicles in our cities, with fewer cars, would improve the quality of life as the air cleared.

What’s more, transportation infrastructure is an investment where the jobs stay here, and people experience the difference.


Hail! New Cabs Are Coming

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When New York City was in a bad way, mostly from crime and grime, before the first Giuliani administration, the editor and social critic Lewis Lapham said: “First, fix the taxis.”

Quite so. Taxis are the public face of a city. In the United States, taxis are mostly a disgrace: dirty, poorly maintained and driven by people, often new arrivals, who do not know their way around.

It is not clear that New York fixed the taxis, but they seemed to improve along with a general improvement in street-level life in the Big Apple.

New York taxis are pretty special. An English writer in the 1960s described them with enthusiasm as “great yellow projectiles” hurtling down the Manhattan canyons. Next to London’s clumsy-looking but very nimble black boxes, there is a raw energy about New York taxis that mirrors the city they serve.

Yet there has been no distinctive vehicle for taxis since the Checker Motors Corporation of Kalamazoo, Mich., went out of business in 1982. Like other cities, the New York taxi fleet has become eclectic. The de facto standard vehicle has been the taxi version of the Ford Crown Victoria, utilitarian rather than distinctive, and now being discontinued by Ford.

The first victim of non-standard vehicles in taxi livery is comfort, especially in New York City, where operators install intrusive Plexiglas partitions to protect drivers. These make the back seat feel more crowded than it perhaps is, and cause the passengers to wonder about the safety of their noses in the event of a short stop.

For most people taxis are a luxury, something special. We want to feel special in the back seat, more like a person and less like a package.

Well nearly three decades after the last Checker went into service in New York, donned its yellow livery and had its prized medallion (the city-issued license that controls the number of cabs permitted to operate), New York is copying the London example—a vehicle built just for taxi work. Bravo.

According to The New York Daily News, four companies are competing for the honor of building purpose-specific taxi cabs: General Motors, Ford, Nissan and an obscure Turkish auto company, KarsanKarsan. The newspaper says the two top contenders are in fact Nissan and KarsanKarsan.

Reports give the advantage to the Turkish entry. Photographs of the Nissan suggest something built on the platform of a commercial van, whereas the Turkish offering is more elegant, after the style of a crossover. The issue is before the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Every few years, London has a competition for a new taxi model and these are sometimes built by companies not otherwise known for making cars.

London cabs have been regulated since the 17th century, when special designs for the horse-drawn contraptions were introduced and influenced carriage design around the world. They also led to some of the lore about London cabs. Cabbies, it is said, are obliged by law to carry a bale of hay for the horse; and it is legal for a gentleman to pee on the left rear wheel of the conveyance as necessary.

I have done many things in the back of a London cab, but I have never tested the left rear wheel. Also, I can attest that there is no trace of hay in or about today’s London taxi.

But there are things about London taxis that New York City, and by extension taxi operators across the United States, might wish to emulate:

—a. First, the roominess: Four people can comfortably ride in the back, two on the bench seat and two on fold-down seats facing backwards. This really is superior.

—b. Second, the roof height: In theory, this has to be high enough to accommodate a man wearing a top hat. The height of the man is not part of the legend.

—c. Third, the vehicle has to be able to turn almost in its own length. This, it is said, was introduced to accommodate the narrow circle in front of the Savoy Hotel, an Art Deco masterpiece.

If New York City gets new taxis, they will affect the whole country in time as did the Checker. After all, the original Checker market was not New York City but Chicago. Good ideas spread.

 

Hey Dick, Add a Spoonful of Socialism to Your Tea

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MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — The English like to say, from an old music hall song, “a little of what you fancy does you good.”  Well, so does a smidgeon of socialism.

Shock horror! Alert Dick Armey, inform Rudy Giuliani and let Rupert Murdoch know. Heresy is dangerous, and the correct authorities should be informed.

Like most people who rail against European socialism, those three have been the beneficiaries of some largesse that might be described as socialistic.

Armey, who is leading the tea bag revolution and who talks of the socialist threat as though a fleet were coming up the Potomac to sack Washington, is the beneficiary of the rights, honors and money that come from being a former congressman, all the way down to a handsome health care package.

Then there is Giuliani, who presided over the second most liberal city in the United States, after San Francisco, added to its amenities and improved America’s largest subway system. Notably, he did not end rent control, now known as “rent stabilization,” nor did he end a plethora of liberal services available in New York. Yet if the former mayor, who wanted to be president, wants to denigrate something, he utters the “s” word.

