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Remember frantically fumbling for coins
inside, under and around your seat, as you held up traffic in the exact-change
lane at the Turnpike tollbooths? In a pathetically
transparent attempt to cooerce people into using the $27.50 automatic-deduction
transponders
in
the FastLane program, officials of the Mass Turnpike have removed all
exact-change lanes, leaving two options: FastLane or human tolltakers. Guess
which line takes forever. Guess who else thinks this stinks.
”They’re forcing you to make a decision you should make
freely,” says the ubiquitous Alan Dershowitz, a stalwart against creeping
transponderism. ”It’s not Big Brother yet,” he says, ”but it’s Big
Third Cousin.”
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I’m really gonna miss those exact change baskets.One
time, some of my coins missed and fell to the pavement. I put my minvan
in reverse and carefully backed up to where they lay. Opening the door
to the van, I leanded down to pick them up, taking my foot off the
brake in the process. The van started slowly backward. The
open door snagged on a steel post and peeled back like the lid on a sardine
can. The Cambridge Youth Soccer team I was transporting at the time thought
it was hilarious.
related
Sam Allis column in
the Boston Globe
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