OPINION: Trucks: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them in NYC
Each day, hundreds of thousands of trucks move throughout our region. Vital to our lives, these vehicles carry almost all the goods that our region consumes. However, in the execution of their myriad duties, they crowd our roads, adding to the mayhem that is our infrastructure. Having been strangled with governmental neglect and crushed by metropolitan success, these assets are congested beyond imagination while their physical structures fall to pieces. Such overuse and rank neglect has precipitated a full-fledged war of priorities, one that asks streets and their users to handle Ubers without disrupting bike traffic, provide for platoons of automobiles without slowing buses and — most important to our story — accommodate a growing army of trucks without disrupting everyone else.
In the age of e-commerce and nutritional diasporization, trucks — already the method of conveyance for over 90 percent of goods in our metropolitan area — are taking on an increasingly important role in our lives. While the goods and services these vehicles purvey are unquestionably beneficial, their impact on our region’s infrastructural health is unquestionably not so. To preserve the status quo, we must find methods to mitigate their negative effects, lest, with our unquenchable appetite for everything, their numbers drag us further toward bedlam.