#woe! american public transit be upon ye!

[dirtcola]

I have a story to tell. Look at me. I need to talk about public transit.

Behold... the woeful tale of the most cursed subway station in the system (content warning bodegaland under the cut)...

I present to you - 191st Street on the 1 Train.

This station is notable for being the deepest underground. It is 173 feet (53 m) below street level. This is because it is under a massive, steep hill in the neighborhood of Ft George. Most of New York City is pretty flat, however, in places like Northern Manhattan and parts of The Bronx, the terrain is quite hilly. This specific hill is notable for being big enough to almost completely cut off the neighborhood of Inwood (northern tip of Manhattan) from the rest of the island.

The station itself has a simple enough layout, a northbound and southbound platform connected by a covered pedestrian footbridge and mezzanine. The atmosphere is what is different - you're so far underground that the air is still and stale, and in between the arrival and departure of trains, it is deathly quiet.

So you're likely thinking, "how does one exit this strange station at the bottom of such a big hill?" There are two ways to enter and leave the station: a set of four large freight-style elevators, or a long pedestrian tunnel which lets out at the bottom of the hill. There are no stairs.

Let's talk about the elevators first, should you decide to brave them. Luckily for you, they've recently been completely replaced! This is a wonderful thing, because the old ones were absolutely slow and rickety as hell and would often stall out and return to the bottom of the station when overloaded (being overloaded, mind you, by exhausted and nervous commuters eager to make it out of there).

Here is a video shot by a transit enthusiast riding the old elevators shortly before replacement. Note how it took a full 43 seconds to make the ascent, and that is with only one person riding in it! He also made a follow-up video riding the new elevators, which ascend at a crisp 34 seconds.

Now you might be thinking, "those elevators seem like a total death trap. What about the tunnel?" Well...

The tunnel is made of concrete, dimly lit, and 900 feet (270 meters) long. For a years, the walls were covered in graffiti art and murals commissioned by the NYC Department of Transportation. To be fair, it looked pretty cool!

However, I'm sure you noticed the past tense in the preceding paragraph. In January 2023, DOT completely painted over the tunnel in an unflattering shade of landlord white. It looked like this:

Understandably the community was quite upset by this. DOT eventually began commissioning artists to beautify the tunnel in September 2023:

Certainly an improvement! The tunnel still lets out at the bottom of the hill though, so I hope that you don't have business at the top of the hill. It's also a long walk from one end to the other, and the thick concrete walls make the sounds inside very isolated. Not ideal for any semblance of safety.

In conclusion, this post may make 191st Street interesting, but I still suggest avoiding it. The atmosphere in this station is oppressive and eerie, the elevators and tunnel out are of dubious safety, and there isn't much to see or do here if you don't live in the immediate neighborhood.

New york fuckin city babey!!!!!!!!!

[payment-providers]

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New Post has been published on https://payment-providers.com/dining-out-as-the-economy-reopens/

'Dining Out' As The Economy Reopens

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Memorial Day weekend is upon us – which means here in the United States, summer is officially setting up to begin. Sort of. With the outbreak of an international pandemic, our summer plans have been rather modified, as consumers seem to be considering what the safest summer plans might be, and opting to tread a bit differently than they have in the past. 

As PYMNTS previously reported, the Great American road trip seems set to make a resurgence, and consumers are increasingly nervous about any travel plan that involves sitting on an airplane with strangers. And as it turns out, Americans’ willingness to be seated next to strangers just about anywhere has been one of the biggest questions during the reopening of the economy that is now underway (in some form or another) in all 50 states.

Yes, stores and restaurants are reopening, beauty parlors are allowed to take appointments and consumers are preparing to get back out there as the summer season is poised to take off.

But will the customers go out?

That is the $22 trillion question attached to the phased economic reopening – whether or not consumers en masse will return to something like the old world of physical commerce, after having spent the last eight weeks at home, reorganizing their lives around digital channels.

According to PYMNTS’ most recent consumer survey, there are some valid reasons to believe that some large and valuable demographics might opt to hold off on getting back out there.

Enthusiasm for re-entering a possibly contaminated world isn’t terribly high among millennials, bridge millennials and Gen Xers, many of whom have shifted to digital habits over the last eight weeks or so – and plan to keep it that way, instead of transitioning back to the real world. And the trend is even more visible among more affluent, free-spending consumers: Among those who said they plan to stay online during the recovery period, 38 percent reported earning over $100,000 per year.

So how to get consumers back out there? According to the experts PYMNTS has talked with over the last several weeks, the race these days doesn’t go to the swift – it goes to the safe. And it goes to the places and service providers that make customers feel safest when they choose to physically interact.

