The Access-A-Ride program, which serves New Yorkers who can't use subways and buses, has been eating up an increasingly large chunk of the MTA budget. A new pilot program announced today could help bend this curve. Graph: Office of the State Comptroller

In a bid to cut costs and improve transit service for New Yorkers with disabilities, the MTA and the Taxi and Limousine Commission will pilot a program to have yellow cabs provide Access-A-Ride service. The program could benefit everyone who rides subways and buses too — if it proves effective at curbing the cost of Access-A-Ride, the federally-mandated service which has been eating up an increasingly large portion of the MTA’s budget and putting strain on other aspects of the transit system.

About 75 percent of Access-A-Ride customers don't need to travel in lift-equipped vans, according to the MTA. Photo: bitchcakesny/Flickr

Instead of scheduling Access-A-Ride vehicles to pick them up and drop them off, the 400 customers in the pilot will be able to go out, hail a cab, and pay the equivalent of a subway fare using a pre-paid debit card. The participating customers don’t need wheelchair lift-equipped Access-A-Ride vans (about 75 percent of Access-a-Ride customers can travel without them), and pick-ups and drop-offs will be limited to Manhattan below 96th Street, where yellow cabs are fairly ubiquitous.

After the first 90 days, the MTA will evaluate whether to continue the pilot and expand it to more customers. If successful, future expansions of the program could incorporate livery cars and black cars, to reach areas of the city where taxis are less available.

The MTA estimates that the taxi program will save $35 per trip, and over the course of one year the 400-passenger pilot could save in the range of $2 million. The total cost of the Access-A-Ride program is now about $450 million annually, and citywide about 150,000 people are enrolled in it.

Question: What are the biggest misconceptions people have about a writer’s life? 

Walter Mosley: The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it.  That, you know, that a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas; that they don’t understand really, not how isolated the life of that person is because the life of that person is dependent on who they are, but the literary life of that person.  How hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books.  How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they’re reading when they’re talking to you about their books.  The idea is... and a lot of people who think about writers actually think about reading.  They’ll say, you know, they’ll think about the great novels, this oh, you must have read you know, Albert Camus and Virginia Wolff and Shakespeare, when really you know, the books that made you become a writer was "Tom Swift" and the "Hardy Boys" and "Nancy Drew."  That the love of writing comes at a very early age, you know, like for me for instance, comic books so affected me.  And you know, a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast.  They say, “'The Fantastic Four?'  That’s not literature.”  I say, “Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old.”  This was literature.  This was telling me what life was about.  This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.  And you know.  

I think that that’s a big, you know.  I always tell people, well you know, if a young girl read "Beloved" as her first novel, she’d have to kill either herself or her mother, you know, because in "Beloved" you have a mother killing their children.  This is not something a child would accept very easily. You know, and would never understand.  And so "Nancy Drew" is much more suited for a eight-, nine- or 10-year-old girl.

Question: Why do some people disregard popular forms of writing as being less worthy of attention than what we’ve dubbed “the classics”? 

Walter Mosley: Now the interesting question about people going to the classics when they think about books is that because people don’t understand what the classics are.  Like for instance, William Shakespeare was a popular writer, he was a writer who wrote for everybody, you know from the lowest drunk down in the pit to the kind and the queen sitting up in the high seats.  

Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, you know, Victor Hugo.  I mean all of these people, they’re popular writers.  They’re writing to the broadest range of people.  Later on, those writings became codified and boy, this is great literature.  Well, yeah, it’s great literature, but it was popular literature when it was written.  And that’s almost all of literature that survives starting from Homer.  You know?  It’s the adventure.  It’s the story, it’s the fight, it’s people falling in love, it’s people with deep you know, personality disorders who succeed anyway, you know, beyond themselves.  That’s what great literature is.  

And the problem is, is that once we have made it, we call it great literature, we look at it in a different way.  So when that literature exists today, you know all great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.  

So you know, it’s just a problem.  The thing is, writers have to remember that.  Writers have to remember it.  This is my job.  My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world. 

Recorded November 10, 2010
Interviewed by Andrew Dermont

Reading development over the lifespan! Now that's what I call a protective factor!

Sage Maths is free open source software for doing virtually every type of maths you can imagine. Not just numerical maths, but symbolic maths too - you can give Sage an equation and it will tell you what the equation of its integral or differential is, for example. And it will do numerical maths, plot graphs, analyze statistical information and solve equations or sets of equations. In fact, it will do virtually anything mathematical you can think of.

Sage was developed as an open source alternative to commercial systems like Mathematica and Matlab (it has most but not all of the functionality of both) because mathematicians and scientists need to be able to understand and review the algorithms their software uses - something not possible with a closed system.

Originally developed for graduate mathematicians, Sage is now at the stage where it is useful and interesting to professional and hobbyist mechanical and electronic engineers, amateur astronomers, business number crunchers, and people who just want to know more maths than they do. It runs on Linux, Windows and OS X, and lately people have managed to run it on both Apple iThings and Android smartphones.

Fantastic!

5 Books is a lovely thing! www.fivebooks.com

The Roman philosopher Cicero postulated, Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others. With Thanksgiving behind us,

Here's a curious press release from NASA:

NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.