What the hell was that? — a formal complaint by pikachu, the kid.
Although the snow has melted and the ice on the roads has thawed, the memories of the most horrific commute that each and every New Jerseyan experienced last night is still frozen in our minds.
The usual 25-minute drive home from the Paramus IKEA turned into a 4-hour saga of fear, boredom, and hopelessness, as motorists around me struggled to control their cars on unplowed and unsalted highways, byways and backroads. Accords, Camrys, BMWs, Mustangs, even Audis, Subarus, and family crossover SUVs had the hardest time gripping on what is essentially a huge sheet of the slickest, most slippery combination of packed snow and ice.
In the matter of one night, roads in all of North Jersey turned into one giant parking lot, exponentially surpassing those of the Garden State Plaza and MetLife Stadium in terms of size and amount of people struggling to get home. An older motorist described to me that this was worse than the time he was stuck on the George Washington Bridge for hours during the weekend of Woodstock roughly 50 years ago.
Motorists aren’t the only victims here, as pictures from all over social media showed stampedes of stranded, confused and frustrated commuters in both Newark Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, wondering if they were going to make it home that night. Port Authority, the beating heart of the NJ Transit bus system, shut down its gates, while commuters were diverted to trains and NY Waterway Ferries, as buses faced 3-hour delays.
With my Twitter and Instagram feed being lit up last night and this morning with videos and pictures of gridlock in Newark, mere hopelessness at Port Authority and Penn along with Snap Stories from the debilitating traffic, who is to blame for all this mess?
If you are a motorist, you can point at the mayors of your cities, towns, and municipalities that you pass on your commute or actually live in. They are responsible for sending the plows and salt trucks, which were of complete, absolute absence until the snow turned into rain — 3 hours after they could’ve made my 4-hour drive home not be 4 hours.
If you commute using public transit, point at NJ Transit. Although they might have underestimated the snow, you cannot excuse the fact that their current infrastructure cannot handle a storm like this.
Finally, the one single person that we can point at and demand an apology is our governor Phil Murphy, as he is the one at the top of this chain of command. We still remember that one blizzard where everything was messed up because Christie and family were at Disney, but to think that this mere “first snow” essentially brought all of NJ to its freaking knees is completely unacceptable.
Governor, this is the FIRST snow of Winter 2018. Me and millions of New Jerseyans that depend on our roads, rails, and buses to get around to where we study, work and drop off our children cannot imagine how fucked up the second, or third snow or even a blizzard would do to us.
We don’t want to experience this shit ever again.
All we are asking you is to apologize and promise to the people that elected you that you will do something about it.
