by Lewis, Dan
Bolian smashed that time.
His attempt in 2013 began a year and a half earlier with the purchase of a Mercedes CL55 AMG. As Jalopnik reported, the car was a good starting point but needed work to make a clearly illegal road trip in record time. First, Bolian added two twenty-two-gallon gas tanks, nearly tripling the car’s standard capacity, and a pair of GPS units to make sure he knew where he was at all times. (If one failed, he had a backup.) Most of the work was done to avoid the authorities. The car had multiple iPhone and iPad chargers, allowing for the use of speed trap-dodging apps; a pair of laser jammers (the radar jammer he ordered wasn’t finished in time), a kill switch for the rear lights, and three radar detectors. He also added a CB radio so he could ask trucks to slow down in order to pass them—masquerading, via radio, as a trucker himself.
He didn’t make the trip alone, of course. He had a codriver, whom he recruited only a few weeks before the run, and a spotter in the back seat—his job was to watch for cops and calculate fuel needs—who joined the team just days before the record-breaking attempt. On October 19, 2013, the trio left Manhattan . . .
. . . and promptly got stuck in traffic. It took fifteen minutes to get off the island.
Nevertheless, it was basically smooth sailing from there on out. Over the next twenty-eight hours and change, the trio sped their way to the greater Los Angeles area, averaging—averaging!—ninety-eight miles per hour the entire time. Yes, that includes gas and bathroom breaks.
BONUS FACT
In 2011, a pair of New Yorkers made another notable trans-America trip—a slow one, taking six days and costing them thousands of dollars. As the Daily Mail reported, two guys hailed a taxi outside of New York City’s LaGuardia Airport and negotiated a deal with the cab driver to drive them all the way to L.A. at the discounted rate of $5,000. (By mileage, the fare should have been at least twice that.) Why? One of the two passengers was the son of a former cabbie and wanted to show his dad that you could, in fact, hail a taxi to take you to California—he figured actually making the trip was the best proof.
LIFE IN THE FAST LANE
WHY RICH PEOPLE SHOULDN’T SPEED IN FINLAND
Speeding may earn you a ticket. In most cases, it will cost you maybe $150 in America or 100 Euros in Europe. For many people, that could be the difference between making this month’s rent and being in arrears. For others, it’s barely noticeable.
So Finland tried to fix it. Which is why, in 2001, Finland fined Anssi Vanjoki, a high-paid Nokia executive, more than $100,000 for driving seventy-five kilometers per hour (forty-seven miles per hour) in a fifty-kph (thirty-one-mph) zone.
In 1921, Finland adopted a “day-fine” law, which aimed to apply the ecumenical effect of incarceration to petty violations such as littering and minor traffic violations. Finland noted that jail time hit the rich and poor roughly equally; for each day in prison, the convict lost a day of freedom, whether rich or poor. Fines, the government concluded, should follow a similar framework. Since that year, those infractions can cost a violator a whole day’s pay—be it fifty Euros or 50,000 Euros. And unlike other countries with day-fine laws, Finland has no maximum fine amounts.
As reported by the BBC, for Vanjoki, this meant a bill of 116,000 Euros (at the time, about $103,000). In October 2001, he was riding his motorcycle fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit and, when caught, was given a fine equal to fourteen days of his annual income, which is how the day-fine system should work. But Vanjoki’s case had an odd wrinkle—it was based on his income for the 1999 filing year, which was much higher than typical. Vanjoki appealed the fine, arguing that in 1999 he sold a number of stock options, boosting his income tremendously. By 2001 he was making significantly less money because his equity stake in Nokia was worth much less. The courts agreed with him and cut his fine by 95 percent.
While the day-fine system seems more fair than the typical flat-fine system most of the world uses, it has found its critics. England and Wales tried it in the early 1990s, but it was generally disliked due to the difference between fines. (The BBC noted one example of two men ticketed for fighting each other; the fine levied on the richer of the two was ten times that of the poorer.) In 2002, American economist Steven Landsburgh took to the Wall Street Journal to assail the scheme by pointing out an absurd result: “If Mr. Vanjoki speeds while his chauffeur rides in the passenger seat, the price is $100,000. If they switch seats, the price drops to $50.”
