Summer, and it begins

Oh the summer is here, and we had a number of street fairs. The 8th Avenue street fair in Chelsea in addition to some construction on 17th Street jammed up all the westbound traffic in Chelsea and the Flatiron District, as well as northbound traffic on Park Avenue South and 6th Avenue. The eastbound traffic was a little crappy too. As usual there was traffic going west in the 30’s and cross-town in the early 50’s. There was some sort of event at Rockefeller Center, all these football fans of any team in general; no football jersey was the same. 5th Avenue was moving at turtle paces due to gridlock from various crossing streets. Also as usual, since the Pope was gone, the traffic update radio stations have gone back to only reporting traffic into and out of Manhattan, but not reporting on Manhattan traffic. Somebody should start a radio station, which updates on traffic conditions on the Island of Manhattan.

Anyway I got pretty lucky. All cabbies know that the job is mainly about luck, and I got few rides going cross-town, which kill more time than a visit to the local post office. Early in the morning I had an hour-long gap between fares at one point, but since I picked up the cab an hour later, I was able to return it later, and dip into a time that had higher passenger demand.

If it weren’t for the one airport fare and then a rare trip back into Manhattan from the airport soon after, it wouldn’t have been such a good day. The woman going to LaGuardia couldn’t find any identification, so she hoped the airport would accept an article in a magazine with her picture as proof. She was some singer, I asked her name, but it didn’t ring a bell.

The traffic report said that due to a Mets game the Grand Central would be bad, but of course, it was way better than the cross-town traffic in Manhattan.