{"id":547,"date":"2005-12-20T10:04:53","date_gmt":"2005-12-20T18:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/12\/respect_my_frozen_ass.html"},"modified":"2005-12-20T10:04:53","modified_gmt":"2005-12-20T18:04:53","slug":"respect_my_froz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/12\/respect_my_froz.html","title":{"rendered":"Respect My Frozen Ass"},"content":{"rendered":"

Union President Roger Toussaint talks about “respect and dignity”<\/a>, obviously respecting the fact that we froze our balls off trying to get to work<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The strike by 33,000 transit workers left some 7.7 million people, from school children to physicians, without their usual way to get around in 21-degree temperatures made chillier by a sharp wind. Some employers sent out chartered buses and vans to fetch their workers, while some people opted to stay home.<\/p>\n

Many however, decided to drive, leading to traffic snarls as early as 5 a.m. at bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, as police officers turned away cars that had fewer than the four passengers required to enter Manhattan south of 96th Street.<\/p>\n

So in a city where it is polite to avoid eye contact with passengers sitting inches away on a crowded subway, New Yorkers were compelled to hop into cars with perfect strangers in order to comply with the four-passenger rule.<\/p>\n

“I was waiting and no bus came,” said Larissa Silver, 38, who lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and works on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. “Then a lady pulled up in a car and said, ‘Does anybody need a ride downtown?'”<\/p>\n

Ms. Silver, who left her house at 5:30 a.m. to get there by 9 a.m., added: “So far, I’ve been lucky, but this is just the beginning. I don’t know how I’ll get home. I have no idea.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a three-and-a-half hour<\/em> commute . . . one way! Respectable!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Union President Roger Toussaint talks about “respect and dignity”, obviously respecting the fact that we froze our balls off trying to get to work: The strike by 33,000 transit workers left some 7.7 million people, from school children to physicians, without their usual way to get around in 21-degree temperatures made chillier by a sharp […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grrr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}