Clark County's campaign to keep bus service won Tuesday, 54-46.

Angie has profiled the victory in Durham and the loss in Seattle. Here are the rest of the results:

In Montcalm County, MI, a proposed property tax hike to fund bus service failed 39-61.

A terrible idea failed to catch on in Cincinnati, but the closeness of the final tally showed there’s still work to be done. The proposal to ban any forward movement on building a streetcar system lost, but the vote was 49-51. Still, this loss was a big win for transit.

Bad news for residents of Trumbull County, Ohio: the property tax increase that would have saved their transit system failed 36-64. If the county is to be believed, this means the transit system will shut down entirely, a huge loss, especially for the county’s most vulnerable residents. According to a local paper, “In 2010, the transit provided 64,249 trips: 18,922 for senior citizens, 21,013 for the disabled, 16,131 for students, and 8,183 for other residents.”

The 54-46 passage of Proposition 1 in Clark County, Washington was a big win for transit. Residents of the Washington-side suburbs of Portland will pay another 0.2 percent sales tax in order to stave off harsh cuts to their transit service. Even the normally anti-tax local paper said the vote was essential to maintaining quality of life in the county.

The counting of the statewide initiative 1125 in Washington went into the next day, but we can say definitively now that this bad idea has lost – at last count, it had 48.44 percent of the vote. The measure would have put serious restrictions on tolling at a time when tolling is one of very few funding mechanisms available to states. Even worse, it would have codified a pro-roads bias by insisting that tolling revenues could only pay for roads. It also singled out light rail, banning it on the I-90 bridge.

* The proposal to increase the Lorain County sales tax failed pretty spectacularly — 32-68. Transit advocates took note of this one but aren’t counting it as a loss, since the primary focus of the campaign – and the primary destination of the tax revenues – was the criminal justice system, not transportation. The loss does, however, mean that the county will cut its contribution to the transit system in half, in order to have more money to pay for prisons.

Here are a few we didn’t mention Tuesday:

In the current political environment, the Senate probably couldn't do much more than maintain current spending levels. But it's not enough to transform our transportation system. Photo: MTSNAC

The upper chamber maintained funding for several key livability programs, teeing up a fight with the GOP-led House over spending levels. A finished 2012 budget is already a month overdue and despite the Senate passage of a “minibus” (as opposed to an “omnibus”) spending bill yesterday, no one seems to expect a completed bill anytime soon.

The Senate bill maintains current overall spending levels, which, in the current environment, is a win for advocates of transportation investment, though given that the numbers don’t account for inflation, they essentially amount to a spending cut.

Either way, these figures don’t shift the status quo very much. While funding for TIGER and transit projects gets a modest boost, high-speed rail has been sharply reduced in this bill. And, since this appropriation comes in the absence of a new reauthorization of the federal transportation program, which could set new policies, these funds come without any guarantee that the money will be spent more wisely, in the pursuit of strategic goals and keeping systems in a state of good repair.

The bill includes:

• $550 million for the TIGER program, a key element of the shift away from formula funding and toward merit-based allocations for the most innovative projects. The bill sets aside almost a quarter of that funding for projects in rural communities. This funding level would represent a $23 million jump over the actual enacted number for this year.
• $41 billion – the same as this year – for the Federal-aid Highway program. Sen. Barbara Boxer was disappointed that the Senate did the math differently this year – rather than allocating $44 billion and then rescinding $3 billion of it, this bill makes the cut upfront. While that appears to be a more straightforward way to do it, some fear that it makes the baseline funding level look lower. That means that future funding will be determined based on $41 billion, not $44 billion.

The popularity of car sharing is a good sign for transit. Photo Sierra Club

Millar may have meant the comment as inspiration, but consumer and demographic data seem to back his claim.

Over the course of four decades, the Southeastern Institute of Research in Richmond, Virginia, has conducted more than 14,000 market research studies for clients like AT&T and the AARP. During a panel discussion on “The Shifting Paradigm of the City,” the company’s CEO, John Martin, outlined a convergence of measurable trends that paint a very promising future for public transportation.

According to Martin, Millar is right: There is a large and growing audience for more and better public transit. Here are the top five reasons we could soon see a swell of transit advocates.

Growing population: With the U.S. headed to 341 million residents by 2020 and 400 million by 2040, the population is growing. If the current trend continues, an overwhelming number of them are bound for the cities. “What ultimately will happen is we’ll have these urban villages everywhere,” Martin said. But more people means more cars, and tight budgets mean no new roads. “News flash: Congestion, access and mobility are really going to be challenged,” he added. In that context, public transit will be an obvious answer for new and long-time city dwellers.

Demographic sea change: We’re facing a profound generational shift and, according to Martin: “The dynamic is aligning with transit big time.”

The Washington Metro system keeps hundreds of thousands of cars off the streets a day, and is responsible for hundreds of millions in tax revenues and household savings per year. Photo: thisisbossi/Flickr

At the heart of the region’s success is, of course, the Washington Metro, which has shaped development for more than three decades. In fact, so much of the land near Metro stations has been developed that ridership is projected to reach the design capacity of the current system within the next 20 years. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is currently mapping out how to respond.

At a panel this morning, Nat Bottigheimer, an assistant general manager at WMATA, shared some results from an internal study the agency conducted as part of this process. The core question he investigated: “What is it you’re actually getting from a transit investment?”

The agency’s research and modeling produced some intriguing numbers demonstrating how the creation of Metro — its 86 stations and 106 miles of track — has benefited the region:

• Since the system was created, $212 billion in real estate value has been added within a half-mile of Metro stations.
• Land value near Metro stations generates $2.8 billion annually in property tax revenues. $195 million of that is directly attributable to transit.
• Households in the region reap the equivalent of $705 million per year in time savings thanks to Metro.
• Households save $305 million per year on costs related to owning and driving cars.
• Every day Metro riders walk 33,000 miles.