Which is why, for the rest of the summer, finding parking at one’s favorite eatery might be a new challenge for those diners who are motivated to actually eat out. Because parking lots are finding a whole new usage by the restaurants they serve: Instead of providing a place to park cars, they’re now a place to park customers – and serve them dinner.  

How the Parking Lot Became a Dining Spot

In Tampa, Florida this summer, restaurateurs are being encouraged to offer more outdoor seating options for consumers, supported by a new pilot program that gives owners more flexibility in utilizing the surrounding sidewalks, streets and parking lots. The goal of the program is to allow restaurants to expand their service offerings while respecting social distancing rules (which require keeping tables six feet apart) and adhering to limited-capacity laws. By adding the parking lot to their countable capacity, restaurants can immediately welcome more guests.

“It was a losing proposition,” Tampa restaurant co-owner Jeff Gigante told CNBC of the indoor restrictions they initially faced in their home state. “[The pilot is] a lifesaver for us.”

The pilot in Tampa is not unique: In Cincinnati, Atlanta, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California and Connecticut, local governments are trying out arrangements to allow restaurants to reclaim space not normally used for serving customers to make reopenings possible. In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont issued an executive order to allow for outdoor dining.

“If we’re going to continue our great renaissance as a city, we’re going to have to open up more streets and public space to restaurants or … they’re not going to survive,” said Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley.

Will Reclaiming the Parking Lot Help Restaurants Survive? 

Among the few points of universal agreement is that socially distanced dining isn’t a cost-effective option for a majority of establishments. With dining rooms limited to as little as 25 percent up to a general max of 50 percent, the economics simply don’t work for most restaurants, which are low-margin businesses to begin with.

Too low-margin, in many cases, as big-name restaurateurs have elected to put off their grand reopenings until a solution such as a vaccine allows them to operate more normally.

“We won’t be welcoming guests into our full-service restaurants for a very long time – probably not until there’s a vaccine,” Union Square Hospitality Group Founder and CEO Danny Meyer told Bloomberg. “There is no interest or excitement on my part to have a half-full dining room while everyone is getting their temperature taken and wearing masks, for not much money.”

Union Square Hospitality Group runs 19 restaurants in New York City – including the QSR Shake Shack chain, which can run remotely indefinitely. 

Other businesses, like Tampa’s Forbici Modern Italian restaurant, have to reopen at some time in the near future or may never reopen at all. And trying to open at a quarter or half their regular capacity is simply not economically feasible, Co-owner Jeff Gigante explains.

“Running a business at half capacity gives you half revenue – and you still have to staff it as if you’re at full revenue,” he explained.

But the ability to place tables on the street in front of his establishment means they can keep their restaurant open at close to normal capacity – which means reopening enters the realm of economic possibility.

Tampa’s pilot program and the addition of those tables was initially set to run for the next two weeks, but will continue in a modified form, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said in an interview. The program essentially suspends city code and permit requirements pertaining to outdoor dining, making it easier for restaurants to start offering it.

Cincinnati had a similar variation of the expansion of outdoor seating, which allowed restaurateurs to apply for a fast-track permit to set up temporary outdoor tables for reopenings last week. Indoor seating began this week under social distancing guidelines.

Will Outdoor Dining Bring Back Reluctant Consumers?

As is often the case with data bout the novel coronavirus, much remains unknown about how much difference eating outside will make to its transmission between people. Early studies examining Chinese outbreaks seem to confirm that outdoor dining is less conducive to the spread than eating indoors.

Dr. Jonathan Temte has noted that while there is no proof that eating outdoors is more effective at slowing the spread of the disease than eating indoors, there are many “supporting concepts” around other viruses that lead him to believe the transmission risk is lower in open-air environments – as long as people take precautions, like maintaining social distancing guidelines.

“It has to do with the proximity to other people and the time that you’re in that proximity,” he said.

In a related concern, various critics have noted that eating outside encourages people to start forming crowds. Tampa’s Mayor Castor notes that unless outdoor eating is carefully monitored, it could potentially turn into a problematic issue. 

“We can’t have people congregating, waiting on a table. They need to know where they’re going and what time they’re going,” said Castor, adding that the city also has a policy of “no seat, no service.”

Apart from issues with enforcing social distancing, even as diners move outside, Mike Whatley, vice president of state and local affairs for the National Restaurant Association, noted that at best, outdoor eating is a temporary and highly seasonal solution to restaurateurs’ issues. 

On its own, it won’t be enough to lift the struggling industry – which has seen nearly 5.5 million lost jobs since April of this year – out of its various difficulties.

“With summer comes thunderstorms and extremely hot weather, and many restaurants may not currently have the equipment for umbrellas or outdoor seats,” Whatley said. “There are some who are doing it, and it’s great. But this is by no means a cure-all solution that’s going to fix all the industry’s woes.”

