Aug 20, 2003
By Michael Powell
The Washington Post
NEW YORK — As America has long suspected, no one here can drive.

Lawyers, doctors, day laborers, actors, psychotherapists: New York City has more able-bodied, non-licensed, car-phobic adults than anywhere in the United States. Only about 25 percent of the inhabitants possess a driver's license.

Caroline Hwang, 33, a novelist and editor, is one of New York's carless millions. She lives in Manhattan and walks, hails cabs, uses her subway card. She packs her beach towel and takes the Long Island Rail Road to the Atlantic Ocean beaches and bums a ride when friends insist on one of those bucolic weddings north of the Bronx. As a teenager in Wisconsin she had a license, but that seems so yesterday.

"I asked my boyfriend recently if I could sit in the driver's seat. I couldn't remember which was the accelerator and which was the brake," she recalled. "I feel like New York City is set up for people like me."

Bill Bastone runs thesmokinggun.com, a whimsical investigative Web site. He grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, a couple of blocks from the elevated No. 7 train, which rolls right into Manhattan. He went to New York University and worked for the Village Voice. He neglected to take driver's education in high school, and that was destiny. He is 42 and doesn't have a learner's permit.

"I don't remember dreams, as a rule, but the only ones I do recall are about out-of-control auto wrecks," Bastone said. "So maybe I need to sit down and talk to someone about this."

Or maybe this car-and-license thing is more proof that New York floats somewhere off the East Coast. For most Americans, the car — the Mustang, the Bronco — packs as much iconic wallop as a horse for John Wayne. But not here — in New York, you are defined by the IND, BMT or IRT trains. When electricity failed last week, those carless commuters were left with only foot-power.

New Yorkers plan work and play around their inability to drive. They vacation on Fire Island, because no cars are allowed. They tend to travel east to London, Paris or any other European city with a good subway system instead of heading west, say, to Utah or Wyoming or Nevada, all of which have long highways and no Yellow Taxis.

Driving in New York is not natural. Periodically, the men and women at the city Department of T***sportation measure the average speed of a car traveling across midtown, which they invariably find moving at the rate of a Galapagos tortoise. Then there are other problems: alternate side of the street parking, rapacious meter maids, $100 parking tickets, exorbitant insurance rates, incomprehensible and contradictory highway signs and the fact that no car in New York ever stays in its lane.

"It's bad enough to sit in the back of a taxi and watch," Bastone says.

Even romance bends to a license-less rhythm. Chris Policano, 42, serves as chief spokesman for the City Council. A decade or so back, he asked his beloved to marry him. She said yes, but set a condition: He must obtain his driver's license.

"I'd had learner's permits, many, many permits," Policano recalls. "But scheduling the road test was so daunting. There was that parallel parking thing."

As it turned out, Policano took his road test along the Brooklyn docks in a blizzard. The test officer wanted to get home and said to skip the parking. So Policano is a licensed driver. But that fact hasn't t***sformed his life. "You know," he said, "it's a lot easier to say 'Taxi!' "

Jeri Drucker grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a regional hot spot for the driving-challenged. She is planning her son's wedding on the far side of the Delaware Water Gap. It's a logistical nightmare. Her sisters don't drive, nor do her adult nieces or her uncle. Her stepsister drove in Los Angeles once, but she moved back to New York and gave that up.

Drucker plans to rent something akin to a school bus to haul her family out there.

"My father had a license," Drucker said, "but that was a long, long time ago, and he never drove. Maybe this is inherited?"

In this unlicensed wilderness, the city's hundreds of auto schools hang shingles like lanterns for the auto-phobic. As one instructor at the Bensonhurst Driving School said of himself, "I'm not a teacher, I'm a psychotherapist."

There is the man who has had learner's permits for 17 years and comes in each April for a lesson or two before deciding he can't handle it and disappears. And there are legions of 58-year-old accountants and 62-year-old lawyers who see retirement approaching and start thinking Boca Raton and Tucson, if only they could drive.

"We have 75- and 80-year-old students," said Wilma Valenzuela of the Professional Driving School on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. "They always ask, 'Do I drive right away?' I say, 'Not if you haven't driven before, you don't!' "

Some drivers come in for late spring tune-ups. They have licenses but have never used them and now need to get to the Hamptons.