On the other side of the coin, there’s everything that Metro has prevented from happening. Without Metro…

• Commuters would have to put up with commutes that take 25 percent longer. This would effectively curtail people’s access to jobs and employers’ access to the workforce.
• The region would see more than a million additional auto trips per day.
• This traffic would require 1,000 additional lane miles to accommodate, the equivalent of two Capital Beltways’ worth of asphalt.
• Four to six more traffic lanes across the Potomac would be necessary.
• The downtown core would be eviscerated by parking. To store all the extra cars would take 200,000 parking spots, the equivalent of 170 blocks filled with five-story parking structures.
• All that car infrastructure would cost nearly $11 billion to build, and impose huge maintenance costs every year.

How about this for your next transportation stimulus, Mr. President? Image: Austin Strategic Mobility Plan

Given the GOP strategy of obstructing any stated goal of the administration, it’ll be a tough sell. Some Republicans have already made it clear they would rather see a $640 billion, 12-month payroll tax holiday. That would increase the deficit by more than twice what Obama’s plan would, but deficits don’t seem to matter as long as taxes are getting cut.

So it’s no surprise that the president is also looking for ways that he can spur infrastructure job creation without Congress’s approval. Last week, Obama pleaded with Congress to pass a clean extension of the transportation bill (a plea which some Republicans are gleefully denying). At the same time, he announced that he was directing some agencies to each identify three infrastructure projects that could use a little federal help in speeding up the process. Here’s what he said:

In keeping with a recommendation from my Jobs Council, today I’m directing certain federal agencies to identify high-priority infrastructure projects that can put people back to work. And these projects — these are projects that are already funded, and with some focused attention, we could expedite the permitting decisions and reviews necessary to get construction underway more quickly while still protecting safety, public health, and the environment.

He specifically called on the departments of agriculture, commerce, housing and urban development, interior and transportation to highlight three projects each. We were wondering whether this process will end up falling into some of the same traps as the stimulus, which emphasized shovel-readiness to the detriment of other evaluation criteria for new projects, like whether the money would be well-spent.

Though Obama didn’t use the phrase “shovel-ready” last week, he called for projects that are already funded and have state and local permits, which implies nearly the same thing. Without a new stimulus, which the Republicans have already promised to oppose, there is no money to fund new projects, making it imperative to find those that are already funded. Still, the president admitted last year that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

And despite the administration’s general friendliness toward transit and understanding of the limitations of the private automobile, 60 percent of transportation dollars in the stimulus went to highways, with just 20 percent to transit. (Most of the rest went to freight rail, with a little bit for aviation and maritime projects.)

Across the United States, about 700,000 households not only lack access to a vehicle, but live in areas that are not served by transit, according to “Transit Access and Zero-Vehicle Households,” a new report from the Brookings Institution.

These guys are the lucky ones. About 700,000 people in the 100 largest U.S. metros not only don't have cars, but don't have access to transit. Photo: Angie Schmitt

This isolated population represents about 10 percent of the 7.5 million carless households in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. Beyond issues of social justice, these households’ predicament presents a great economic concern for the country, say Brookings researchers.

“Seven hundred thousand households is larger than the population of Columbus, Ohio or San Antonio, Texas,” said Adie Tomer, senior research analyst and author of the report. “These people are terribly constrained in earning a living, getting to the store, or taking their kids to daycare. If this many people were facing a public health scare, this country would be in crisis mode. We need to approach this problem with similar urgency.”

The most vulnerable carless families, by and large, were those that live in the suburbs or the Southwest, according to the report. Cities with the highest number of families lacking access to transit and private automobiles included Atlanta, with just 69 percent transit coverage, Dallas (71 percent), Houston (73 percent), Phoenix (81 percent) and St. Louis (82 percent).

On the other hand, some of the biggest overall transit cities also do the best job making sure nearly every resident has access to service. Los Angeles’ transit services reach more than 99 percent percent of the regional population, just ahead of New York (99 percent), San Francisco (98 percent), Seattle (97 percent) and Miami (97 percent).

Report authors point to trends like job sprawl and the increased suburbanization of poverty as aggravating factors that put carless families at economic risk. Since the 1980s, the U.S. has built 655,000 roadway lane miles; this had the effect of increasing the distance between destinations, the report noted.

Brookings researchers urged both local and national leaders to respond to this crisis through land use policies that encourage development in densely populated areas and expanding transit service into under-served suburban communities.

Tanya Snyder: There are some union rules that some transit advocates say are harmful, like the mandatory eight-hour workday and the restriction on part-time work, when transit especially has such peaks and valleys – you’ve got a rush hour in the morning and a rush hour in the evening, and all this dead time in between.

ATU President Larry Hanley says diminishing worker protections is not the way to a stronger transit network. Photo: Workday Minnesota

Larry Hanley: In most urban transit, you have a large number of bus drivers who work what are known as swing shifts, where they work in the morning rush hour, they work in the evening rush hour, they handle the question of peak service, and they essentially do the work of two people. It’s not their fault that demand for service falls off in the middle of the day; it’s just the reality of the business.

In Staten Island, in my local, the percentage of people in Staten Island transit who operate swing shifts, I think it’s 62 or 63 percent of all the work is swing shifts. And these are people working – driving – eight or more hours on almost every shift. They have time off in the middle, but they’re putting in a full day. Their day starts at 6 o’clock in the morning and ends at 6 or 7 o’clock at night. So, these are long days with hardworking people.

I think it’s really a cheap shot. I’d like to have people go down and hang out at a bank or a brokerage house and see how much time the executives really put in at their desk. But anyway, that’s my class war argument.

TS: Was “class war” off the record?

LH: No, class war is on the record! I agree with Warren Buffet. There’s a class war going on and his class is winning.

They are literally scraping bodies off highways because we have bus drivers falling asleep at the wheel, because proponents of bad labor policy were successful in the 1980s in deregulating that industry.

