How do you deal with maintenance downtime?

You know your no-toll escape route from NYC don’t work anymore?

 

cmon now you didn’t want to sit there in a hotel for 5 weeks. That would been ridiculous

 

Downtime on the road and in a big city? Bicycle and exploration time. We get some breakdown pay and the company tries to get us rolling?

Write the truck up for an issue at the home terminal? Sit at home and contemplate a job hop if it takes longer than a week. It's a semi-tractor, not an F-15 undergoing turbofan overhaul!!!!

 

Not really worth it IMO but back in the day you could take the 59th St. Queensboro Bridge off of Queens Blvd or somewhere in Long Island City and cross into Manhattan. Make the left onto 3rd Avenue, go down two blocks to E. 57th St and make the left over to 2nd Ave. Make the left up 2nd Avenue and run that all the way up over the bridge into the Bronx and there's an on ramp to I-87 north back up to I-95 and out the GWB. From the west side you can also run all the way up 10th Avenue to 179th St and make the left on to the GWB. Trucks leaving the Javitz center usually do that.

Not really worth it just to dodge one of the toll bridges to get off Long Island (Throggs Neck or Whitestone or I guess even the Verazano into Staten Island ), but I did it a couple times 10 years ago coming back over to NJ late in the evening from JFK. Now recently they actually toll Manhattan below 60th St. to discourage traffic from coming in there so I don't think that works anymore. Technically 53 footers aren't allowed in the city either, or at least they didn't used to be, but late in the evening or middle of the night was the only time you'd attempt such a ridiculous escape route and nobody was enforcing that.

There's toll free ways across Chicago too if you're really in the mood to be punished.