Imagine a Better 2026

A Diego Rivera-inspired image created by Paul Ross using AI. I don’t use AI to write these musings on cities and public transportation but I love this image created by my friend Paul using AI photo editing and image development tools.

If I sound angry at the leaders of my country in this piece, it is because I am.

If This Were Only a Bad Movie

How can it be, that 2026 is off to an even crazier start than 2025?

The current president’s attempt to whitewash the killing by an ICE officer of an innocent driver in Minnesota is right out of the playbook he used to seek to erase the shameful acts of his supporters at the Capitol on January 6th.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, the master of flooding the zone with terrible ideas and actions that will have a lasting impact on the world as we knew it, unleashes his private army to kill another innocent person. What if we could just freeze the frame and when we came back to this horror movie we are all living through, the darkness would have passed?

A freeze frame from Minnewaska State Park.

The times we are enduring make all the more meaningful the connections we have with family and friends and home. So in spite of the ongoing assault on democracy and human decency, and as I am now officially old and eligible for Medicare and the half-priced OMNY fare on New York’s trains and buses, in December it was time to check in with my nearest and dearest in New York.

Public art on the El platform, from the Number 2 train in El Bronx.

While the thought of returning to a cold winter from practically balmy Mexico City was difficult, I did it, spending 10 days in sub-zero New York.

Mexico-Tenochtitlan - 2nd Ave y 116th St, El Barrio.

New York like Mexico is a city best experienced on foot. And so there I was, trudging with my friend Paul from the E train in Jackson Heights to Elmhurst for Thai food and from the Number 2 train station at Bronx Park East, to Little Yemen in El Bronx.

Sweetness, Little Yemen, El Bronx.

On other days I walked across Central Park and the Upper West Side and up and down the hills of West Harlem and Washington Heights with my son.

The Central Park Reservoir at sunset.

It was cold but what is the point of being in New York if you don’t take in the sights and sounds and tastes of the City at its best?

Sleepy heads on the E Train in Queens.

And it is all within striking distance, thanks to the NYC subway and what will hopefully soon be faster New York City buses like the Metrobús bus rapid transit (BRT) I ride in Mexico City!

Fast, frequent and efficient Metrobús, CDMX.

New York is home, and as terrible as that fellow New Yorker temporarily occupying the White House is making things for too many of us, I will always return.

Let in Snow

There, I said it. It wasn’t just family and friends and the City that beaconed to me in the beautiful state of New York. Thanks, as always, to my lifelong friend Alan for getting me out on cross-country skis for the first time in decades. Alan, a lawyer who doubles as a guide par excellence to the Adirondacks, the Gunks, the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, insisted on this trip to beautiful Minnewaska State Park. As usual he was right.

An avowed hater of the cold and Winter enjoying beautiful Minnewaska State Park.

The repugnant policies and actions of the current U.S. president do not dim my hopes for better things in 2026. From Latin America to Greenland, may it be a year free of his small greedy hands. Imagine!

Imagine better things in 2026.

Yours in transit,

Joel

#nyc #newyork #mta #omny #brt #busrapidtransit #metrobús #harlem #elbarrio #uws #upperwestside #centralpark #washingtonheights #elmhurst #queens #elbronx #mexicocity #cdmx #medicare #minnewaskastatepark #gunks #adirondacks #berkshires #hudsonvalley #imagine