Ithaca Road Rage

I cannot count the number of times I have waited at a stoplight in Ithaca in the middle of the night, not a car in sight. And I always wonder why my hometown — with a smaller tax base than Ithaca — can afford sensors and pressure plates while this city cannot. My natural inclination is always to treat these as stop signs and go through them, but as you might have noticed, Ithaca is a police state; I have had five parking tickets since I came a year ago, had a cop follow me after giving up on parallel parking in a tight space and had another yell at me for being on a cell phone at a stoplight. (Maybe Ithaca police officers should be given Sudoku puzzles to keep them busy.) Depending on my mood, I either go through the lonely intersection at 2 a.m. or wait, but the fact remains that getting around in — and getting to — Ithaca is a pain. It seems that the only thing missing is for Cornell to have a moat around it.

Part of the problem is that Ithaca is a peculiar mix of urban and rural. We do not have a continuous, walkable urban landscape, but rather pockets of urban development surrounded by suburban (and rural) sprawl. Collegetown and the Ithaca Commons are pedestrian, but one needs transportation to get there. If one already lives in C-Town or on the Commons, a car is necessary for going to the grocery store unless one wants to drag 10 bags onto the bus. Parking at Cornell is nearly impossible, as is parking downtown.

The traffic lights do not help. Between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., Route-13 becomes a logjam. These are always frustrating, but it is even more frustrating that the lights are timed so that they alternate; you can only get through one at a time. I can only attribute it to divine intervention when a train passes by and all the lights turn green, unless I have to turn right or was traveling across 13.

Maybe the traffic is also why people in Ithaca have so many bumper stickers on their cars (pick your liberal cause); we spend a lot of time looking at the bumper of the car in front of us.

I have heard the apocryphal claim that Ithaca has the most restaurants per capita in the country. Anecdotally, one might say it also has the most potholes, bad roads and stop signs. Going down Stewart Avenue is like going on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland (and with all the hills, a boulder just might come at you).

It is true that many of us walk, bike or take the bus and that this is lauded as the “sustainable” solution to the traffic problem. But snowfall makes walking unpleasant and biking difficult and dangerous. Despite Ithaca’s preponderance of enviro-conscious denizens, the public transportation system here is in need of a boost. Long waits for the bus and long rides are common and the bus system all but shuts down past six, when it would be most useful to students studying late at school. Students’ schedules do not fit into the nine-to-five block that TCAT seems to have planned for.

Getting to or out of Ithaca is just as tough. Unless one wants to fly on one of Northwest’s tiny planes and pay steep prices, Syracuse or New York City are the nearest major airports. There are no airport shuttles to Ithaca from Syracuse and the few private limousine companies that make the trip charge exorbitant amounts, over $100 round-trip.

In getting to New York City, one gets what one pays for. Taking CoachUSA to New York ($81) will get you uncomfortably small seats, a bathroom that belongs at Woodstock — except that the water in the bus Port-o-Potty swishes back and forth — and a motley crew of passengers, which can make the five-to-six-hour ride more entertaining. On one trip I took, one of the passengers periodically trekked to the bathroom, after which the entire bus would fill with the smell of cigarette smoke. Sleeping is an option, unless the driver has decided to pop in a movie and play the audio over the loudspeaker. Last trip’s choice: United 93.

The Campus-to-Campus bus is the Queen Elizabeth of buses — Internet service, spacious seats, free snacks, pillows and blankets. But a round trip will cost you $150, half what an airline ticket home costs for me and almost double what a CoachUSA trip costs.

There are some things that cannot be helped, of course. Ithaca’s hilly terrain makes getting up to Cornell difficult and it is hard to do anything about the infrastructure of the existing roads. But to avoid ending on a carping, Lewis Black note, I would suggest that Cornell consider a cheaper alternative to the Campus-to-Campus bus and for someone at the City of Ithaca to rethink the stoplights.

Gabriel Arana is a graduate student in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at garana@cornellsun.com [1]. The Red Line appears Thursdays.