And as for what to do with these workers in the middle of the day, Congress, pandering to a small group of private bus companies – and this is an absolute obscenity – restricts public agencies from doing charter bus work. And this is nothing but pandering to private bus companies who have an inordinate amount of political influence. So, all over the United States, there are probably 100,000 buses that lay idle on weekends, lay idle in the middle of the day, when they could be used productively in the communities. They could be providing charter service to people all over our cities and providing better-rounded schedules, so that a bus driver who works the morning shift could actually do some charter work and have a full eight-hour day.

The charter restriction is on the level of the bridge to nowhere in terms of how much of a crazy rule it is, that is really responsive to the needs of a handful of people and harmful to the systems all over the country.

TS: What about just hiring workers part-time to handle either the morning or evening rush?

LH: Many of these places already have part-time bus drivers. Now, there’s the broader economic argument: If we move our entire society to part time employment, how do you sustain families? How do you sustain a culture, when everybody’s working part-time and has to work three different jobs?

But when you get into an area like driving a bus you really ought to think for a minute about the safety of people forced, for economic reasons, to go out and have multiple jobs and run the risk of not being conscious when they’re driving a bus.

We’re seeing the impact of the de-professionalization of inter-city transit right now, where they are literally scraping bodies off highways all over the country, because we have bus drivers that are falling asleep at the wheel, because the folks who were proponents of bad labor policy were successful in the 1980s in deregulating that industry. And the consequence has been that bus drivers now in the over-the-road industry are paid somewhere around 30 or 40 percent of what they were paid in 1980. And they are falling asleep at the wheel, driving buses off highways. And these accidents are happening all over the place because the people who make those arguments about bus driving being a part-time job were successful. They won it. And now we have a transient work force. They’re not professional drivers.

If the goal is to race to the bottom, to get the cheapest products, which means the cheapest labor, we ought to be mindful that we’re ruining the lives of American kids.

TS: So if part-time work isn’t a good solution, would cross-utilization of workers be an answer – for example, having maintenance people who can’t work during rush hours do other sorts of customer service during those times?

LH: Well, that’s done in some places, but I don’t know of too many places where the maintenance people stand around waiting for the buses to come in off the street. Every bus system has a number of buses that are spares that allow them to have maintenance done 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s the way they work. So I think it would really be the rare exception to find maintenance workers who don’t have buses to work on.

TS: What about on rail tracks?

LH: I don’t know that much about rail. I’m a bus driver.

But you know, there are a lot of simplistic ideas and simple people that go out and try to push out the idea that somehow after running transit systems for well over 100 years the labor relations system has not sorted out all these issues, but they have. And periodically, you’ll find some story about some rule that comes from 100 years ago on the railroad that is glaringly inefficient today, and if you talk to the folks in rail unions you’ll find they’re willing to change a lot of those rules. But we don’t have that much with regard to that stuff.

TS: Some transit advocates are also critical of things like Buy America provisions because it costs transit agencies more money.

LH: This is the Wal-Mart question. This is whether or not we have a country at all anymore.

If the goal is to race to the bottom, to get the cheapest products, which means the cheapest labor, then we ought to be mindful that while we’re preserving the fiscal integrity of the MTA, we’re ruining the lives of American kids. We’re making it impossible for them to get a job. And if you look at the unemployment rates today, as staggering as they sound, it’s 9 percent overall, but for college educated kids it’s 4 percent. Which means that people who lack a college education no longer have a future in America. They just don’t.

We have forfeited our jobs. It’s not like somebody came here and took them away. We have allowed our wealthy to become citizens of the world while the poor remain loyal, patriotic citizens of the United States. And those citizens of the world have transferred our employment, transferred our futures, all around the world only for their own personal interest so they can make more money. So that now, we have people in China and India and all across the world competing with American kids. And at the same time we’ve invested their money, we’ve borrowed from their future, not to give them a better education but to give them the best fighter bomber we can make and the best drones to kill the Flintstones.

This is about a moral crisis in America. And then they have the gall to come back and make all these arguments about American people being inefficient or American people not working hard enough and why shouldn’t they all be part time. But the central issue is that we have allowed corporations like Wal-Mart to wring every ounce of hope out of young Americans’ lives.

President Larry Hanley is considering ways to broaden the ATU to include passengers and other transit supporters as members. Photo courtesy of the ATU

Hanley started as president of the ATU the same week I started at Streetsblog. I remember that first week, hearing excited chatter about this transit firebrand taking the helm of the union.

Below is the first installment of Streetsblog’s edited interview with Hanley.

Tanya Snyder: Starting with the reauthorization: nothing is going to happen until after the recess, they’ve got this battle between two years and six years, the funding levels are miserable in either version – how do you organize your way out of this? How do you respond?

Larry Hanley: The only thing that can actually straighten out the problem is if the people – huge numbers of people – start to articulate a different vision. We need leaders to articulate a different vision and we need people to understand that were heading into a dead end financially, and we’re destroying all the things that made America a great country. And I think that we’ve been sold out by corporate interests that control the politicians.

And the only antidote to that is to try to figure out a way to mobilize the public, and we’re doing that. We’re actively ramping up our communications and trainings, and we’re providing a roadmap to our local leaders and members for how they can organize their communities around transit.

We were able to persuade the unpersuadable — people like Giuliani — because we built broad-based community support, including traditional Republican strongholds.

We don’t think that there is a short-term solution. We think Congress is so out of touch with the needs of the people who live in this country that the only remedy is to convince large numbers of people in districts to go after their members of Congress and straighten them out.

TS: You’ve been involved in coalitions at the local, regional, and national levels for a long time around transit. How have you seen them evolve? How do those coalitions compare now to when you started?

LH: The coalitions that work are the ones that can really get buy-in from non-traditional partners. There are very few places where labor unions partner, for example, with the real estate community and the Chamber of Commerce. But I found that to be a really successful formula back in New York. We were able to persuade the unpersuadable — people like [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani, a guy who was on his own mission — because we built broad-based community support, including traditional Republican strongholds. And we persuaded them that it was in our collective interest, that there was such a thing as a collective interest — that’s really been taken out of the debate publicly. But when we convinced them that there was a collective interest in having better mass transit and cheaper mass transit, they pretty quickly persuaded Giuliani and [Gov. George] Pataki to support it, despite the fact that they had internal pressure in their own political circles not to.