Murdoch is special. He has played footsie with the Gordon Brown Labor government in London; played up to the Communist Chinese; cooed over the Clintons and booed ideas of assistance to the media; and employed a staff at Fox Cable News who are devoted to castigating Europe and its left-of-center democracies. Worse, Murdoch has benefitted over the years from various government subsidies including the Commonwealth Press Cable Rate, which moved news inexpensively around the world before the Internet. And he has never cried out against second-class postage, another huge government subsidy to publishers.

OK, socialism, even the mild kind favored here in the Netherlands, isn’t the promised land of governance; but it produces, at the street level, some pretty agreeable result. Scads of American visitors groove on the country’s parks, public toilets, bike paths and buses that are easy to use.

This small city of about 200,000 bears its medieval history with pride and its socialist amenities with grace, from miles of bike paths to trains that can whisk you to the next hamlet or to Hamburg, Germany.

Travel to a nearby major city, like Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris, and Europe is yours with its high-speed trains that crisscross the continent at 200 mph, and even plunge under the English Channel to London’s St. Pancras Station, a masterpiece which has been restored to its Victorian glory.

London itself adds public amusements with pride. Three recent ones are the Ferris wheel, known as the London Eye; the foot bridge across the Thames, nicknamed the “wobbly bridge”; and the New Tate, an art gallery in an old power station.

You can put this down to the kind of post-socialism that former British prime minister Tony Blair (a Murdoch man) described as “social-ism;” not the old-school, “Keep the Red Flag Flying” socialism, but the idea that people are entitled to services beyond national defense. A good question for Giuliani might be: “Would you have approved the building of Central Park?”

Where socialism–lite has failed in Europe is in an excess of regulation, particularly the rigidity it has brought to hiring and firing. This has kept small business in Europe operating at the mom-and-pop level, scared to hire because in most European countries firing is subject to a labor tribunal’s approval. Approval seldom comes.

One of the great drivers of entrepreneurism in the United States is the harsh but effective idea that employees serve “at will.” That, the socialists can’t stomach. They want Paradise enow.

A little socialism will do–and we needn’t mention single-payer health care.

 

Crime and Art: A Young Man’s Christmas in London

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It was Christmas, exactly 50 years ago. It was also when I masked petty crime with arguments of social justice, and when life exactly imitated art. Really.

Fortnum & Mason, the London food emporium, has been dispensing Christmas cheer in Piccadilly since 1707. It is a British tradition as famous as its rival Harrods, located about a mile away in Knightsbridge.

But whereas Harrods is a department store with a great Food Hall, Fortnum & Mason is mostly a top-of-the-line — very top — food store that flourishes at Christmas as at no other time of year.

Fortnum’s specialty is its Christmas hampers. They are capacious wicker baskets stuffed with comestibles from around the world: candied fruits and honey, dates and figs, goose foie gras with truffles, jellies and preserves, shortbread and rare teas, smoked salmon and caviar, Stilton, fruitcake and Christmas puddings. You get the picture: a cornucopia of goodies, or conspicuous consumption, depending on your point of view.

Well, all these goodies do not get into the Christmas hampers and snuggle in the wood shavings all by themselves. Nor do they stretch the cellophane and tie the bows themselves.

No, that was my job at Fortnum’s where I and a small crew of disparate young men worked, held together by the reality that we were all far from home, broke, cold and our immediate prospects were not great.

I had arrived in wintry London a month earlier from sunny Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, expecting immediate journalistic success. Instead I was broke, owed rent on my room, lacked a warm coat and had a hole in one shoe.

Then I learned that Fortnum’s was hiring packers for the Christmas season. I signed on at the glorious store in Piccadilly, but that was the last I saw of it. Instead, I worked in an unheated warehouse at the Elephant and Castle in South London.

The wages were 6 pounds a week (about $25) — a reminder that England was still a poor country in 1959. Poor, that is, except for those who sent and received fabulous Christmas hampers.

Some customers sent hampers like Christmas cards to lists of friends, usually titled people, from earls and marchionesses all the way down to lords and ladies. Worse, some recipients were on multiple lists. So heavily laden, how could the hamper fairy make her deliveries to the stately homes?

