The UN comes to town

What you're seeing in this picture is the tail end of a police escort for some unknown dignitary.

Any time the UN is in session, those of us who live here get to experience this fun side of the city, if you consider detours and gridlock and HONK HONKhonkhonkHOOOONK fun.

There are certain streets that are designated as thoroughfares for the dignitaries, such as 57th pictured here. You can see that they've taken the inner most lane east bound and inner most lane west bound and coned it all off as a corridor of travel. The only problem is 57th is also a major crosstown street (buses, taxies, stupid heads who drive to work every day all want to get crosstown using the few designated major crosstown streets since it's supposed to be faster).

So the city adds traffic cops at every intersection to tell people when to stop (nobody pays attention to the signs saying "don't block the box"). This means a lot of extra traffic weaving its way through the other east/west streets. And since THOSE intersections don't have traffic cops, gridlock is as common as pigeon poop and just as lovely, too.

Oh, and if you're wondering, the bus I take from the spot that picture was taken from was so late I ended up taking the bus that goes south on west end instead of north, which means an extra 10 block (half mile) walk for mrs-7-months-preggers-exhausted-from-a-long-frustrating-day.