Our goals are really mainstream, but they’re not treated that way.

TS: To some degree, you have that coalition now, at the national level. The Chamber is knocking down doors, asking for a bill and pushing for a gas tax. Is that helpful?

LH: It’s helpful in the short term. Whether or not we can sustain that in the long term is debatable. Unfortunately, the climate politically is such that whenever there’s a connected labor issue, coalitions like that can break down. We’re hoping that doesn’t happen this time. Our sense is, people arrive at that door based on their own self-interest.

TS: The people at the Chamber aren’t transit people. Do you share interests with them?

LH: We do share interests with them; the question is, who controls their political agenda? Around the country, our local unions – although the connections are not yet made – they do share interests with small business owners, people whose businesses depend upon a thriving transit system. They do have an interest in working with our union. The question is, can you convince them of that? Can you convince, first, the local leaders in our union, and the members, that those are worthy relationships?

We want to build a long-term understanding of what it means to have a thriving transit system throughout the country. And that’s not what brings all those folks to the table right now. I think it’s immediate interest, immediate fear about the economy, the interest their constituent businesses have in getting their companies back to work. We have a broader and deeper long-term agenda.

TS: You mentioned real estate and the chamber – who else should be in this coalition?

LH: Anybody who cares about global warming, the environment; who cares about the economy; who cares about the moral crisis that America faces with the war, the fact that we are engaged in bombing and killing people all over the world for oil, which we’re then using to destroy our environment; faith-based groups who have both practical concerns for their parishioners and constituent groups, but also people who have moral concerns about the way the country’s headed. Transit provides an opportunity for a very broad based coalition.

Here’s a newsletter from 1996 – this is not something I planned, but I happen to have this stuff handy – “Chamber of Commerce Coming on Board, Realtors Next” – “The Merchants Associations Support the $2 Fare Because It’s Good For the Staten Island Economy.”

We had religious groups, pastors of churches. I spoke at just about every Rotary and Kiwanis club on Staten Island. I had all kinds of happy dollars and funny things exchanged in front of me. We weren’t selling snake oil – we were selling a better economy, a better environment, a better Staten Island, so we were embraced by all kinds of people who just saw it as a good deal for their city.

We weren’t selling snake oil – we were selling a better economy, a better environment, a better Staten Island, so we were embraced by all kinds of people who just saw it as a good deal for their city.

And we also had a rider group. One of our mid-term goals is to try to organize riders. We have 100 passengers who ride our buses and trains for every one of our members. And we want to organize them.

TS: Would they be ATU members or sort of like a straphangers union?

LH: I don’t know. I just heard a story about Argentinean teachers who reshaped their union, and they don’t call it the teachers union anymore; they call it the education union. They have affiliate or auxiliary memberships for people who come in contact with the education system – parents, janitors, school bus drivers. That’s one of the things we’re discussing here, is whether we want to build an organization with membership. But whether they’re members or not, they certainly have an interest in supporting transit.

In Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts – this summer – we have two locals up there, and they hired an organizer to ride the buses, directly organizing riders to support public transit. That’s what we did in Staten Island. We had college students riding the buses, having people fill out postcards addressed to politicians, urging them to lower the fare and get new equipment and get bus lanes into Manhattan.

TS: So they sign the postcards, but you’re not necessarily involving them in a long-term coalition.

LH: Yes we are. We established a database. And from the database we began to mail and call for meetings. And we started to have meetings of passengers on a regular basis. And the passengers themselves began to self-organize.

So then we had bus captains, people who said ‘I want to control my bus, I’ll be in charge.’ So then whenever we had a flyer, we had a reliable network of passengers who would take 100 flyers and distribute 50 in the morning on the way to work and 50 in the evening on the way home. In this newsletter, it says we delivered 10,000 signatures to Mayor Giuliani. And when we did it, we had a press conference at City Hall, and we had a couple hundred people there. And most of them were passengers, who came on their lunch hour.

Our arguments are community-building arguments. We’re fighting downtown about whether to restore taxes to millionaires and billionaires, to the 1/10^th of one percent of our society that has so much money that, if they spent the rest of their lives burning it, they could never get to the bottom of the pile. But we’re giving them tax breaks.

We’re raising the fares on the buses in Cincinnati and New York and everywhere else around the country. That’s a tax! So politicians hiding behind the notion of ‘I’m not going to raise taxes’ is ridiculous.

But we’re raising the fares on the buses in Detroit and Cleveland and Cincinnati and New York and everywhere else around the country. That’s a tax! So politicians hiding behind the notion of ‘I’m not going to raise taxes’ is ridiculous. They’re raising taxes all over the country by simply withholding funds from our systems. Their policies are forcing taxes to be increased on the people who can’t afford to pay them. That’s a regressive way to raise taxes.

TS: Let’s get back to the idea that the people who ride transit are those that are least able to pay. I wonder sometimes about the concept that “transit-dependent” people are poor – do you use that when you’re trying to connect transit with social justice and equity, or is that a harmful stereotype, that the only people who ride transit are those without other options?

LH: That’s what’s used against us politically – racism, classism, lack of concern for poor people. Down in Clayton County, Georgia last year, they eliminated all the bus service in the county. The government in Atlanta had persuaded a whole bunch of poor people to move out to Clayton County so that they could do gentrification in Atlanta, and it was OK because they had a way to get back into Atlanta to get to work, which was to take the bus. And then a minute later, they eliminated all the bus service in Clayton County. And there were people who had full time jobs, worked every day, played by the rules, and now couldn’t get to work.

And nobody thinks those people are too big to fail.

Our political society thinks it’s OK to do things like that. And it’s because the people who ride buses and trains are seen in the light that you just cast them in, with the exception of some large cities.

