Squeaking, lurching and hissing city buses are as much a part of the Manhattan soundtrack as cab horns and Ramones tunes coming up through the floor from that skinny guy in 2D.

But a pilot program from the MTA unveils some buses that are conspicuous in their silence. The New York Times reports that three of them, at $559,000 apiece, are currently on the road.

When the DesignLine stops short, or takes off from a light, there is little more than a low groan. An onboard air-conditioner usually drowns out any sound from the engine.

The other day, one block north of Astor Place, James Sollecito sat down behind the wheel and gradually eased the bus onto Fourth Avenue for a 90-minute trip to Washington Heights. The engine hummed softly as its driver peered out from the extra-large Plexiglas windshield, a sheer single pane that resembled an astronaut’s visor writ large.

“I never drove anything that accelerates like this,” Mr. Sollecito, who has driven city buses for 15 years, said approvingly, as the bus glided along the street jerk-free.

Silence, that rare commodity on the city streets, is achieved by throwing out the most basic element of automobile design: internal combustion. Instead of a noisy, piston-based engine, the DesignLine operates on a spinning turbine that recharges a lithium-ion battery, a green energy source more commonly found inside laptop computers. That means fewer moving parts, and fewer ways to create a racket.

It being New York and all, some riders were not impressed. Others dug the quiet–and apparently sweet-smelling–buses.

Malachai Williams, a second grader at Public School 171 in East Harlem, put it more bluntly. “This bus is awesome!” he said, plopping into a seat toward the back. “It smells like a bus that takes you to different countries and states.”

Number of words uttered by grim-faced M1 busdriver after I boarded and said “Good morning” today: 0

Number of times grim-faced M1 busdriver honked her horn as the M1 plodded through construction-induced congestion on Park Ave. South between 40th and 38th: 6

Number of times grim-faced M1 busdriver honked her horn as the M1 seemed to be making good progress down Park Ave. South between 38th and 28th: 2

Number of words uttered by grim-faced M1 busdriver after I said “thank you” and “have a nice day” upon exiting: 0

I’m waiting for the green at 27th and Park about 10 minutes ago. A man is settling up a cab fare with a cabbie who’s rested his car just west of 27th on Park, right up against a parked car.

The transaction is taking longer than it should; the former rider, slicked back brown hair, 35, blue sweater, jeans, cigarette dangling from his lips, is counting singles like a parolee given an allowance for a strip club.

A bus is behind the cab, waiting to hit 27th but blocked from doing so. The bus is blocking the whole of the southbound lanes on Park, every motorist treated to a huge bus ad about a Lincoln exhibit at the New York Historical Society that says “The Most Beloved Leader That New York Ever Hated.” The bus driver is not happy.

Still, the transaction goes on. The former rider is gesturing to the irate bus driver behind them, and more traffic behind the bus. His movements say, let’s settle the f*** up, a**hole!

Cigarette Man and the driver are feuding over the cost. Cigarette Man gestures again to the mounting traffic and escalating horn noise and says, “You’re the reason for all this!”

Finally, they settle up. Cigarette Man is furious. He slips the singles into his wallet and scoots through the narrow passageway between the cab’s rear bumper and the bus behind it. The cigarette dangles from his lips as his eyes shoot daggers.

You can see where this is going. As they say in the theater, if you’re showing the audience a gun in the first act, you have to use the damn thing in the third act. Indeed, Cigarette Man removes the cigarette from his lips and flicks it at the driver. The butt rolls around on the cab’s hood and stays, like a punt spinning to a stop on the 1 yard line.

Against all logic, the cabbie remains parked, long line of traffic behind him, because of him. 

The bus driver has had enough and climbs down. He’s a solid black man of about 45, looks a bit like Cedric the Entertainer.

He goes over to the cabbie’s window.

“Fuck the way!!!” he yells, a bizarre shorthand for “Get the fuck out of the way!”

“Fuck the way!” he repeats, then climbs back into his rig.

Finally, the cabbie does indeed fuck the way, and New York gets moving again.

NY Times columnist David Carr is probably the best media critic on the planet, as evidenced by his claiming the Mirror Award for Commentary, given out by media types to those who do the best job of covering the media, each year.

David Carr was also a raving crackhead lunatic in another life, assaulting women, injecting liquid cocaine, and even, at one rock-bottom point, leaving his infant twins in the car amidst a freezing-ass Twin Cities winter to engage in a lengthy drug session.

It’s all in his memoir The Night of the Gun. But unlike other junkie memoirs, Carr actually treats the memoir as a reporting project–not trusting the memory of a crack and booze addled brain, he goes back and interviews the people involved in his former life–treatment counselers, dealers, ex-girlfriends, former bosses, the twins he left in the car, even old drug buddy Tom Arnold (Yes, Mr. Roseanne). It’s a novel way of connecting the dots of one’s former life.

