Uber is for the weak

Young people aboard the LaGuardia Link.

  

      "We're the oldest people on this bus by 30 years," I said, then gave a second look around anD revised. "Maybe 40 years."

     It was true. Everyone else on the LaGuardia Link Q70 seemed in their mid-20s. A time when money tends to be tight.
     Money isn't tight for me; I can afford ride shares and taxis. But I can also do math. And spending $111 on an Uber from LaGuardia to Jersey City, a trip that would take about an hour with traffic, didn't make sense. Not when you can make the same trip for $7.75 — the free shuttle from the airport to 75th Street, the $2.50 subway down to the World Trade Center, and then five bucks or so — I didn't take notice if the exact price — for the PATH train under the Hudson to Exchange Place.
      Sure, it took closer to two hours, with the pause at the Oculus Starbucks so my wife could grab a revivifying cappuccino .But we weren't exactly in a rush.
      I've always enjoy taking public transportation. I spent weeks in cities from Tokyo to Paris and never gotten in a cab. Sometimes it's a challenge —  last year I was offended that there was no direct public transportation route from Boston to Boxborough, so cobbled a complex public transit odyssey together. It was almost an adventure. Even when publications are paying. I don't have many rules when traveling, but I seldom take a cab when a bus works, or a plane when there's a train going the same place. 

     I remember going to cover the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. I checked into my motel — nothing fancy here at the old Sun-Times — and then got in the queue for the bus, smiling quietly to myself, thinking about a colleague who ran up nearly a grand in taxi bills, supposedly, in London and almost lost his job over it. 

     "You'll just have to find another reason to fire me," I thought, paying my fare. Plus there was a captive audience of talkative Clevelanders waiting for me there.