BONUS FACT
Another Finnish innovation? The dish-draining closet. These are cupboards situated above the kitchen sink with a hole at the bottom. They’re designed to allow people to place recently washed dishes right back into the cabinet without drying them first. The dishwater then drips down, slowly, into the sink below. Invented in the mid-1940s, the dish-draining closet was named “one of the most important Finnish innovations of the millennium,” according to Wikipedia.
TO COLLECT AND SERVE
THE SMALL TOWN RUNNING A FULL-TIME SCAM
In 1947, the inhabitants of a three-block residential area in Ohio decided to incorporate as a municipality called the village of New Rome. By the year 2000, the village had grown—but only slightly. It encompassed two-hundredths of a square mile, and per the census that year was home to sixty people. Nevertheless, fourteen of the sixty were police officers who patrolled the area and its one main road—and the village leaders apparently wanted even more officers. The reason? The New Rome speed trap, a notorious feature of Ohio travel, and a lucrative one for the tiny village.
West Broad Street, a relatively busy roadway, runs through the area. Decades ago, it was the main road coming out of the state capital of Columbus, five or ten miles away, before I-70 was built in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Nevertheless, it still has a steady flow of traffic—one that New Rome treated like a honey pot. The posted speed limit on West Broad is forty-five miles per hour, but until 2003, the tiny section that ran through New Rome had a lower speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour. The well-staffed New Rome police force watched the area nearly around the clock with ticket books at the ready, waiting for the inevitable speeding violations caused by the sudden drop-off.
The program was quite lucrative. In an average year, New Rome brought in $400,000 in gross revenue through traffic tickets. But the volume of the tickets issued wasn’t the only reason why the village made so much money—zealous (overzealous, likely) enforcement was also a key element. Almost all the ticketed drivers lived outside of New Rome, but that didn’t stop the small village from taking extreme measures to enforce the tickets. As Car and Driver reported, “Once stopped, drivers [were] routinely asked where they work. Fail to pay the fine on time, and a New Rome cop or two may appear at your work place the day after, handcuff you in front of the boss, and haul you off for payment discussions.”
A $90 fine for speeding wasn’t the only thing drivers were typically faced with. If you were pulled over in New Rome, there was a good chance that you’d find yourself on the wrong end of a laundry list of fines. Have tinted windows? Tack on another $105. No front license plate? $55 more. Make an unsafe lane change—and you can imagine how subjective that is—another $90. In total, you could be ticketed for more than a dozen various violations as officers conveniently found ways to run up the tab.
The good news for travelers along this route? The speed traps are gone. For that matter, so is the entire village of New Rome—but not because of the abusive traffic controls. In 1979, New Rome held an election for village council and never did so after that. The council members—almost all members of the same family—just kept re-appointing one another to vacant seats, arguing that the others in the municipality weren’t interested in running. Further, the state of Ohio noted, the village didn’t actually provide many (if any) meaningful services to the public. Most were provided at the township, county, or state level. Based on these factors, the state forcibly dissolved the village (over the protests of many of New Rome’s residents) and mandated that it be ab
sorbed into the surrounding township.
BONUS FACT
In 2010, the Supreme Court of Ohio decided that police officers do not need to use radar guns to determine if you’ve been speeding—they just need experience. According to a report by ABC News, the court ruled that “a police officer’s unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed is sufficient evidence to support a conviction for speeding . . . if the officer is properly trained.” Soon thereafter the state legislature passed a law requiring the use of actual speed detection devices.
HOLY TOLEDO
WHEN OHIO AND MICHIGAN ALMOST WENT TO WAR
Ask any college football fan about rivalries, and the long-standing friendly (okay, not so friendly) “hatred” between Michigan and Ohio State will undeniably make their list. The annual matchup, once ranked by ESPN as the top rivalry in sports, dates back to 1897 with more than 100 gridiron battles since.
