White Plains Common Council ignores downtown residents.

7:30 AM on a sleepy, foggy Sunday morning and monster buses, first Greyhound then county, are already roaring down Barker Avenue heading toward the train station. They never use non-residential Hamilton Avenue. Never.

Traffic commissioner Tom Soyk will assure you that he is powerless to do anything about this. Maybe make a meaningless, ineffectual phone call to someone at a bus company, then continue with 100% unimaginative administrative duties.

Many posts about this mess have appeared on this blog, all ignored by White Plains Common Council members, even when a link to a post has been sent to each. The same will be done with this post, both the sending and the ignoring.

Are White Plains Common Council members really that oblivious, disinterested, incompetent? If they actually wanted to see the bus mess, simply go to the intersection of Barker and Church at 5:30 PM any weekday. After ten minutes, the nature of it will become apparent.

As written previously, White Plains residents living in downtown apartments are a bizarre oddity to White Plains Common Council members, all of whom live in houses nowhere near downtown, an area that exists only for their amusement. Given all that, White Plains Common Council members are as involved and interested as one might expect: not very. How do they get away with this benign neglect?

1. At large voting. White Plains Common Council members are elected city wide, not by geographic area. They pretend to represent all residents but only care about their immediate neighbors and the Council of Neighborhood  Associations (CNA). The CNA seems like a company organized union, one that makes it easier for the company to control the workers. The CNA never holds any meetings in downtown White Plains. Never.

2. Those of us who live in downtown White Plains apartments are dumb and lazy. It's embarrassing to admit this but it's obviously true. We have enough people to easily overcome reason number one but don't do anything. It's pretty sad.

So the buses roll into downtown. Has any city official explained how this benefits White Plains generally and downtown residents, who get the brunt of the traffic, danger, noise, pollution, congestion, specifically? The buses also park wherever they please and never get a ticket for that or for speeding. Never.