I was fortunate to come from a city where transit was something that everybody was involved in – rich people, poor people rode transit. People that have options ride transit because it’s a better alternative. That gets to the question of, do we provide alternatives that attract people who have other options, or do we intentionally make transit unattractive to people so they don’t ride it? So I think we have to work on different tracks: to fight and organize the people who currently ride it, but at the same time fight to improve it and increase the funding for it so it becomes available to folks who would use the option if it were not so limited.

Our conversation with Larry Hanley continued, venturing onto the prickly topic of whether union rules and labor protections hurt transit agencies by costing them more money. Stay tuned for the second half of our interview tomorrow.

The designers explain that their slide is meant to be a nice gesture to the travellers. They brilliantly foresaw that such a playful urban intervention can generate large-scale positive spin-off for a disadvantaged neighborhood like Overvecht, and that’s exactly what happened.

Frivolous fun, or ingenious solution to the MTA’s escalator maintenance woes? (In Utrecht, of course, they don’t get 106-degree scorchers like today, so this slide will probably stay usable all year round.)

Source: Donald Shoup

If you drive to work, you can get a $230 monthly parking benefit, subsidized by the federal government and paid through your employer. If you take transit, right now you can get up to $230 per month, but the cap may revert to $120 when the current transit benefit law expires at the end of the year. And if you ride a bike? If your employer can even figure out how the bike benefit works, you get twenty bucks. Don’t spend that all in one place, kiddo. (Full disclosure: even Streetsblog hasn’t worked through the confusing bureaucracy enough to give its bike-commuting staff this benefit.)

Rep. Earl Blumenauer announces the introduction of the Commuter Relief Act outside a metro station. Photo: Meghan Cahill/League of American Bicyclists

The privileged position of cars in the employer-benefits paradigm could soon change. As Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) said today, “We need to take away subsidies that incentivize people to do just the opposite of what we ought to be doing.” As a congressman representing the second most congested part of the country, Moran said it was “stunning” that the tax code “is designed to subsidize congestion.”

Moran is a co-sponsor of Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s (D-OR) Commuter Relief Act, introduced today as a way to bring some equity to different transportation modes. Why should drivers get up to $230 a month to foster oil dependency, greenhouse gas emissions, and congestion when everyone else gets so much less?

Blumenauer’s proposal contains a menu of options that lawmakers can choose among – or they can choose all of them. They are:

• Transit equity: sets the cap for all transportation benefits at $200 a month – parking and transit.
• Self-employed extension of transportation benefits: gives self-employed workers transit benefits for their work travel.
• Parking cash-out: requires employers who offer a parking benefit to also offer the option to take cash instead (reducing the incentive to drive).
• Van-pool credit: creates a 10 percent tax credit for spending on vanpool services.
• Bike benefit: raises the cap for the bike benefit from $20 to $40 and makes the procedures easier for employers. It also allows commuters to combine the bike benefit with transit or parking benefits, which they’re now not allowed to do.

“What we need to do is to be able to help American commuters break the tyranny of the pump,” Blumenauer said today at a press conference at the Capitol South metro station outside the House of Representatives office buildings. He said the bill would give people choices to reduce their costs of commuting, but reminded his audience that long term, the challenge was to provide better transportation choices. One man standing behind Blumenauer held up a sign with the words “Going to work so I can pay to get to work” in a circle with a slash through it.

One of the innovations of Blumenauer’s bill is that it acknowledges that people get to work different ways different days. Under the current law, commuters need to choose a transit, parking, or bicycle benefit. In the new bill, they can mix and match. They can take the $40 bike benefit and also combine it with a $160 transit benefit, up to the $200 total cap.

The cash-out option is the key to allowing that kind of flexibility. Rather than forcing commuters into a rigid program of just driving or just taking transit, it can put $200 in their pockets for whatever transportation costs they encounter – whether it’s bus fare, parking, new tubes, or Gatorade for the long ride. The chart above, which parking expert Donald Shoup of UCLA printed on Streetsblog last fall, shows the power that a parking cash-out can have in shifting transportation choices.

Blumenauer asserts that the bill is deficit-neutral, since the small reduction in parking benefits makes up for the increase in other benefits. And he says that the benefits aren’t just a pat on the back for people already using transit and bicycles. From Blumenauer’s office:

A recent study by Newsweek found that one in five employees changed how they commuted when their employer offered a commuter benefit program. Given that a three percent reduction in commuting trips results in a 39 percent decrease in congestion, reducing commuting trips during peak times, through vanpooling or transit, is one of the most efficient and cost effective ways to increase road capacity.

Bike to work and your commuter benefit could pay for dry-cleaning bike grease out of your suits. Photo: Ray's Life Cycle

Not every automobile commuter gets monetary parking benefits, of course. Yes, in some dense, urban areas like New York or D.C., employers can directly help employees pay for parking in public lots. But in smaller cities and suburban areas, drivers can usually just pull right into the office lot for free. If a commuter wanted to “cash out” that parking benefit under the bill, experts say the IRS requires employers to quantify that in-kind payment to determine how much the cash equivalent would be.

Blumenauer gestured at a massive free parking lot for Capitol employees just behind the House office buildings.

“I invite you to think about how much it costs the federal government to provide free parking here to thousands of people on Capitol Hill,” Blumenauer said. “If we give commuters more choices, we will end up reducing the pressure. If we gave our employees here the choice of a transportation benefit to rent a space here or down the street or transit or cycling, we could cut the cost to the federal government of maintaining some of the most expensive real estate in Washington D.C. for all these people that are clogging the roads every day. Think of the uses for this expensive real estate.”

In 1974, the Franklin Avenue Shuttle derailed, a not infrequent occurrence as deferred maintenance took its toll on the transit system. Photo: Doug Grotjahn via nycsubway.org.

Last week we wrote about how the looming $10 billion deficit in the MTA’s capital plan could lead to a $3.00 fare and $137 monthly pass within three years. That’s not the only way the transit authority could decide to respond to a lack of funding, however.