But Michigan and Ohio once went to war—real war, with militias, and perhaps even bayonets and horses.
Ohio became a state in 1803. Two years later, the U.S. government formed the Michigan Territory, a pre-statehood area encompassing the modern states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and parts of North and South Dakota. However, map-making at the time wasn’t all that great. Maps were often best guesses as to the true geography and topography of the area, and when reality struck in late 1834 or early 1835, it turned out to be different from what the maps suggested. A nearly 500-square-mile strip of land between Michigan and Ohio, dubbed the “Toledo Strip” after the major city in the area, was suddenly in dispute. Both sides wanted the land, particularly because it was clear that the location of Toledo was perfect for a port city, and therefore, an economic boon awaited the ultimate owner.
In April 1835, President Andrew Jackson tried to stave off the conflict. Unfortunately, he, too, was conflicted. He asked his attorney general to investigate whether Michigan’s or Ohio’s claim was legally correct, but quickly realized that Ohio—like now—was a “swing state” in the presidential election. He decided that it’d be best to appease Ohioans and give them the Strip, hoping to entice them to vote for the Democratic candidate in the 1836 election. However, Jackson’s attorney general reported back with contrary findings, concluding that Michigan’s claim would carry the day. Jackson decided to try and pull an end-around, asking to re-survey the line (with the expectation that the new survey would put the Strip in Ohio). Michigan, flatly, said no.
Unable to settle the issue amicably, the two sides raised militias and occupied the area—the Michigan forces on one side of a key river, and Ohio’s on the other. Thankfully, few shots were fired, most of them warning shots aimed at the sky. The only bloodshed in the entire months-long skirmish occurred on July 15, 1835, when Joseph Wood, a Michigan sheriff, went into Toledo to arrest Benjamin Stickney, an Ohioan major, for trespassing on Michigan soil. One of Stickney’s sons (named Two—really) stabbed Wood with a penknife; the wound was not fatal.
With hostilities boiling and on the brink of eruption, Jackson tried again to resolve the conflict. In June 1836, he signed an act that would allow the Michigan territory to become a state, under the condition that it ceded any claim to the Toledo Strip to Ohio. (As part of the deal, Michigan would get most of what is now known as the Upper Peninsula.) Michigan again refused, and it seemed an escalation of the war was likely. Ohio had authorized $300,000 to raise its militia; Michigan one-upped Ohio by authorizing $315,000 for similar efforts.
This last action ended the “war”—not because Michigan now had the better militia, but because it had more debt. At the close of 1836 the Michigan territory was teetering on bankruptcy and, not being a state, was not eligible for a 5 percent commission on the sale of federal lands, which would have netted Michigan roughly half a million dollars. The federal government was running a budgetary surplus at the time, and $400,000 was to be distributed to the states—but Michigan wasn’t one yet.
On December 14, 1836, Michigan accepted Jackson’s terms. In January, it became the twenty-sixth state in the Union. A month earlier, in the presidential election, Martin Van Buren, a Democrat (like Andrew Jackson), won—but not because of Andrew Jackson’s efforts in Ohio. Ohio’s electoral delegates voted for William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate.
BONUS FACT
While Martin Van Buren won the presidency, his running mate, Richard Mentor Johnson, failed to win the vice presidential election outright. That year, there were 294 available votes in the Electoral College; to win, a candidate needed 148 or more. Van Buren received 170 and won the presidency without controversy. But the twenty-three electors from Virginia who voted for Van Buren refused to also cast their ballots for Johnson. Johnson received only 147 votes, and fell one shy of the 148 needed. As required by the Constitution, the election then went to the U.S. Senate, which ended up electing Johnson anyway.
THE WAR OF MARBLE HILL
“THE AMERICAN SUDETENLAND”
When many people think of New York City, they focus on the borough of Manhattan, the island that features the Empire State Building, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal, and other things nonresidents know about. There are four other boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx—but to get from any of those to Manhattan, you have to take a bridge or tunnel, with the rare exception of a neighborhood called Marble Hill. It’s not part of Manhattan Island—rather, it is connected to the Bronx. But if you’re voting or called for jury duty, you do so as a Manhattan resident.
