There have been mornings when there was so much traffic, people couldn't even get out of their garages. Cook doesn't need radio traffic reports. I don't even drive to work, but when I look down and see traffic backing up across the bridge because of some problem in the Bronx, I know my bus ride is going to be pretty horrible. Cook thinks the neighborhood has all the benefits of being a close-in New York suburb. Jack Alter knows that to appreciate the problem, you need only follow the road across the water.
Traffic stops, and then starts backing up.
Eventually the backup reaches Fort Lee and it starts stretching off the highway and out into the streets, and nothing moves. Alter has nothing against the poor schlub whose fan belt snapped at the exit to, say, the Bronx River Parkway, which caused traffic jams back on Center Avenue and Linwood Avenue in the Bridge Plaza neighborhood. His quarrel is with New York authorities who, he says, refuse to automatically assign police to deal with traffic control on the Cross Bronx, but instead leave it to the tow truck driver who responds to the scene. Alter has been trying to get a meeting of his police and the cops from New York and the Port Authority. It hasn't happened yet.