Worrying About the Long Island Rail Road From Seattle

It is 9:47 AM in a kitchen that gets about forty minutes of usable light per day, and I am eating a piece of toast that I have already decided was a mistake, scrolling past the local news to read about a train I will never take. This is one of my hobbies. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I worry, with great specificity, about the infrastructure of New York. It is cheaper than therapy and almost as humiliating.

The story is this: the Long Island Rail Road, which the Associated Press tells me is the busiest commuter railroad in North America, carrying about 250,000 customers each weekday, may shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. Five labor unions representing about half of the system's 7,000-person workforce have been negotiating for months. A strike was temporarily averted in September when the Trump administration stepped in. That gave everyone 60 days, and the 60 days are almost up. The MTA has offered a 9.5% raise over three years. The unions want 16% over four. On Wednesday, the MTA's chief negotiator, Gary Dellaverson, said the gap "is describable simply in terms of money."

I have been thinking about that sentence for an hour now, the way you think about a thing your dentist said that you're pretty sure was an insult. Describable simply in terms of money. As if money were the easy part. As if money weren't the part that determines whether Susanne Alberto, a personal trainer quoted in the piece, can do her Manhattan sessions in person or has to switch them to virtual, which anyone who has ever tried to be encouraged through a laptop knows is not the same encouragement.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has urged riders to work from home, if possible. The MTA will run free but limited shuttle buses during rush hours, from designated LIRR stations to subway stops in Queens, for essential workers and people who cannot telecommute. I read that sentence and pictured a bus, and then I pictured the line for the bus, and then I pictured myself in the line for the bus, even though I am three time zones away and have never been an essential worker in my life.

What I cannot stop thinking about is Rob Udle, an electrician interviewed at Penn Station, a union member himself, who said he sympathized but didn't like the strongarm tactics. "You're affecting a lot of other people," he said. Which is, I think, the quietest, most devastating thing anyone in the article said. Because everyone is affecting a lot of other people, all of the time, and most of us have the decency not to notice.

The toast is cold now. I do not commute. I have, for years, been a person who simply walks from one room to another and calls it a morning. And still, somehow, I feel late.

Source: The Seattle Times — Business (image and reporting)