Although I was a staunch conservative, I found myself dreaming of revolution. All of the hamper packers seemed to be hungry all the time. Our pay was spent after a few days and then we starved — starved while packing the world’s finest foods.

Stealing a few items seemed reasonable, but the security people checked for empty wrappers and other incriminating evidence of consumption. But I came up the solution, the perfect crime: We would selectively eat the food and ship the empty cans and boxes out to the better-fed.

What is more, I explained to my fellow packers, no one would complain to their friends that the hamper was wanting in some areas. More, the chance of recipients ever touching the hampers was slight, particularly if we pilfered only from those going to a family that was on several lists.

The butler, I calculated, would simply tell his employers that hampers had been received from, say, nine friends. And the servants would almost certainly be given the hampers the day after Christmas: Boxing Day in Britain, when the leftovers of Christmas are boxed for the servants and the less fortunate. We were just getting our boxes early.

So we gorged and rationalized our thievery, the way people do.

On our last day the foreman, a permanent employee of the store who earned the princely sum of 8.5 pounds a week (about $34), came to us at midday and in his gentle, world-weary way said that as a Christmas treat, he was taking us to lunch.

This was terrible. We had already had our fill of rich Christmas cake, gooseberry jam spooned out with our fingers and piles Scottish shortbread.

Nevertheless, we accompanied the foreman to a workmen’s cafe that served up vast portions of such dishes as sausage, egg and chips (French fries), bubble and squeak (reheated potato and cabbage) and rissoles (ground, fried, leftover meat). The wise ordered the sausage, egg and chips.

We ate like marathon runners on the 25th mile, doggedly, dutifully and desperately. We lied in our thanks and longed to throw up. We chewed out of decency.

It was all out of an O. Henry short story. Or was it Dickens?

This soothed my conscience: Life was imitating art.

 

Public Faces, Scowls or Smiles?

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France is wiping its public face. Maybe you don’t think it needed it but the French do, and they have committed a chunk of their economic stimulus package to refreshing public buildings and historical treasures. The royal palaces of Fontainebleau and Versailles near Paris, and the many chateaus down the Loire River will benefit.

 

To the casual eye, these monuments, these aspects of the public face of France, looked in pretty good shape. But when this latest effort is finished, they should be as great as they were hundreds of years ago.

 

By contrast, the economic slump has forced U.S. jurisdictions to cut back on their expenditures for the public face of America. Those who had hoped that the stimulus package would revive the New Deal-era Works Projects Administration are disappointed. Federal and state governments are slashing funding for public works projects and letting public places decay.

 

Virginia is even closing some of the rest areas on its Interstates. These are not especially plentiful, but they are a godsend for truckers and people traveling with children and pets. They offer no food but they do offer clean toilets and, thoughtfully, an area for dogs to do what dogs do. No luxuries, just necessities.

 

France is not alone in thinking it must keep its public face clean and smiling. Allegedly, staid Britain works hard on its public face. For example the Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has promised that the double-decker London buses will not be phased out as his predecessor, Socialist Ken Livingstone, had tried to do.

 

Livingstone wanted all the city’s familiar red buses replaced with so-called bendy buses (articulated buses). On the face of it, the old buses are uneconomic; they take a crew of two, whereas the bendy buses only have a driver. Yet that first economic calculation does not tell the whole story: Johnson sees the double-decker buses as being an integral part of the public face of London.

 

Likewise, the black taxis of London. They are unique to London and they cost more than regular cars because they are purpose-built, and new designs are introduced every few years. Often modified, new design-taxis are built by different companies: Some are built by companies that are not otherwise in the automobile business. This procurement pattern keeps the innovations coming.

 

While it costs Londoners more for their buses and their taxis, it comforts them in a way; it makes them feel special. But the real dividends are in tourism: London is the most visited city in Europe.

 

Paris and Rome each have a high sense of their public face and a regard for the aesthetic sensibilities of the population. Also, they have a certain knowledge that that a smiling public face will bring the smiling tourist faces, clutching their dollars, yen and yuan.

 

At bottom, it may be more of a philosophical issue than an economic one. Half a century ago, Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the “private affluence” and “public squalor” in the United States.

Not that there are no great public places in the United States: New York’s Central Park holds its own against London’s Hyde Park or Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Nonetheless, it would have been nice if there were stimulus money to spruce them up and maybe create a great new public toy, like London’s giant Ferris wheel, The Eye. Churchill said that we shape buildings and then they shape us. Quite so. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate