Road rambling

Driving back at dawn from Saratoga Springs to New York City after dropping my daughter C off at Skidless, I was musing on the sweet magic of a million drivers—all strangers to me and to one another—in a miracle of synchrony moving in smooth concert through the vast network of on ramps and off ramps and toll booths and crosswalks and all the rest, like a wonderful wordless dance. And suddenly I was roused from my revery at the Clarkson Street exit of the West Side Highway by a cop rapping on my window. Ticketed for "blocking the box": $115.

I know many rural and suburban people are astonished by the sheer bigness of New York, but as a longtime New Yorker I am continually stunned by the bigness of places like Saratoga Springs—huge houses surrounded by immense lawns, vast shopping malls amid enormous car-gobbling parking lots, automobiles the size of school buses. New York seems very human-scale by comparison. And much as I long to explore the world outside of New York, I'm always kind of grateful to return home to my humble little apartment on my funky potholed street—and get the damn car back to the rental office.

Speaking of which, doesn't it seem kind of unfair that when you rent a car you have to decide upfront whether to take the $30 bring-it-back-empty option or the $8-per-gal bring-it-back-with-a-mostly-full-tank option? It reduces a car rental to gambling. Why can't you just bring it back with whatever's in the tank and pay market value for the gas needed to top it off for the next customer? Why turn it into a punish-the-bad-guesser game?