With the foliage in the most vibrant phase of its death throes it’s easy to overlook something as mundane as a disabled bird scooter:
However, in this case I noticed not only the scooter itself but also the pathetic plea that was plastered underneath:
What?!? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!? Hey, I’m not one of those assholes who will knock these things over or toss them in the river, but there’s no goddamn way I’m gonna pick up their scooters for them. This is like going into a Burger King only for them to hand you a bag of frozen ingredients, point you to a microwave, and say, “You make it.” Actually, it’s not even that, because in that case I actually wanted the Burger King. Really, this is like a Burger King employee leaving a bag of the store’s trash in front of your house with a note on it that says, “Please get rid of this for me.” I remember when shared “micromobility” was going to save society–I even believed it for awhile myself! Now I understand that at best it’s the Life Alert of the transit world:
Speaking of transit, with a single Los Angeles baseball team rebuffing both of New York City’s teams one after the other, we’re feeling deeply insecure and so in an act of desperation the Department of Transportation is falling back on smugness:
Yeah, we really got them there, because unlike Los Angeles, New York City doesn’t have any overly wide and congested roadways or anything like that.
Oh, wait, yes we do, and you don’t need AI to generate images of it, either. All you need is the photos of them the city uses to illustrate their own reports of how shitty they are:
In fact, not only do we have the most congested highway in the entire country, but we occupy three of the top 10 spots!
We may not win the World Series, but we’ll always have the best traffic.
Not only that, but the last time Dodgers and Yankees met in the World Series was 1981. Since then, Los Angeles has built an entire commuter rail system:
And in that same amount of time, we’ve basically just built 1.8 miles of subway track:
It took us 88 years and it’s the most expensive subway line in the entire world:
Oh yeah, we also extended the 7 train one (1) stop and built a big-ass subway station that nobody uses.
So as I like to say:
See, we like to think of ourselves as a walking (or bicycling, or public transit) town, but we’re really in no position to congratulate ourselves for transcending the ills of motordom:
As it happens, this occurred right outside of my younger son’s school. Fortunately it appears to have happened in the wee hours when there were no kids around, but when I passed by in the late morning they were still cleaning up the debris:
I plugged the plate of the overturned douche canoe into the How’s My Driving site:
The vehicle has received an impressive number of fines over the past couple years:
Mostly parking…
…but some red light and speeding violations too:
Note that How’s My Driving doesn’t pick up moving violations, only camera violations and parking tickets, which is data that’s publicly available. The city actually created a program to deal with drivers like this, but they never did anything with it and they let it expire:
But at least we’re not LA, right?