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Similarly, many community members complained that the traffic enforcement agents stationed at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge wave through traffic without the slightest regard for pedestrians or walk lights. When the agents are stationed there, said Crane, “there effectively is zero pedestrian crossing time.”

And as we all know, this is what “TEAs” are “told to do”. But by whom? We have a police force simply to enforce the law, and there’s no law that says to prioritize motorists at downtown intersections. We have a city DOT to manage traffic, but they do not seem to be in charge of these malignant TEAs.

Who is directing TEAs to rob pedestrians of our crossing time, and how do they have the authority to dictate city traffic policy with such lethal ineptitude?

It was clear, at this point, that this is what they’d been trying to do all day, what they’d been planning to do earlier: arrest everybody and sort it out later. And it was only at this point that the “assault on City Hall” happened, maybe five blocks away. Once the 400 people who would be arrested that night had been informed that they were under arrest (which you could hear on the livestream as “Attention marchers: you have failed to disperse! You are now under arrest! Submit to the arrest” several minutes after the protesters had been chanting “Let us Disperse”), protesters who had escaped back to Oscar Grant Plaza “occupied” City Hall.

This particular aspect of police militarization (Texas Highway Patrol with six .30 caliber machine guns on a PT boat) will be solved by global warming.

The boat won’t do so much when the Rio Grande is dry.

From the perspective of intercity rail passengers, the biggest problem with Penn Station is the tracks and track access. The platforms are narrow, and visibility is obscured by columns, staircases, escalators, and elevators. But even what exists is not used to its fullest extent. Although Amtrak checks all passengers’ tickets on board, it also conducts a prior check at the station, funneling all passengers through just one access point and lengthening the boarding process. It’s possible to go around the check by boarding from the lower concourse, but Amtrak trains are not posted there, requiring passengers to loiter on the upper concourse, see what track the train arrives on (information which is typically posted only 15 minutes before departure), and scramble. As a result of the convoluted boarding process, Regional trains dwell 15 minutes at Penn Station, and Acela trains dwell 10 minutes. Many of those minutes could be saved by just better station throughput.

Penn Station: where security theater meets stupidity theater.