Brooklyn's Super Convenient but Mostly Illegal Private Bus Service

Over at TheAtlantic.com, Lisa Margonelli has a great profile of New York's dollar vans, that "willy-nilly aggregation of 350 licensed and 500 unlicensed privately-owned" vans that roam neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens where existing public bus lines fall short.

Sounds great. So what's illegal about it? Margonelli explains, in part: "In the late 1950s, cities took over the bankrupt transit lines and tried to make a go of them, retaining for themselves the monopoly on the right to provide service. In the early '60s the feds became involved in propping those systems up, but without much enthusiasm. Meanwhile, private transit were prevented from driving the streets even when they offered services different from the public transit agencies."