Anyway, jump ahead a few decades, and Carr is living straight and claiming those Mirror Awards every year. The bane of his existence these days? That shitty bus commute from Montclair to Times headquarters in Hell’s Kitchen.

This bit from The Night of the Gun looks at Carr trying to piece his life together after getting out of detox (yet again) and taking over parenting responsibilities of the twins (hard to believe, but the twins’ drug-dealing mother was even worse off than their father).

Our first place together was at 2612 Dupont Avenue, an upper duplex that was sort of creepy and mouse ridden, but it was ours, giving us defendable space that was not my parents’ basement. We did not have a car that worked, and we ended up schlepping to buses on many brutally cold winter days. (To this day, living in suburban new jersey, where a bus to New York is a way of life, I detest riding it, in part becaue it arcs back to a time when I had no choice.)

We went through a couple of junker cars and eventually bought a rolled over white Volvo wagon that the twins called “Beauty” not because it looked good, but because it ran. My pal Billy pounded out the dents, sold it to us on the cheap, and then made sure it kept running, one of the many not so random acts of kindness that helped us achieve normalcy.

[image: Gawker]

Here in Gotham, we call it moxie. Or hutzpah. Or balls.

Elsewhere, they call it rude.

I was schlepping up to Grand Central around 5:15 yesterday, waiting to cross 32nd at Park. A middle-aged woman was crossing from the north. Unlike every other pedestrian at the intersection who waited patiently, or at least semi-patiently, she strolled across the street and blocked traffic.

A cab was at the front of the line, unable to proceed through a green because Mrs. Herself was crossing.

Mind you, Herself was hardly hustling across 32nd. No, she took her own sweet time, much to the consternation of the cab driver, the cabbie behind him, and the other dozen drivers waiting to go.

Ah, but Mrs. Herself did not merely stop there. No, once she’d just about cleared the way for the cab to go through the fading green, she in fact hailed that very same cab–thus holding up the line a few more moments until she’d poured the whole of herself into the taxi.

The driver let out an exasperated breath and pushed himself to be civil. The light turned red and the cars were stuck in place.

I was still chewing on this rare show of bravado when I encountered some similar, er, moxie at 34th. The bright red Water Way bus was pulling out of 34th and Park and heading west. A man had clearly missed the bus. He took a large rolled up umbrella by the point and whacked the ass-end of the bus three times good and hard with its wooden hook handle. Thwack, Thwack, THWACK, it went, as all eyes turned to see the source of the noise.

Inexplicably, at least from where we stood, the bus driver stopped and let the man board.

As the Times’ Metropolitan Diary might gush, only in New York!

In case you missed it, the NY Times had a fun piece late last week about a city busdriver given to belting out opera at red lights. Christopher G. Dolan has been briving a dus, as Ralph Kramden so eloquently put it, for 27 years. These days he steers the M8 from West Village to East.

“This is difficult sitting down,” said the driver, Christopher G. Dolan, 51. “You got to be standing up.”

He had miles to go before he could do that - about 2.2 miles, to the end of the line on East 10th Street. There, in the shadow of a housing project by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, he spent a four-minute layover in the aisle, practicing Alfredo’s half of “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici”-the drinking song from “La Traviata,” a duet.

Dolan is a natural baritone who retrained himself to be a tenor.

Two bucks for a ride across town and a free show sure beats a $150 ticket to Turandot at Lincoln Center.

OK, back from that well-lit Loopyland that is Las Vegas.

One thing about endless American Airlines flights where you’re trapped in the middle seat for five years (that’s an actual Freudian slip of sorts–I typed ‘years’ instead of ‘hours’ and only noticed it when I gave a final proofread before publishing)–they really make you appreciate a crummy 45-minute Metro-North ride that much more. I am absolutely adamant about getting an aisle seat for reasons I’ll chalk up to a strain of claustrophobia that runs in the family. As I was checking in at McCarran for my return flight, I figured I’d ask about an exit row seat, remembering just how jam-packed the seats are after my extremely uncomfortable JFK-Vegas flight a few days before.

The woman told me she had a middle seat in the exit row. I quickly did the math in my head–middle seat certainly not ideal, but if there’s a few feet between me and the seat in front of me, middle doesn’t really matter. I grabbed it.

Big mistake. As I boarded and headed down the aisle, my eyes shot ahead for the row that seemed to have lots of room. I couldn’t find it, and instead had to search for my row number. You’d never know it was an exit row by looking at it–the guy on the aisle still had to fold himself up like a Murphy bed to let me in. Making matters worse, the guy on the window was massive.

The anxiety set in that anyone who’s flown has experienced — that feeling of, I will not last five hours here, and if I fake an epileptic seizure, maybe I’ll get to sit with the stewardesses flight attendants in the back and get a free seltzer water. The guy behind me was kicking my seat, which drives me absolutely bonkers. I shot him a half-dozen stink-eyes; he seemed to be a Japanese businessman type and failed to take my not-so-subtle hints.

