When, at the eleventh hour* the MTA sends out a singularly ill-informed spokesbot to sullenly inform the city that the Authority's "fair offer on the negotiating table", if you live in Brooklyn you can pretty much give up hope that you won't be looking to hitch a ride into Manhattan come the cold, cold dawn.

Under orders as I am to report in if possible, I'm expecting to learn first-hand just exactly what kind of traffic-snarl hell the various inbound arteries will become.

If it were even ten degrees warmer outside, I'd be very seriously considering walking. It's only 6-7 miles as the crow flies, I think. But I'm not a crow, and that'd mean leaving pretty damn early. I may walk home, though. I walked home during the blackout, but we lived a mile closer to the Manhattan bridge and it was a nice day in summer. The bike is currently nonfunctional, so it's not an option, which is too bad. It would be a chilly ride, but doable.

I do live close enough to one of the designated carpool pickup points, so that's my destination in the morning. Before I get to bed, I will note this: after a certain horrific event about four years ago, the city and its complex transit system got back to functioning almost immediately. The leadership looked for solutions and recognized that for a metropolis as big as this, the price of paralysis is overwhelming. I don't know who is right -- or more wrong -- in the dispute between the MTA and the Transport Workers Union. My sympathies in general are with the workers, but there's a lot I don't know about what the various turns in the negotiations have been, so I try to keep an open mind.

But: the political appointees of the MTA answer directly to no one who lives in the city. And they've shown an appalling disconnection from their responsibilities here that is reminiscent -- albeit on a smaller scale, and with different inflections -- of certain governmental responses to recent natural events. Worse, the governor -- who should answer to the voters, but whose base is not chiefly among the multihued straphangers of Gotham -- has been a distinctly ghostly figure during this crisis.

And the Mayor, who at least enjoys a bully pulpit if not actual power over the Transit Authority, has done nothing but deliver finger-wagging about lawbreakers, reminding us that the constitutionally questionable Taylor Law forbids strikes by state employees.

The TWU may be righteous in their grievances, or they may be overreaching and hubristic. But those in management -- and those elected to manage the managers -- have given riders no reason to believe they've done what they could to put the brakes on this runaway train. Forgive the idiot metaphor -- I'm off to bed.

*actually the second iteration of the eleventh hour, but who's counting?