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Your points in the Motherboard piece are all well-founded, the most salient of which, in my opinion (as a person who travels for work and therefore uses the tram roundtrip at least twice/month), is making the an airport voyage suck less. There is near constant pandemonium in the corridor at Jamaica Station as confused tourists attempt--with little and sometimes no help from the woefully underrepresented onsite MTA staff--to figure out how to exit. Crowding at busy times (which is most time these days) is frequently unsafe and leads to genuine panic among people who are jet-lagged, have limited English speaking proficiency, and typically ill-accustomed to public transportation in general, let alone one so fast-paced. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for airport workers to commute to work through that melee just so that the city can syphon an extra $8 off a relatively small number of people.

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Hi Aaron, I though you might be interested in Overhaul by Steven Rattner, who led the bailout of the auto industry. It is a very self-congratulatory book, but I thought it was interesting to see an outsiders view into the inefficiencies of each automaker as the gov't met with them. Your recommendation of The Reckoning [just ordered a copy] reminded me of having read this book years ago. Thank you for the recs!

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