Making matters worse, it was 7:30 a.m.–too early for respectable people to enjoy a cocktail, though that didn’t stop the huge guy next to me from asking for a double vodka to wash down a handful of sleeping pills.

Well, I got through it, as people on planes almost always do. And, like I mentioned, it puts a Metro-North hop into Manhattan in perspective, at least the next few times you ride Metro-North before returning to your old pet peeves. If the guy behind you is kicking your seat, simply move to another one, or stand in the vestibule–neither of which is much of an option when you’re above the clouds.

I must say, while I missed three days of work due to the trip, Metro-North has been freakishly early in pulling into Grand Central repeatedly over the past few weeks–like, three or four minutes early. I bash Metro-North when it’s late–oh, do I bash Metro-North when it’s late–so it’s only fair to mention that the railroad has been even better than prompt of late. Is it somehow related to lower ridership due to layoffs, furloughs, etc.?

I’ve also been taking the M1 bus from Grand Central to work on those mornings when I just can’t muster the resolve to get on the subway.  As I emerged from Grand Central yesterday, I spied a man at 40th and Park waving a protest placard that said, fittingly, “American Airlines–Illegal Practices.” The man had obviously suffered the perils of too-little legroom on American, and the empty Promised Land of the exit row.

(One other American complaint–charging $15 to check a bag means everyone brings ginormous bags onto the plane, which they were sort of doing anyway before the airlines started charging, obviously as a result of hearing years and years worth of comedian hacks and lame late-night hosts do jokes about an airline losing their luggage. If you prefer to board on the late side, as I do (what, spend more time on a plane than I have to?), good luck finding a little rack room for your knapsack.  

This morning, on the M1, I even got to see a fellow rider–a well-dressed white male, which you see very little of on the bus–who had a hook for a hand. That was pretty cool.

It also made me miss Vegas, and that wild pirate display they do in front of Treasure Island. In a nod to current events, the Treasure Island events crew has reworked the hourly pirate show to include a Somali teen hijacking an American freighter.

Good to be home again.

The always-a-pleasure Roddy Doyle revisits his Commitments creation by assembling a band of eccentric immigrants to Ireland to change the musical landscape in Dublin. The Deportees is a collection of short stories focused on the immigrant experience in Ireland; this bit comes from “I Understand,” about a dishwasher being exploited by local Irish thugs for reasons that are not quite clear.

It is not Doyle’s first appearance in the Trainjotting Reader.

–

This morning, I stand at the bus stop. I have been in this city three months. I begin to understand the accent. I already know the language. How do you do? Is this the next bus to Westminster? I have brought my schoolroom English with me. There is no Westminster in this city but I know what to say when the next bus goes past without stopping.

–Fuck that.

People smile. One man nods at me.

–Good man, bud, he says. –Making the effort.

I smile.

I understand. This word, Bud. It is a friendly word. But I cannot say Bud to this man. I cannot call him Bud. A man like me can never call an Irish man Bud. But I can say, Fuck that. The expletive is for the bus driver or my fellow bus-stop waiters. I understand. My children will learn to call other children Bud. They will be Irish. They will have the accent. If I am still here. And if I have children.

It is spring. I like it now. It is bright when I stand at the bus stop. It is warm by the time I finish my first job. Early morning is the best time. It is quiet. There are not many people on the footpaths. I do not have to look away. Eyes do not stare hard at me. Some people smile. We are up early together. Many are like me. I am not resented.

On what in the media might call a slow news day, I thought I’d share a little mass-transit related music I heard on my iPod this morning.

It’s from Bruce Springsteen’s first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey. The tune is called “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City,” and it sees Bruce trying to tow the line amidst all the miscreants and ruffians that inhabited Manhattan at the time.

We’ve all seen images of the graffitti-streaked subway cars; mass transit in New York was indeed a much different animal when Asbury Park came out in ‘73.

Springsteen writes:

When last we spoke, there were layoffs and cutbacks. The whole bit. But that was so 2008, right?

Well, we can hope.

Ah, the New Year. 2009. A whole decade, practically, in the bag. And yet, without any real decade-designation. Coming after the Nineties, what do we even call it? “The Oh’s”? “The Zeros”? In many ways, either works. But whatever you call it, here we are. Freezing our asses off and wondering… Now what?!

Me, I’m walking to work as usual. Today I have to be in at 8:30 a.m. sharp because the president of a certain luxury-goods manufacturer is getting a tour of the agency this morning. We creatives got not one but two e-mails telling us to be in early and to be dressed more presentably than our usual ripped-jeans-and-Iron-Maiden-T-shirt attire. (All right, that’s my typical outfit, but it’s a close-enough approximation of our general garb.)