Sharing Our Special Spooky Transportation Report

🐦 Hitchcock had The Birds. Edgar Allan Poe had a raven. Dracula had a taste for blood. This October, transportation news supplied its own unsettling variations.

Live birds concealed in passengers’ clothing. Blood-feeding bed bugs aboard a long-haul flight. A cruise booked for the Bahamas that headed toward Canada instead. And a late-night drive near Sleepy Hollow. 👻

The regular October BOMA NY and BOMA NJ Transportation Reports had already started trick-or-treating, but this news simply wouldn’t stay in the locked in crypt until November.

So, BOMA New York and BOMA New Jersey friends, gather round the campfire for our first Halloween Transportation Extra. 🎃

Knight Riding

Driving home from a BOMA event, with Sleepy Hollow nearby, I spotted a Knight Transportation truck. Perhaps it was the hour. Perhaps too much ’80s television. But for a moment, I watched for a ramp to lower and a familiar red scanner to glow.

I imagined a glowing Trans Am speeding along next to me. Was I dreaming when I saw it pull into the trailer and move onto its next mission?

Consider that your invitation to this month’s strange detour. Tell ’em KITT gave you a lift. 🚗👻

Familiar Faces in Unfamiliar Places

The cover tips its hat to Gary Larson’s The Far Side and Charles Addams’s delightfully macabre world. A plane full of monsters has its own ideas about who makes an unsettling seatmate.

Eight Stories That Escaped the Crypt

My imagination had competition from the actual news:

  • 🚽 When You Gotta Go, You Gotta Go: Six failed airplane lavatories turn JFK into an unscheduled rest stop.
  • 🐦 Fowl Play: Customs officers discover 21 live birds concealed on two travelers arriving in Miami.
  • 🛏️ Bed Bugs Take Flight: Reports of bites prompt Qantas to ground an aircraft for a deep clean.
  • 🛳️ Cruise Blues: Passengers pack for the Bahamas and get Halifax instead. Sit down in your Thinking Chair and consider the clues.
  • 🪨 Rock and Roll: NYC DOT finds a new home for Astoria’s Steinway Boulder.
  • 🕷️ Spider-Man Gets His Own Way: Forest Hills honors its friendly neighborhood superhero.
  • 👰 NJ Transit Says Yes to the Dress: Train crews reunite a bride with her missing wedding gown.
  • 🌳 Wrong Kind of Parking: Rescue crews free two occupants from a vehicle lodged in a tree off Interstate 78.

Each story includes a link to its source. In the spirit of the occasion, the graves they rose from are noted. 🪦

And, of course, there’s Harrison Ford.

Read the Halloween Extra

📖 [Read or download the Halloween Transportation Report](PDF LINK)

Five pages of strange journeys, cartoons, and a little nostalgia. No transportation-policy homework required.

Some Unwanted Passengers Are Our Business

Bed bugs and pest birds supply material for this edition, but managing them is part of Bell Environmental’s everyday work.

Our bed bug services including canine detection and treatment and bird control services help commercial properties address pest problems that affect travelers, employees, and visitors.

We can’t, however, help anyone who insists on smuggling birds in their pants. That’s a matter for Customs.

Contact Bell Environmental Services for help with bed bugs and commercial pest problems in the New York metropolitan area.

🎃 Happy Halloween! 🚧 Regularly scheduled transportation problems return in November.