Is the Tappan Zee Bridge a model of the economy?

Yes, it seems I've completely lost my mind. I'm actually asking if a bridge could be a model for our economy in recession. Before I begin to defend my sanity, let me say that the picture of the Tappan Zee Bridge to the right is copyright 1995-2008 Tappan Zee Bridge/I-287 Environmental Review and I got it from their site at http://www.tzbsite.com. I'm sure they meant that the copyright extends to this year, too. They just haven't gotten around to it.

Anyway, back to the defense of my sanity: What I'm actually thinking about is a trip my family took a few years ago. We'd been to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving and were traveling back home on the week-end after Thanksgiving Day. Instead of going through New York City, we decided to take the "less traveled" route further north via the Tappan Zee Bridge but the traffic was terrible here, too. We were creeping along on the Tappan Zee Bridge and "creeping along" makes it sound like we were going faster than we were really going. Then we hear a siren behind us.

My first thought was that I hoped it wasn't an ambulance or a fire truck and I said a little prayer in case it was. Well, it was an ambulance and in contrast to what you usually hear about bad, selfish drivers, everyone did their best to pull to the right to let them pass. Lo and behold, room was made and the ambulance sped by. At that point, it seemed to me, everyone paused for a few seconds. Here we were all crammed together (even closer and slower than before) with this completely open lane to our left. I think we all assumed that everyone else was going to race into the now-open lane and just clog everything up again. But something magical happened.

Almost instantly the road just opened up. We just all found ourselves with plenty of room and we were all moving at a good speed. We weren't doing the speed limit but we were very close. I think (this was years ago) we may have been going about 40 - 50 miles per hour. And we weren't all crammed together. We made the rest of the crossing with no problem until we had to slow down for the tolls at the eastern side of the bridge. I'd never seen this before and I've never seen it since. Were we all being rewarded for being considerate of the ambulance? Most of the credit probably goes to the people who did pull into the open lane and moved on at a fast pace. I think too many problems are caused by people who hang in the left lane and then don't pass.

Anyway, I hope this is the sort of thing that is happening with our economy right now. We have been slowed down by a bunch of bad decisions or too many people trying to do the same thing. On the bridge, our being brought to a crawl is like our economy being hit hard by the failure of so many banks, companies and personal finances. We've all had to adjust our lives and compensate for the problems we find ourselves in. I think what our leaders have done, with the various bail-outs and stimulus packages, is form an open lane for us. It remains to be seen if the people with access to that lane will take the opportunity and make the best of it (to "run with the ball" so to speak) or just get in the lane and hang there blocking the people behind them. We'll see.