She Sells Mangoes By The Roadside
An Update on the BQE
This is an urgent update to a post from last year regarding the current state of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, also known as the BQE. To summarize that initial writing, in my lifetime the BQE has gone from being one of the worst highways in all the land to being the worst thing in the universe. A Black Hole. A concentration of Dark Matter. The Fires of Mordor. The reason for the downgrade is that about three years ago the city reduced the number of lanes—from three to two—at one of the busiest stretches of the highway. This narrowing was done on purpose to try to preserve the life of the roadway—in other words, to prevent it from collapsing.
The question posed by that original essay was How Do You Know When a Highway Has Jumped the Shark? The answer was simple and straightforward: a highway has jumped the shark (i.e., outlived its usefulness) when traffic on a highway is so intense, predictable, and institutionalized that a person can start a lucrative business selling goods to motorists on the side of that highway. Here, mangoes. If there is something that can be considered the canary in a coal mine when it comes to a highway, you have to think selling shit on the side of the road has to be high on the list. Not on the off-ramp, mind you. In the left lane.
While it is certainly reasonable and appropriate to rail against the inanimate object that is a highway, the gist of that original piece was largely to ridicule, criticize, mock, embarrass, and insult a group of local elected officials for their policy decisions regarding the BQE and (whatever is left of) its future. In particular, while any sentient being can see that the narrowing of the BQE has created permanent traffic—indeed, the mango business only exists because of the resulting traffic—these politicians want the narrowing of the highway to stay that way forever. Yes, even once they rebuild that part of the highway sometime in the future. Their “logic?” Studies show that widening highways does not necessarily reduce traffic. I want you to ponder that for a minute.
Also, per those same politicians, the BQE was the brainchild of city planner Robert Moses, who was apparently a racist, so there.
(Ah, yes, the third highway lane, that nefarious secret instrument of systemic oppression.)
In any event, the point here is not to rehash old grievances, but rather to provide an update. Today, I am happy to report that . . .
. . . the mango business is booming.
What started out as a tentative and temporary stake-out in the right shoulder has started to expand. The cooler is larger. In fact, there are now two coolers. The woman has moved to the left lane. She seems to be expanding into other fruits. Last week, she even had her son with her. Maybe she’s hiring more bodies. I recommend you check out Indeed.com to see if there are any open positions.
This, of course, raises some questions. As far as I could tell, since she and her immediate family are the only people who are deriving any benefit from the BQE lane policy, one wonders what kind of political influence they have. What kinds of massive political contributions are they making to those local politicians? What kind of dirt do they have on them? From whence does this diabolical power emanate?
Ah, the many tentacles of Big Mango. The whole thing is rotten to the unreasonably large core.