All of which is very nice. But as this is New York, a tincture of belligerence can sneak into conversations with the license-less. As in, "Why should I drive?"

M.P. Dunleavey, an editor and Manhattan native, recalls relatives poking fun at her for being in her 30s and not having a license. "I didn't think it was funny," she said. "There was something gauche about having a car. It was so — suburban."

Joe Dunlap, 34, has spiraled through the city as a bike messenger, traveled the world and now is studying to get his master's degree in education. Someday, maybe, he'll get a license.

"If I get bored and I'm like 50," he said. "I just might do it."

Stranger things have happened in New York.

Oh, dear. You have to prove you are a US citizen and are not a convicted felon before you can cast a v**e that will affect millions of people. The horror. Does this mean I can no longer walk into the precinct in your home state, say that I am you and v**e Republican? This would mean the Democraps would lose my grandpa's v**e, and he has v**ed a straight Democrat ticket ever since he died in 1976.
FACT CHECK. Most of the supposedly "disenfranchised v**ers" receive some sort of government benefit that REQUIRES them to have an ID suitable for v**er identification. "V**er suppression" is nothing more than a Progressive pissant euphemism for "v***r f***d."
This would mean that the 200,000 more v**es than registered v**ers in Pennsylvania would lose their franchise. Horrors again. In GA, that would mean that mail in b****ts would no longer be sent to the 8000 plus fraudulent addresses they were sent to this time.
How can we look ourselves in the mirror if we deny corpses, wetbacks, felons and multiple v**ers their rights?

Wow, a lot of words for someone who knows little..

And good morning to you Smedley..

I can not speak for others, but in Minnesota, we r******r to v**e. at that point we produce ID of some sort, (we have choices) to prove who we are. After we are in the "book" v****g at our polling location is simple.. give your name, it is recorded so no else can claim to be you and you get the b****t..

As for all those v**er ID laws which got overturned, it is how they are written.. the obvious point is as the courts say, the intent is to prevent part of the citizens from v****g.. if you can not admit that, it fits the rest of your refusal to meet reality.. just the trump way..

Your claims about Pennsylvania and Georgia are only lies made for the disruption and without proof, were tossed out of court..

Joe Biden’s Neera Tanden Pick Is Even Worse Than You Thought
President-elect Joe Biden will reportedly nominate a White House budget director who has been one of the country’s most prominent critics of US Sen. Bernie Sanders and who has previously backed Social Security cuts.
Biden — who has repeatedly pushed for Social Security cuts throughout his career — announced his se******n of Center for American Progress (CAP) President Neera Tanden as his choice to run the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). A longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, Tanden touted her think tank’s 2010 proposal to reduce Social Security benefits in 2012, as Biden was pushing for such cuts in the Obama administration.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/joe-biden-neera-tanden-social-security-omb

good morning..

I will indeed have to watch this lady with a critical eye.. But... that is normal for us liberals..


Domestic policy
Much of Tanden's work relates to healthcare policy in America. She worked on the passage of the Affordable Care Act during the Obama administration.[27] Tanden supports a multi-payer universal healthcare system,[63][64] and opposes single-payer healthcare, including Medicare for All proposals.[65][66]

Tanden has argued that cuts to social welfare programs, including cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, should be considered as a part of long term deficit reduction.[67] During her presidency, the Center for American Progress (CAP) has advocated for pegging periodic increases in Social Security benefits to the chained Consumer Price Index or chained CPI, which would regress the program to more austere accounting methods to help its beneficiaries keep pace with inflation.[68]

Tanden has been a critic of the policy proposals and supporters of U.S. Senator and former p**********l candidate Bernie Sanders.[69] During the 2016 Democratic Party p**********l primaries, she opposed Sanders's signature proposals of a $15 per hour minimum wage and single-payer healthcare.[48][70]

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/02/24/republicans-introduce-a-torrent-of-new-laws-to-restrict-v****g


Republicans introduce a torrent of new laws to restrict v****g
There are nearly seven times as many such proposals in state legislatures as there were a year ago

Republicans seeking to tilt the scales in their favour have found plenty of tools at their disposal. A new report by the Brennan Centre for Justice, a think-tank at New York University, finds that Republican lawmakers across 45 states have proposed at least 253 new laws to make v****g harder.