Koch tried, unsuccessfully, to toll the bridges. Ultimately he gave up. “Bridges don’t vote.” Yet every Mayor since Koch has failed to fund mass transit. Lindsay was Mayor when Gov. Rockefeller pried TBTA from Moses’ grubby fingers. That was congestion pricing that actually passed in Albany. The Lindsay and Rocky worked together to get it done and without the dedicated dollars from TBTA the system would have collapsed long ago.

Bloomberg couldn’t come up with city MTA capital funds and has accumulated a massive budget surplus further weakening his argument for congestion pricing. He has been politically ham-handed through the entire PlaNYC process while the media cluck-clucks bemoaning the “its politics” line. Ya think?

He has forced many horrible land use decisions on NYC (Home Depots every where you turn, IKEA) throughout most of his administration, only to discover in his lame duck years, land use environmentalism.

I think it is insane to extend the 7 line without connecting it to a waterborne transit node.They have a chance to link it to New Jersey and aren’t?? What on earth are they thinking??

Yes, it is insane. Unfortunately they really aren’t thinking very much at all. Every rail project in the region (with the possible exception of the Second Avenue Subway) is being shrunk back to the point where it’s hardly useful at all.

http://capntransit.blogspot.com/2007/10/access-denied-arc-nibbled-to-death.html

He made it look easy. As a lifelong citizen in this city there has been nothing to compare to what he has done . . . of course, he can always do a lot better.

The News article is a pretty good piece of analysis actually. I think the point is this: if you make relatively minor adjustments to the assumptions used in the Mayor’s congestion pricing plan, the net revenues raised by the system fluctuate significantly.

If the City has twin goals of raising revenues for transit and reducing traffic congestion, they had better have some pretty good forecasts of both. Otherwise we could end up investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a system that spends half of its revenues on operating the system and leaves transit with the scraps.

Estimating the upfront capital cost of implementing the Mayor’s plan is another story altogether. Because capital equipment and construction costs have escalated so rapidly during the past several years, states and cities (including New York) have been chronically underestimating the cost of major projects. (See, for example, the 7-Line Extension.)

I’m hoping the Mayor’s office has a simpler version of the congestion pricing system up its sleeve by the time the Commission starts asking questions about whether the costs are worth the benefits.

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/39609/

“Democratic donor and Hillary Clinton supporter John Catsimatidis has switched parties and vowed to spend more than $40 million of his own money to become the next mayor . . he’s also looking to buy an SUV: ‘You’re not a real candidate if you’re not in a Suburban.’”

I know it’s a joke, but still, it is sadly true.

It seems as though a great opportunity has been missed here from a technological standpoint. As much as I agree that the Taxi Cabs should follow through with their contractual agreements to install the GPS/media units, I feel as though this deal has been presented as having very little upside to the actual drivers.

It seems as though a relatively technologically simple concept of utilizing the cab’s GPS units and customers’ GPS-enabled mobile phones could provide a serious environmental/economic solution to cab drivers’ endless circling for customers and customers’ frustration about not finding a taxi.

1) Enable customers to send out a taxi “beacon” from GPS-enabled cell phones, which deposits $2.50 that is transferred to the driver upon arrival.
2) Taxi drivers within a specified radius respond to the beacon and pick up the customer.

I know this may seem like an enabling force to make taxis even more convenient to use, but I feel as though the environmental benefits outweigh the lower “cost of time” that the customer currently pays.

It would make the taxi cab system much more efficient and could eventually give a very strong argument to why less road capacity is needed for automobiles so that other forms of transportation could have dedicated lanes (like bikes and buses).

The GPS technology could be further implemented so that riders who are interested in sharing cabs to places like the Airport can split the fee, instead of having cabs full of single riders heading out to the airport.

I went back to read the 1998 Hudson River Park Act that created this waterfront park (and was the hard-won compromise to come out of Westway). I was interested to see in which respects it preserved or expanded the powers of the park compared to the original parkway authorities (few) and in which way it diminished them (more). I stumbled on one provision that preserved the pro-automobile, anti-transit feature of the parkways – the preservation of Pier 40 for long-term parking but for than 10 passengers… Maybe there could be an enlightened trade of some kind.

I trust you do check the weather every so often?

Maybe we should start having emergency referendums in this city preceded by large public information events at Cooper Union, CUNY, NYU, Columbia, The New York Academy of Sciences, etc.

The potential for losing greater than $300 million in federal aid and other ongoing income, and not addressing climate change in a city that can make a real local and global difference — as the center of the world’s third largest economy — is definitely an emergency. Like what is happening in the US Southeast, West, and Australia right now, our drought could start next year. We can’t wait until we get start getting hit with large hurricanes, experience even more severe blackouts and heat waves, or infestations resulting from warmer climates for people to act responsibly when given the full picture.

Here on our doorstep at Columbia University in NYC there is a huge team of scientists along with Al Gore who just won the Noble Prize for doing the research and spreading the word on climate change and with the Columbia Earth Institute as an advisor the city on how to adapt to this crisis and do our fair share in mitigating it, the members of this Noble Prize winning team should be brought front and center to explain the dire situation to the people of this town.

Earth Institute Colleagues Share in the Nobel Peace Prize

http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/1950

Business as usual and everyone with their handout despite having to deal with a climate change crisis and things have to change fast since we haven’t even started.

We need solutions not problems.

Really bad form by all involved.