At the other end of the spectrum from fare-backed borrowing, the MTA could decide that it cannot take on any additional debt. In that scenario, the MTA would simply have to cancel or postpone every unfunded maintenance and expansion project — most of the next three years of the capital program. You can see those projects at the MTA’s capital dashboard, here. The result will be breakdowns, delays, and a slide back toward the decrepit and dangerous subway system of the late 1970s.

“You can expect to see the condition of the system decline pretty rapidly if you’re not doing this work,” said Felice Farber, the director of external affairs for the General Contractors Association of New York. “It’s not too hard to get back to the poor quality service of the past,” she said.

“You’ll have older buses, so they’ll be breaking down more often,” explained Pete Foley of TWU Local 100. “Subways will have to go slower,” as they pass over worn out tracks, he continued. “Eventually you’re going to have cracks. You’ll have derailments if you have a crack in the rail.”

Delays will be more common during rush hour as well, due to the lack of regular preventive maintenance. “You’ll be fixing things when they break,” said Foley. “They’ll wait until it’s an emergency.”

In the final three years of the capital plan, Farber said, 23 percent of the cost is network expansions like East Side Access, 27 percent are basic repairs to the system, 35 percent goes to regular replacement of tracks or buses, and thirteen percent to system improvements like new communications technology.

Expect to see more of this if the state doesn't fund the MTA capital plan. Buses and subways will start to break down pretty quickly without necessary repairs. Photo: Cory Doctorow via Flickr.

Over time, said Farber, putting this work off would force riders to pay more for less. “What happened on the New Haven line is the perfect example of what happens when you defer maintenance.” In 2000, then-governor John Rowland refused to buy new Metro-North cars. That decision ended up resulting in a ten percent service cut during rush hour this winter, when the repairs needed to the old cars overwhelmed the MTA. “They also paid huge overtime expenses while they struggled to get their system up to speed,” said Farber.

Both Farber and Foley noted that even though the capital program is currently funded, the transit system is already starting to struggle. “If you ride the train now, we’re already starting to see train delays because of signals, starting to see the doors have only one side open,” said Farber.

Foley pointed to scaled back plans for the MTA’s mega-projects. One of the two stations on the 7 line extension won’t be built, for example, and the corridors connecting the different subway lines at the Fulton Street Transit Center were narrowed by around six feet.

Station repairs and customer service improvements could be some of the first to go if the MTA’s capital plan deficit isn’t closed. “That’s the direct passenger experience,” said Farber. The current round of station repairs are mostly in Brooklyn and Queens, she said.

The expansion of real-time arrival signs to the lettered subway routes, the new subway intercoms, and security cameras also won’t go into effect, said Foley. “They’ll just have to cut these out.”

In reality, of course, the MTA can choose to mix and match between fare-backed debt and deferred maintenance, putting off the features that might be nice to have and charging riders for the ones they need to have. The MTA could also potentially swap in service cuts or layoffs for fare hikes.

The bottom line is that without the revenue that a solution like congestion pricing or bridge tolls could provide, none of the MTA’s options are good for riders. Should our transit system buy what it needs by taking out a huge loan and sticking transit riders with the bill? Or just let the system begin to fall apart? Albany shouldn’t be content with either.

Swapping transit for car lanes has led to an enormous decrease in capacity across the East River bridges. Image: Sam Schwartz at NYC DOT via FHWA

In the headlines this morning, we linked to a great historical photo of the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge on Brownstoner, and it’s taking a closer look at the full implications of the shot. Not for nostalgia’s sake, but to make a cool, calculated appraisal of the efficiency of this piece of transportation infrastructure, as currently configured.

The Brooklyn Bridge in 1903 carried far more people than it does now. Top photo: Shorpy.com via Brownstoner. Bottom photo: Google Maps via Brownstoner.

The 1903 image shows the bridge with only one lane in each direction for private vehicles, which at the time were drawn by horses. The rest of the space is given over to tracks for streetcars, elevated railroads, and pedestrians. Now, of course, there’s still a shared bike-ped path through the middle of the bridge, but the rest of it is all for cars, with three lanes of automobile traffic running on either side. No buses or trucks run over the bridge.

If the job of the Brooklyn Bridge is to move people between the two boroughs, the reallocation of space from transit to cars has been disastrous. In 1902, one year before the photograph was taken, the Brooklyn Bridge moved roughly 341,000 people a day across all its modes, according to the Federal Highway Administration. It hit its peak capacity a few years later, with 426,000 people using it each day in 1907.

Today, 125,000 motor vehicles cross the Brooklyn Bridge each day [PDF], as do roughly 4,000 pedestrians and 2,600 cyclists. For the bridge to carry as many people as it did at its peak, each of those cars would need to carry more than three people, but they do not. In 1989, when the city counted around 132,000 motor vehicles crossing, the FHWA estimated that 178,000 people crossed the bridge daily.

More than a century has passed since this photo was taken, and the Brooklyn Bridge’s capacity has declined by an enormous amount, thanks to the elimination of transit across it. You just can’t fit enough bulky and mostly empty cars on the bridge for it to add up.

There’s an interesting discussion on Brownstoner about which picture represents the more bustling and vital city: the old Brooklyn Bridge with transit, or the current one with lots of cars? The transit-friendly bridge may look less busy than the traffic-clogged bridge of today, but the numbers show that looks are deceiving: The less-full bridge was actually the more active and functional bridge.

The past and present of the Brooklyn Bridge embody the transportation capacity that NYC has given up by catering to the less efficient mode. Today, running streetcar tracks along the bridge wouldn’t do too much good, seeing as how the city’s entire streetcar network has been ripped out, and the same goes for the els. Where the dismantling of those two transit systems wasn’t replaced by equivalent subway or bus service, as on the Brooklyn Bridge, the result is a transportation system that simply moves fewer people.

A government shutdown could empty out the D.C. metro system. Photo: Examiner

Just a month ago, AASHTO sounded the warning that the transportation sector could lose up to $100 million a day in case of a shutdown. However, Congress’s extension of SAFETEA-LU through the end of the fiscal year (September 30) has put their minds at ease. Now, AASHTO spokesperson Tony Dorsey says spending for federal highway programs will continue unabated, despite a shutdown. “At this point,” Dorsey said, “we’re not anticipating any issues.” Still, he said, they’re hoping that “should there be a shutdown, it will be a very, very short one.”