Its history gives us a brief glimpse into America’s early attitude toward Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Manhattan is separated from the Bronx by the Harlem River, which connects the Hudson River to the East River. In 1890, a section of the Harlem River that was a few thousand yards from the Hudson was very narrow, and seafaring vessels had difficulty in navigating it. The Army Corps of Engineers decided to reroute the Harlem River, creating a wider passageway south. In doing so, it cut off a piece of Manhattan—Marble Hill—turning it into an island. When the county of the Bronx was created by the state on January 1, 1914, Marble Hill—still an island—was officially included as part of Manhattan. Unfortunately for mapmakers everywhere, the old path of the Harlem River fell into disuse and was filled in sometime during that same year. Marble Hill was, from that point on, a neighborhood in Manhattan that was paradoxically attached to the Bronx but not to Manhattan itself.
For more than two decades, no one seemed bothered by this. However, in 1939, Bronx borough president James F. Lyons tried to capitalize on this curiosity and turn it into some publicity for himself. He went to the neighborhood—“unarmed and escorted only by his chauffeur,” in the words of the New York Times—and climbed to the summit of a rocky hill, where he planted the flag of Bronx County. Symbolically, he was claiming the neighborhood for his borough. While residents of Marble Hill jeered him, Lyons was unperturbed, comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln and noting that some disliked Honest Abe for freeing the slaves.
The news media ate it up, just as Lyons had hoped. The Times article featured a picture of him, grinning widely, holding the Bronx County flag on a rock atop the hill, his chauffeur-assistant standing stoically next to him. Everyone seemed to appreciate the joke, but the Times, for some reason, did not carry Lyons’s self-comparison to Abe Lincoln. Instead, they saw a different person in Lyons, one who doesn’t seem so funny to modern ears: Adolf Hitler.
The Times casually referred to him as “the Bronx Fuehrer” multiple times in its coverage of his “bloodless coup” the next day. Further, the Times called Marble Hill the Bronx’s “Sudetenland,” a reference to the section of Czechoslovakia that the Nazis had annexed a year prior. All of this was done tongue-in-cheek, of course, but apparently in the spring of 1939, it was perfectly okay for a major U.S. publication to jokingly liken an American politician to Adolf Hitler.
As for Marble Hill itself, the attempted annexation failed—it had no lasting impact on the geography of New York City. To this
day, the neighborhood remains a part of Manhattan, although residents go to schools in the Bronx and are serviced by Bronx-based emergency responders.
BONUS FACT
On the day of Lyons’s attempted annexation of Marble Hill, reporters thought that he had brought in reinforcements—there were four tanks sitting near the border between the neighborhood and the Bronx. It turns out that was a coincidence. An enterprising entrepreneur had bought fourteen surplus tanks from the government and was shipping them to South America to be used as tractors. Ten of the fourteen had already been shipped, but the other four were sitting there, unmanned and uninvolved, as Lyons and his driver invaded Marble Hill.
REVERSE CARTOGRAPHY
THE MAP THAT PREDATED THE TOWN
Travelers starting in the New York City area and making their way across New York State—perhaps to a resort in the Catskills or to Binghamton University—may stop at the Roscoe Diner. It sits on Route 17, one of the main thoroughfares between the city and points westward, and has a reputation extending for miles, in part because you can get some very good French toast there. Otherwise, you are in the middle of nowhere. Roscoe, the town (and it’s not really a town, but a “census designated place”), has only 900 or so residents. The nearby municipality of Agloe has even fewer: no one lives there.
But that’s because it only kind of exists.
If two companies make a map of the same area but do so independent of each other, the maps should have some identical data. Towns and roads and bodies of water need to be represented accurately or drivers and others using the maps to navigate their surroundings will certainly get lost. Sure, you can be creative when it comes to choice of colors, fonts, or line thickness, but the locations of things have to be right or the map won’t be very useful.