Does anyone care how long people stay in prison? That’s what Carol Shapiro wants to know.

In 2017, the longtime criminal justice reform advocate was appointed to New York state’s Board of Parole, which decides whether people who’ve served their minimum prison sentences should be released. She was eager to join the board because she wanted to reconfigure the gears of its “conveyor belt justice” — her term for the rapid, impersonal churn of cases in which a person’s freedom can be decided in mere minutes.

Shapiro ultimately found the task impossible. The ideology behind the board’s decision-making was too entrenched for one person to change. She left in 2019.

When the Covid-19 pandemic introduced “social distancing” to Americans’ vocabulary, many people took it as a cue to ditch public transit in favor of personal cars. New Yorkers were no exception, taking the wheel in large numbers and leaving the Metropolitan Transit Authority, North America’s biggest public transit network, starved for riders.

New York’s distancing guidelines are now far in the rearview mirror, but traffic on the roads has not subsided. People are driving a lot more than they were five years ago in every large metropolitan area in the state, including New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, Syracuse, and Poughkeepsie, according to a new report from the transportation data firm StreetLight. And those drivers are moving more slowly than they used to, as road congestion has gone up.