But that’s not the whole story. According to a detailed DOT shutdown plan, the vast majority of the Federal Transit Administration would shut down, keeping only 54 out of 575 positions working. Already-awarded stimulus grants would continue to receive oversight and the Lower Manhattan Recovery Office would continue to function. The $270 million that the FTA normally remits to transit agencies every week would cease.

Jeff Rosenberg, government affairs director for the Amalgamated Transit Union, says the SAFETEA-LU extension only continues government’s authority to pay for transportation programs. But “if the FTA isn’t authorized to open the door,” he says, those payments will cease. That could be especially damaging for smaller metros that receive operating assistance, not just capital funds, from the feds. However, he’s hopeful that a potential shutdown would only last a couple of days and would just be “a blip on the screen.”

What else can you expect to happen if the government does shut down as of midnight tonight?

• At least 800,000 federal employees would be furloughed immediately. That would cause a massive drop in transit ridership, especially here in D.C., where Metro is predicting a five to 20 percent drop in case of a shutdown. Michael Perkins of Greater Greater Washington estimates that this would result in a loss for Metro of a quarter million dollars a day.
• Amtrak’s federal subsidies – up in the air for months now anyway as Congress debates whether to eliminate them, reduce them, or maintain them – will stop. However, Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman recently assured employees that the rail operator can keep going on ticket revenue alone in the short term.
• The Federal Highway Administration will stay open, with no positions furloughed, according to the DOT shutdown plan. The FHWA is funded with contract authority and has enough funds available to operate in that way for about a month.
• More than half of the Federal Railroad Administration’s workers would be furloughed.
• The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will keep operating with a full staff.
• As a result of the colonial arrangement by which Congress controls D.C.’s city budget, some core D.C. city functions would grind to a halt. A new campaign to “take your trash to Boehner’s house” in case a shutdown stops garbage collection already has nearly 5,600 Facebook fans. (The city would resume trash collection after one week, when uncollected garbage constitutes “a danger to public health.”)
• D.C. Street sweeping, taxicab regulation, most road repairs, the DMV, and public libraries could also be suspended.
• D.C.’s metro system would keep running, and would even keep a rush hour schedule, but might reduce the number of cars.
• Circulator buses and Capital Bikeshare would also keep running.
• The Federal Housing Administration would stop guaranteeing new home loans. FHA loans account for 30% of the housing market.
• Most of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which issues auto recalls and makes grants to states for safety campaigns, would close, with about 65 percent of its employees furloughed.
• The air traffic control system would keep functioning.
• Long project delivery times and construction delays are already a major concern of Congress, and the House Transportation Committee has prioritized eliminating delays. Well, so much for that – the EPA would cease conducting environmental impact reviews in case of a shutdown, slowing the approval for construction projects.

We’re continuing to monitor developments, but at this point, we’re bracing for a shutdown. A few hours ago, Reid took to the Senate floor to declare that the “one issue remaining last night” was the GOP rider defunding women’s health services. Boehner’s office maintains that the issue is, as always, spending cuts. Both sides are hoping the public will blame the other party in case of a shutdown. Reid hopes people will be as “appalled,” “frustrated,” and “personally offended” as he is if the GOP is so dead-set against cancer screenings for women that they’ll shut down the government over it. The Republicans hope to portray the Democrats as being so unwilling to budge on just a few billion dollars that they’d even let U.S. troops overseas go without pay.

Whoever’s to blame, it looks like the rest of us may be forced to go without some government services for a while. The longest government shutdown in modern history – the Newt Gingrich episode – lasted 21 days, but there’s no telling whether this one will break that record.

Remember, even once Congress is able to come to some kind of agreement over the FY2011 budget – whenever that may be – there’s still the FY2012 budget to worry about.

If Albany doesn't do something about the $10 billion deficit in the MTA's capital program, MTA debt will pile even higher and transit riders will be forced to pay it off at the farebox. Image: NYS Comptroller

With each passing month, the MTA comes closer to the day of reckoning on its unfunded capital plan — the maintenance work that keeps trains and buses running and the expansion projects that provide more access to the system. While the first two years of the 2010-2014 capital budget were funded, there is a $10 billion deficit in the remaining three. So far, there doesn’t seem to be any plan from the city, state, or federal government to find this funding. In fact, between the State Senate’s goal of repealing the MTA payroll tax and the House GOP’s budget-slashing, there may be more obvious paths to the MTA losing revenue than gaining it.

Albany has twice passed up the chance to plug a major part of this gap by enacting bridge tolls or congestion pricing. Increasingly, it’s time to ask what happens to transit riders if legislators just don’t do anything. The options aren’t appealing: a $3.00 base fare or 1970s-style breakdowns and delays.

In one scenario, the MTA could decide that everything in the capital plan, from basic repairs to the system to megaprojects like the Second Avenue Subway, has to happen. In this case, they’d have to borrow the money to pay for the improvements up front. If the MTA borrowed all $10 billion, according to the state comptroller’s office [PDF], the MTA’s yearly debt service obligations would soar even higher than they are already projected to. In 2010, debt service cost the MTA $1.9 billion. If the capital plan is paid for by borrowing, by 2019 debt service would total $3.9 billion.

To pay for all that extra debt, the MTA would have to increase its yearly revenues the only way it can, by raising fares and tolls. According to Neysa Pranger of the Regional Plan Association, the MTA would need between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in new annual revenues to pay for $10 billion in bonds.

The 7.5 percent fare hike scheduled for 2013 — that’s on top of this year’s equivalently sized hike — is predicted to raise around $460 million a year, according to the comptroller’s report. Based on that number, it will take roughly a 24 percent fare hike to get $1 billion in new revenue and a 32.25 percent hike to reach $1.5 billion.

