My Experiences with Unions and Monkeys: The Commute

I graduated from college without a job so I moved home to zmother's house.  After about six to nine weeks I got a job at the aforementioned union shop so I commuted there from the Neck.  This involved driving on the Palisades Interstate Parkway, locally known as the Palisades or, more affectionately, the Pip (but not the Pip).

Although I have a handful of fond memories from the early 1990s relating to time spent in cars on the Rockefeller and Alpine lookouts, the Pip might have been the worst stretch of highway in the Northeast back then.  Neither New Jersey nor New York would invest any money in it, both asserting that the Port Authority was responsible for its maintenance.  It had so many potholes that it was like driving on the surface of the moon.  People would routinely get flat tires, so there often were cars on the side of the road.  And it's an ancient road with no shoulder or acceleration lanes, so people bomb onto it with a full head of steam.  It has a 50 MPH speed limit and tons of hidey-holes for Johnny Law so it's easy to get a ticket.  And it spans the NY/NJ border so, of course, many of the drivers who use it are raging assholes.

I had many bad experiences commuting on the Pip.  Some people drove below the 50 MPH limit because the road was so chewed up and it was not uncommon to get stuck behind two cars driving 47 MPH side-by-side in both lanes.  It was just as common to deal with maniacs doing 80 MPH, perhaps in a hurry to get to White Castle.  These maniacs liked to tailgate, and I would get out of the way when I could but sometimes there was simply nowhere to go--I was boxed in by the other cars and had to deal with being tailgated.

The Pip is a scenic road.  As the name implies, it rides atop the Palisades Cliffs so it has great views of New York City.  This means that it's right on the Hudson River so there are times when the cliffs, and thus the Pip fill with fog.  There were two or three occasions where the visibility was almost zero (even worse than that ride back from JMU in the snow, a reference for only two of us).  It was not fun.

All of this is to say that driving on the Pip sucks.  They've since repaved it so it's better, but it still has no shoulder, a 50 MPH limit, and NY/NJ assholes driving on it.

As a result, this Jalopnik article did not surprise me.  I recognized the Pip after not more than 5 seconds of video, and this is exactly what it was like commuting to work.

Here's another angle.

Yes, people drive like this on the Pip.  And yes, people who drive on the Pip cheer when other people crash on the Pip.

I'm sure TR will opine that I was an aggressive driver in my youth and I will agree, I drove faster than I should've.  But this is next level idiocy by everyone involved.  And this is how I used to start my day!  Luckily TR's homeboys' Aunt Fanny had a place to rent so we moved to Money Earnin'.  But then I had to commute on the Sprain which might have been worse.  Foreshadowing!  Postcount!