Kathy Hochul Just Cost You 100 Hours of Your Life

But the problem here isn’t just the lost benefits to public health and mass transit networks or the foreboding confirmation that even this country’s social democratic jurisdiction can’t manage to do one goddamn nice thing. It’s that if modest efforts to curtail cars can’t make it here—in a city with the country’s best public transit—it’s hard to imagine them making it anywhere else in the United States, either. For the time being, New Yorkers are poised to keep wasting hundreds of hours in cars that could be spent doing basically anything else.

The MTA equates the cost of the 117 hours per year that New Yorkers lose in traffic to “nearly $2,000 in lost productivity and wasted time.” That doesn’t quite do it justice. The tragedy of all that wasted time isn’t so much that Five Borough residents are being kept from generating surplus value for their bosses. It’s that beautiful, incalculable moments are being eaten away trying not to get rear-ended by a coked-out Goldman Sachs analyst’s Mercedes G-Class: seeing your daughter take her first steps; tender, goofy moments with your partner; reconnecting with long-lost friends.