A state commission is considering adding tolls to the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and 59th Street bridges to ease the MTA's billion-dollar budget hole, sources said.

[...]

The Ravitch Commission, appointed by Gov. Paterson to find a long-term solution to the MTA's financial woes, is expected to hand over its recommendations on new funding sources for the MTA next month.

Added James Yglesias of Brooklyn Heights: "You can't punish us for driving."

Can we at least charge you for the extra cost of driving over other modes of transportation?

In any case, I'm not believing it until I hear it from a legislative leader.

It's curious that BVG would prefer to lower itself to the MTA's user-unfriendliness. For what purpose? No one is making a profit from the artistic rendition of Berlin's metro map. If anything, BVG should consider paying the app programmer for providing a value-added service to the transit system's users: the public who invest and support the existence and operation of that system.

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/michael.bloomberg.east.2.859306.html

Why should public institutions (assuming this is one) make intellectual property claims in the first place? What possible gain is there for the public? It is absurd for the stewards of publicly supported work to claim any intellectual "ownership" that is exclusive of the very people that financed its production. This has come up before with riffs on subway maps around the world, and all I can figure is that there are lot of sad bureaucrats eager to throw their weight around, for no public gain. A similar situation here developed when weather forecasting lobbies tried to have the national weather service curtained off from the public (working through congressional Republicans, Santorum in particular), because the internet allows the information they produce to instantly reach the public at no great cost, disrupting the traditional forecasting business—a classic luddite scenario. In that case the NWS took the public's side and the effort at hiding the information failed. For the public and new businesses, giving away the already-produced information is the more productive course by far. That republicans often come out with the opposite opinion is just another way that they have been pro-business, anti-capitalist economic frauds.