At best, he noted, the ability to more easily expand outside has been a temporary “lifeline to operators,” who Whatley said will likely end up needing more government assistance at the federal and local level to weather the crisis.  

But while operators are waiting on the government to decide whether more assistance will be sent, the ability to allow their customers to eat outside has allowed them to serve up something in person that’s been lacking for almost two months: a feeling of safety while dining outside their homes. That feeling, noted Forbici’s Gigante, will be invaluable as his restaurant tries to put its pieces back together.

“People all want to sit outside,” he said, noting that the ability to get what they want is what will ultimately make the consumer comfortable enough to dine out again.  

——————————

PYMNTS LIVE TV: POWERING THE DIGITAL SHIFT | MAY 18-22, 2020

Five days of intimate interviews and streaming TV shows ‘starring’ the smartest people in payments. The economy is slowly reopening on a changed world where “business unusual” is now just “business.” Tune in as PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and special guests from across the payments universe ditch “digital optional” and bring on the digital-first engagements buyers and sellers really want. Join experts in a series of live conversations rethinking business models, customer experiences, payments choice, verticals…everything.

COVID-19, dining, Main Feature, News, outdoor dining, regulations, reopening, Restaurants, restrictions, Safety, Saturday Feature

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[lyfestile]

Gerald Caplan is an Africa scholar, a former NDP national director and a regular panelist on CBC's Power & Politics.

According to the New York Times, Donald Trump's transition team wanted to know: "Why should we spend funds on Africa when we are suffering here in the U.S.?" Curiously enough, most Americans probably would have agreed with Mr. Trump that this was a real question. But they all share an entirely false premise.

America and the rest of the rich world have actually been ripping off Africa for the past 700 years, ever since the Portuguese began the slave trade, all the while insisting that Africa has been the beneficiary of this relentless exploitation. It's been one of the great hoaxes of the past millennium.

Slavery and the slave trade, upon which Western Europe and the United States developed their economic superiority, were said to be positive for Africans, whose innate inferiority meant they had no capacity to run their own lives.

For subscribers: China's African retreat: How a once-celebrated relationship turned cold

Read more: African Union's mass withdrawal strategy mounts pressure on ICC

Colonialism, in turn, was the West's ostensibly philanthropic attempt to gift Africa with "Christianity, Civilization and Commerce," in return for making possible Europe's assorted empires.

Neocolonialsm, which has operated for the past 65 years since the West first "gave" their African colonies freedom, is the stage we have all lived through. During this period, according to Western mythology, Africa has been the problem to which the generosity of the rich world is the solution. You know – a goat at Christmas, the "adoption" of an unknown child, meagre foreign aid and neoliberal economic policies.

In reality, Africa is far more generous to the West than we are to it. That was evident from the first. But beginning in 1973, with the publication of the ground-breaking book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Guyanese academic-activist Walter Rodney, the European fairy tale was definitively exploded. The title said it all: Africa's multiple woes were a function of deliberate policies of exploitation by Europe's colonial regimes.

Since then, despite mounting evidence, mass ignorance in the West, cultivated by both elites and aid agencies, remained dominant. Yet excellent research by sophisticated NGOs have made indisputably clear the manifold ways in which foreign interests consistently ripped off African countries, not least through tax evasion and the investment privileges gained by Western corporate interests.

I myself jumped into this attempt to demystify Africa-West relations with a book called The Betrayal of Africa. The betrayers were Western governments and corporate interests, often in collusion with African elites. The betrayed were innocents in the West and of course the African people.

More exposés pour forth, the latest, probably most comprehensive one, just this December. The U.S.-based Global Financial Integrity examined all of the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor ones each year, including aid, foreign investment and trade flows, as well as debt cancellation, workers' remittances and unrecorded capital flight.

The conclusion was categorical: The flow of money from rich countries to poor countries, including most of Africa, pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.

In 2012, the last year of recorded data, poor countries received a total of $1.3-trillion (U.S.), including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3-trillion flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2-trillion more to the rest of the world than they received. Since 1980, these net outflows add up to a staggering total of $16.3 trillion. That's how much money has been bled out of the global south, including Africa, over the past few decades.

And yes, it's trillions.

Add in the massive corruption, enabled by Western interests, plus the violent coups and conflicts that Western interests facilitated, and there's only one conclusion: Rich countries aren't developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones.

Canada is a pretty good example. On the one hand, our governments sends them paltry amounts of foreign aid. On the other, to take only one example, Canadian investment in African mining ventures, many of them deeply destructive to locals, are often actively promoted by Canadian politicians and bureaucrats.

The Trudeau government is looking for a new Africa strategy. Surely telling the truth about who is ripping off whom would be a very constructive way to begin. Then the appropriate policies could, at long last, follow. Or is the truth now too much for Canada, too?