The G Word

By Mickey Friedman
July 4, 2014

I got my first real job at twelve. I had tried shining shoes outside the Jerome Avenue subway station, and sold my share of Kool-Aid but wasn’t very good at either.

So, after school, I delivered copies of the New York Post. Up and down my neighborhood apartment buildings.

Once a month, it was collection time. And I had my little metal coin changer clipped to my belt, filled with quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies for making change.

I hadn’t thought about my coin changer for the longest time.

Not until I read about Ride$hare, Chip Elitzer’s innovative and optimistic transportation system for The Best Small Town in America.

(And, yes, someone finally got up the nerve to tell me the folks at Smithsonian Magazine just deep-sixed us. Suggesting that all of sudden Chautauqua, New York has replaced us as the Best Small Town. Where the heck is Chautauqua, anyway? They probably use plastic bags for groceries!)

The way Chip Elitzer explains it, you stand in the street and make the “V” sign. If you’re not run over, you might find a driver looking for some extra dough. Willing to turn himself, herself into a temporary taxi-driver. Can you see Robert DeNiro: “You ‘vee-ing’ at me?” Hitchhiking through the new millennium. A Free Market version of the 60s.

With “spontaneous car-pooling,” the ridesharer coughs up fifty cents for every five miles or a portion thereof.
Which makes me think of coin-changers. Shiny silver coin changers. For you and me. Maybe clipped to your belt. Or velcro-ed to the dashboard.

This is a very slippery psychic slope for me. And just so you know it’s not personal, but I might not be stopping for you or your outstretched “V.”

This is probably more than you need to know but I’ve never quite recovered. Because one of the sad things that happened to me, and many a slight paperboy in the big city, was that some folks didn’t really want to pay for their papers. Some managed never to be home at pay-up time. Some tried offering to pay with a hundred. And really, in the days before youthful crack dealers, how many Bronx twelve year olds could break a hundred? There just weren’t enough quarters in the coin changer.

So given my psychic scars, the last thing I want is to have to drive around with a coin changer.

And the next to last thing I want is to take you to Sheffield and have to change a hundred.

Or argue about whether we went six miles or just four point five.

Which means installing a really accurate and expensive GPS unit.

Not to mention sharing the occasional ride with a madman.

Which brings me to my friend Anthony and our discussion of the G word. Government.

The fact is all of us in the country have lived for far too long with the free market version of transportation. Here, we need a car. When your car breaks, you discover how nearly impossible life is without it. Getting to work. Getting kids to school or the school bus. Shopping. Bugging your friends. Borrowing a car.

Poor people without cars are screwed. Have you ever taken the bus from GB to Pittsfield?

Chip Elitzer’s Ride$hare is a clever solution to the sad reality of an incomplete public transportation system. But what we really need is a good one.

A taxpayer supported, town-operated transportation system. That employs local people driving town-owned, energy-efficient mini-buses, or vans, or trolleys, or camels, that travel up and down our town roads. A system where drivers are tested, vetted, and insured. Where they have the coin-changers.

Like our libraries and fire house and police and schools, we need it. We can do less driving by ourselves, waste less fuel. Maybe we’ll save money.

Now I don’t want to scare you, but there may be other ways to re-vitalize government. How many of you are unhappy with your phone and internet service? How is Verizon doing for you? Or Time Warner? What if we the people owned our own phone and internet service?

That’s what our neighbors in Alford are thinking about. A high speed, town-operated fiber optic network. 80 percent of their residents have internet service and many are dissatisfied. They discovered they can build a town-owned, fiber-to-home network to provide phone and internet services for what it costs residents right now, while offering far faster internet speeds.

Yes, of course, there are problems with government. But aren’t there just as many problems with the for-profit companies we’re forced to deal with?

Here in GB we’ve been rushing to shed ourselves of town-owned public properties. But maybe it’s time to rethink that. It’s obvious we have two great needs: affordable housing and more jobs. If the Searles School deals falls through, how about we re-use it.

How about the G word?