 |
| 1905 Commodius Observation Automobile, Brooklyn. |
Sign a petition to keep tour guides live here.
It’s an old saying that New York is a great city - at least whenever they finish building it. The meat and mind is constantly torn down and stacked up. The town requires a skilled double-decker bus tour guide to point out its change of costume to out-of-towners. But the double-decker bus tour guide is the next target of the swift swung wrecking ball.
All New Yorkers act like tour guides – love to talk and hate to listen, full of pointless folksy facts, and enamored of giving directions to places they don’t know where it is. In secret, all think what it would be like to give tours on those red double-decker buses. Anyone can walk around and talk, but only a certain character of mind and habitude will schpiel for three hours at full speed up top the bus, wherefrom the city is best seen. And for it earn a wage and maybe tips to split with the driver.
But money talks, more than tour guides. The "Headset Bill" was passed in 2010 in defense against noise pollution created by yammering tour guides passing through the 6th most expensive zip code in the country, where Village residents made enough noise in the ears of the City Council to get the law passed through. The bill provides no job security, and the bus tour company seeks to eat the headset cost by replacing its live guides with robot audio recordings. The tour guides are left talking to themselves about how to find a new job.
Check the coverage by Channel 11 WPIX and The Daily News.
What the Headset Bill forgets, is that the city loves to listen to itself being talked about, and is obsessed with the industry of sightseeing because the city even more loves to be looked at. The majority of tourists don’t want to walk, and so purchase double-decker bus tickets but have no idea how to get around the high city outlands to which they are called to hop-on/hop-off. They need directions and entertainment. They need a tour guide.
While the extinction of the horse & carriage rides in Central Park is to be lamented, these buggies don’t drop people at Macy’s. Tour guides might have been loud on Greenwich Avenue, but outside the Plaza Hotel, where a $48 million condo sold this year, it smells like the elephant tent at Barnum & Bailey circus.
Sign a petition to keep tour guides live here.
