The Complaint Department is open for business-and of late, there’s plenty of frustrating things New Yorkers are encountering on a daily basis.
Let’s start with the new muni-meters. While more technologically advanced than the singular, spaced out meters, the muni-meters seem to be a way for the city to cram as many cars as possible into a metered area and milk every driver for every quarter they’ve got.
Moreover, drivers who park on muni-metered blocks must get out of their car, lock the door, go to the muni-meter post, deposit their money or credit card, get a receipt, go back to their car and put the paper receipt on the dashboard. This is delightful in the rain, the bitter cold and all other weather tortures.
If the one meter is broken, the driver has to search around for another and hope that they don’t get a parking ticket in the meantime while their car stands receiptless.
Let’s also not forget about the mass transit system. The fares are going up again this Sunday, Mar. 3. Even though the MTA has restored some previously cut service, subways and trains can’t seem to keep up with the increased demand. Rush hour trains are jam packed, and bus riders often need to squeeze their way on board.
Planned improvements are moving at a snail’s pace, with the greatest example being the Second Avenue subway extension. It was started in 1929, went into mothballs until 1945, stalled again until 2005 and now expects to be running in 2019 at a cost of $15 billlion.
Another stick in the eye of the taxpayer is the tolls on bridges. As of Sunday, it will cost drivers $15 for the privilege of crossing the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Tolls on other spans such as the Triborough (RFK) and Whitestone bridges are also climbing. These bridges were built with tax dollars and have been paid for a thousand times over, yet the government is still gouging the user.
How about being told by the city that you can’t smoke in any public space, including sidewalks, parks and beaches-or that restaurants can no longer use trans fats and may sell no more than 16 oz. of soda to a customer at any one serving?
People who are concerned about what they eat have to be punished because there are careless, undisciplined people who don’t exercise self-control and will stuff their mouths with everything regardless of the harm they are doing to their bodies. What happened to freedom of choice?
While money is being sucked out of everyone’s pockets and regulations are heaped upon us at the drop of a pin, we have in Washington a broken-down political system that can’t seem to do anything without an argument.
They put in place a series of automatic cuts set to take effect tomorrow, Friday, Mar. 1, which no one wants to allow, for fear of stalling economic recovery. Yet no one in Washington seems willing or capable of finding an alternative.
Which leads us to our final complaint, and it doubles as a rhetorical question we’d like our readers to ponder: Why the hell do we keep electing and re-electing the bozos behind all this nonsense into power?
