Monday, October 24, 2011

Eric Holder Takes A Break From Various Cover-ups To Dictate NYC Cab Design

Investigate Fast & Furious?  Delve deeper into the details of the ill-fated Solyndra deal?  Come up with coherent policy regarding terrorist interrogation and trials?

Our Justice Department cares not for these things. It's chock full of liberals, a breed who we know talks as if they have answers to all the world's problems in the palm of their hand, but when it comes down to it, can't seem to be bothered with the work involved. Like Barack Obama. Or, should they see their preferred prescriptive fail, rather than use their advanced cranial capacity to work their way around the problem, they'll sit in a corner and pout.  Like Barack Obama.  Or they'll blame everyone around them for their woes.  Lie Barack Obama.  Ansd sometimes they'll just find something easy to do, something that is comically destructive but allows them to preen a bit before others and feel better about themselves.  Like Barack Obama.

And Eric Holder.

While he turns a blind eye to the heinous misdeeds of the most radically politicized Justice Department in American history, he casts an evil one towards....the yellow taxicabs of New York City, and forces a typically insane liberal mandate down their throats:


The US attorney’s office in Manhattan just filed a 23-page court brief insisting that (get this!) all new taxis be built to accommodate wheelchairs.
It claimed the city just doesn’t have enough such cabs right now, in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.


Justice’s ridiculously naive position on cabs itself shows how inappropriate it is for federal outsiders to butt in to city business.
Take its chief gripe: insufficient service for the disabled. Fact is, there are just 6,000 people or so with non-folding wheelchairs in the entire city, mayoral aides estimate.
A city, that is, of more than 8 million.


No wonder there’s barely any demand for wheelchair-ready cabs: When City Hall ran a two-year test not long ago, allowing riders to phone for them, hardly any did. (The record for a day: a whopping 15 calls.)
Anyway, as Mayor Bloomberg notes, dispatching such cabs makes far more sense than flooding streets with them -- not that Justice’s legal eagles would understand.


“You know, the Justice Department, I don’t think, has ever been to New York,” Bloomberg joked. “You go out in the streets -- you just cannot take, generally, a wheelchair out into the street and try to hail a cab. It’s dangerous.”
No kidding. Which is why the city plans to roll out a new dispatch system for wheelchair cabs in just a few months.
Meanwhile, some 230 cabs, meant exclusively for wheelchairs, already hunt the streets in desperate search of those elusive 6,000 theoretical fares.

How much more will the average New Yorker have to pay in cab fares now in order to pay for a redesign to service customers who have other means of hailing a taxi? How many potential customers will turn to subways or "gypsy cabs" instead, making poorer the immigrant class who tends to drive yellow cabs - the class the Democrats so piously claim to represent?

Bloomberg makes a key point within his nervous laughter. Local policy cannot be micro-managed and designed from Washington; it must be handled by local officials who mold it to fit their population's needs. If your city had 100,000 needy riders, this policy would make sense. With 6,000 - who can call a customized cab by phone - this policy is madness.

Yet, does anyone doubt that, despite his sheer ignorance of the facts, Eric Holder is quite proud of his work here?  Like Barack Obama, smiling serene over the wreckage of America, swearing he wouldn't change a thing...

1 comment:

Mike Thiac said...

On my department we have a contract with a local company to transport wheelchair dependant prisoners.

In thirteen years street service, I have called for this service one. It's not exactly a high demand item.