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There would seem to be little chance of that bicycle smuggler succeeding at his game in midtown Manhattan. A motorist encountering the Manhattan Traffic Task Force (MTTF) somewhere such as at the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel at 11th Avenue and West 40th Street might even get his shoes questioned. Diversionary Tactics ‘R’ Not Us. At the very least, he’ll come away with a new outlook on the heavy vehicles moving back and forth every day through Bloombergville. Not all his discoveries will be uplifting. He might, for instance, come to the conclusion that he is better off approaching a New York tunnel behind anything but a truck. Another likely finding would be that any truck driver out on the road without every T crossed and every I dotted is begging for trouble. Then there’s this scary thought: There are so many potentially dangerous trucks, trailers and vans chugging around that he might be better off reaching New Jersey from New York by flying from LaGuardia to Newark Airport.
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“Take what we call a level-one inspection,” says Police Officer Chris Hetman of the Motor Carrier Safety Unit based at West 30th Street. “That’s the simplest. We see something we don’t like in a truck, we wave it over to the curb. There’s nothing really glaring, but you’re a little uneasy. For example, a truck that doesn’t have the full address of the owner and a DOT number on the cab door. That’s a violation and should be looked at. Maybe that’s the only thing you find, but by the time you give the truck the once-over and have gone through all the papers the driver’s carrying, you could still have shot the better part of an hour checking it out.” Nobody denies that a tour could pass by pretty uneventfully with level-one stops. “The fact of the matter is you can always find some kind of violation. Just take the city Sanitation Department trucks. Are they really in adherence to the regulation about how high off the ground the license plate has to be? I don’t think so.” But to hear Hetman and other members of his unit, no tour will ever be a dance through the level-one inspections because of the overwhelming number of much graver violations to be found. “Sure, you want to make sure everybody’s following the rules,” the 31-year-old Canarsie native says, “but we have just so many people on patrol and when you’re up to your neck with really serious threats, some people slide through.” The good news is that the “serious threats” he’s referring to have nothing to do with terrorist bombs, nuclear waste or the other frequently cited ingredients for a metropolitan catastrophe. The bad news is that the “serious threats” he’s referring to have nothing to do with terrorist bombs, nuclear waste, or the other frequently cited ingredients for a metropolitan catastrophe. As Chad Rubenstrunk puts it: “What do you want to hear? You’ve got people driving rigs in this city who shouldn’t be driving bumper cars in Coney Island. And some of those bumper cars are in better condition than the trucks. You want to see front axles about to fall off? Do our job. How about vise grips on brakes that stopped gripping anything a year ago? Do our job. You stop a U-Haul trailer and you open the back and you find 55 gallons of gasoline in the back! What’s this about, you ask the guy. Oh, nothing, he says. My truck broke down so I just got a U-Haul and transferred it all here. Good thinking, my man. What else can you say while grabbing for your book?” |
There's the old joke about the guy who crosses the
Canadian border on a bike every week with bulging saddlebags.
A customs officer knows he’s smuggling in something, but no
matter how thoroughly the saddlebags are searched, contraband
is never found. Some years later, after the customs guard has
retired, he runs into the traveler in a bar and over a couple of
beers asks the guy to level with him. “We know you were
smuggling something, but what exactly was it?” he asks. The
guy shrugs that it should have been obvious. “Bicycles,” he says.