No Cell Phones in the Fast Lane

Just this morning I read that we lost 51,000 jobs in the US during July, 2008. Economists had expected a loss of over 75,000 jobs, so this bad news is really good news or at least not so bad news. I am certain there is a web site or a thousand pages federal report giving the details on how, where and when these jobs were lost. How does a job get “lost.” Does it go out into the woods without a compass? Does it drive like a man and refuse to ask for directions? Do “lost” jobs ever get “found”? Sorry, I lost my train of thought! I believe I have a pretty good idea why many of those jobs were lost, at least those that were lost in midtown Manhattan.


I am an urban walker. Although I am not an “I live in the city” New York walker, I have qualifications. First I was born in New York City – well not exactly, I was born in The Bronx. I have worked in Manhattan twenty-two of the last twenty-seven years. For several of those years I walked from Grand Central Terminal to 37th Street and Broadway. In 1999 that walk of five streets and four avenues took me on average fourteen minutes. Good day it was twelve minutes and the worst of days seventeen minutes. A bad day was rain, puddles, slush and heavens forbid, having to wait for a light to cross a street! Those days are long gone.


What has changed? I am almost nine years older and reluctantly will admit to losing a step or two. That amounts to seconds. There are seasonality factors to consider: Heavy winter coats and bad weather add travel time in the winter along with the walk back to GCT being in the dark. Those factors are balanced by the distraction of summer time fashions and the loss of concentration those fashion models cause to me and others. These seasonal factors tend to balance each other out.


I just realized I am already writing paragraph four and have not even alluded to the title of this posting. I have not yet stumbled back to those 51,000 lost jobs. Of course, if they are truly lost jobs I should not be able to stumble upon them. Last year my walk back and forth from the train terminal … I have to pause here – to commuters like me Grand Central is a terminal since the Metro North service terminates at Grand Central, but to the millions of subway riders, Grand Central is a station, since trains continue both uptown, downtown and side town. Let’s see, if a commuter transfers from a train to a subway at Grand Central does it become a “stational”?


I did it again and now it is paragraph five. Lately that walk to the office is nearly fifteen to twenty minutes. That is three additional minutes. Yes, I am complaining but I am not whining. This is serious. Three minutes each way adds up to twenty-two hours per year of lost time for me. Consider that there are a million people on midtown Manhattan streets each day and you are looking at 12,500 lost work days. An average work year is two hundred and twenty days, so this is a loss of almost fifty-seven full time work years. And what do I attribute this highway robbery of American productivity? It is Dick Tracy and the weak dollar. I remember as a kid reading the Sunday comics, there would be Dick Tracy talking into a telephone device on his watch. Remember these are newspaper comics. Dick was always stopped with wrist up when he was communicating. Today it is cellular phones. But this is real life and people walk while they talk or better put, they stroll while they talk. If I am walking behind someone and their cell phone rings, the person starts to move at half the speed. It is one quarter of the speed if they are texting. People on the phone walking toward me are slow moving hazards. They have no idea where they are heading. Two or three side by side cellularites and there is no place for me to pass. It is now hard to find someone walking in NYC who is not on a cellular phone.


Did I mention the weak dollar? Perhaps it was Adam Smith who came up with this economic modeling formula: W$ + MTM = MMT. That is given a weak US dollar and the attraction of Mid-Town Manhattan and you get Millions of Tourists. The definition of a tourist in NYC is someone in shorts and a shirt they should not be wearing, speaking in a foreign tongue (that includes the queen’s English) walking at least three abreast looking up at the top of every building. They actually move at a pace that slows down the cellularites.


But I said I was not a whiner. I have a solution and I am confident as soon as Michael Bloomberg finds this blog, we will be weeks away from resolving this walking quagmire and getting back at least 57 of those 51,000 lost American jobs. All New York City sidewalks must become one way and marked with three lanes. The curb side lane is reserved for the walkers meaning to get from point A to point B. The middle lane is for the cellularites who are communicators and not walkers. The inside lane are for the tourists who are gawkers and not walkers. With a hefty set of fines and aggressive enforcement we might also be able to balance the 2009 NYC budget. Why must we of the private sector always be the ones resolving these city problems. Sigh…..