For riders, that’s a steep price to pay. If the fare hike is distributed evenly across different types of fares (for the latest hike, the base fare was held constant while the price of a monthly pass soared), that means a base fare between $2.80 and $3.00 and a monthly pass between $129 and $137.50 by 2014. If you think that people get mad about typical fare hikes, just wait.

For a single person buying a 30-day pass every month, that could add up to $400 more in transit costs each year. Families with children would be paying more than $1,000 more each year.

Another way to think about it is that this 24 percent fare hike would basically be in effect for 30 years, as straphangers gradually pay off this $10 billion loan. Over the 30-year lifetime of the bond, a single transit rider would spend an extra $12,000 to pay off just the next three years of unfunded capital projects.

The 2015-2019 capital program will need another revenue stream. Leaving that program unfunded would trigger a whole new cycle of borrowing and fare hikes.

In the end, the MTA is unlikely to put the entire cost of the capital program onto fare hikes. As Pranger pointed out, New York already puts more of the cost of its transit system onto riders than anywhere else in the country. “While it’s reasonable to ask riders to assume some of the costs of maintaining the system, the operating ratio needs to remain stable,” said Pranger.

In a follow-up post, we’ll look at the alternative to massive fare hikes: deferred maintenance, unreliable service, and the deterioration of the transit system.

It’s sad because it’s true.

When comedian Mark Malkoff set out to generate some publicity by racing the M42 on a child’s tricycle — and winning — he illustrated nicely the frustration and indignity endured by hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers every day.

In his smartly-produced video, you can see that, unlike a bus, Malkoff was easily able to pass stopped cabs and vehicles parked in the bus lane. And though Malkoff reportedly obeyed traffic signals, he of course didn’t need to stop for passengers. Regardless, it’s a sad comment on the state of transit service when it can be outperformed by most any other mode.

Sure, it’s a cute stunt, and notoriously slow buses are a ready-made punchline (“Take that, MTA!”). But the real joke is on New York transit riders, pranked not by the MTA, but by the NIMBYs and skyscraper moguls on 34th Street who just derailed their best chance to see how efficient crosstown bus service can be.

Think a Big Wheel would fare as well in Mexico City?

A physically separated busway won't be coming to 34th Street. Will New York City bus riders ever get one? Image: NYC DOT

The walkback of the city’s plans for 34th Street from a physically separated transitway to a package of painted lanes and bus bulbs was unquestionably a defeat for bus riders on the extremely congested street. While features like off-board fare payment, scheduled to go into effect this summer, will provide a speed boost to buses, riders won’t be able to go crosstown as quickly as if they had lanes free from encroachment.

What does the city’s decision on 34th Street mean for the future of bus rapid transit across the rest of the city, however? We spoke with two transit advocates to find out.

It seems likely that without physical separation on 34th Street, there won’t be physical separation on any bus lanes implemented before the end of the Bloomberg Administration. (The remaining routes in the city’s first phase of BRT rollout — on the Nostrand Avenue corridor in Brooklyn and Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island — are scheduled to debut in the next two years and do not include physically separated lanes.) Preliminary plans for the 34th Street route were first presented to the public in April 2008, a full three years ago, and the planning process for the project is scheduled to continue through the end of 2011. At that rate, any physically separated bus project would be at least partially under the authority of a new mayor and new DOT.

“A number of the environmental and transportation groups are starting to recognize that the next administration after Bloomberg is going to have to answer to us on where they stand on these issues that have been wildly popular for New Yorkers,” said Kate Slevin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

Though a new physically separated busway is unlikely to be constructed in the next three years, said Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development, “Planning can happen and dialogue with stakeholders can happen that make it a lot more likely that the next phase is gets built and has those features.” Byron said she hopes that the BRT team at DOT can assemble a coalition along its next routes that can politically lock in full-featured bus improvements. “There are workers and residents and employers in the outer boroughs who would love to have this problem of a Select Bus route running by their door,” she said.

DOT’s plans for 34th Street were scaled back at least in part because of the opposition of powerful Midtown landowners, including Macy’s. Both Slevin and Byron argued that the politics of 34th Street, dominated by large and often iconic institutions, aren’t likely to be replicated on most other routes. “34th Street is a higher profile street than many of the other streets in, say, the outer boroughs,” argued Slevin.

“It’s such a unique case,” agreed Byron. she pointed out that not only does 34th Street have a different set of stakeholders than the proposed routes for the BRT program’s second phase, it’s a physically different kind of street. “It’s a short route,” she said. On a longer route, the total time savings from physical separation are larger, making the case for separation easier to make. Additionally, Byron argued, “there are probably few long routes where you can continuously have physical separation.” Future routes, she predicted, will be more likely to move back and forth from separated to unseparated lanes as the street width, traffic patterns, and adjoining land uses shift, providing DOT with more flexibility in its planning.

While both Slevin and Byron were optimistic that the BRT program will continue to move forward and New York’s bus riders will someday get physically separated lanes, Slevin underlined the fact that such victories aren’t inevitable. Said Slevin, “Bus riders and other people in New York who support improved bus service need to be more vocal. People need to speak out.”

Guangzhou is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The economic hub of China’s southern coast, it has undergone three decades of rapid modernization, and until recently the city’s streets were on a trajectory to get completely overrun by traffic congestion and pollution. But Guangzhou has started to change course. Last year the city made major strides to cut carbon emissions and reclaim space for people, launching new bus rapid transit and public bike sharing systems.

The Guangzhou BRT system opened in February 2010. It now carries 800,000 passengers a day, seamlessly connecting riders to both the metro system and the city’s new bike-share network. For these innovations, Guangzhou won the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy’s 2011 Sustainable Transport Award. Watch this Streetfilm and see how one of the world’s most dynamic cities is, to borrow a phrase from President Obama, “winning the future” on its streets.

New legislation wouldn't be able to ban transit raids, but could raise the political cost for Albany lawmakers looking to steal from transit riders. Graphic: Carly Clark/Streetsblog

Since 2009, Albany has stolen roughly $260 million dollars from dedicated transit funds in an attempt to plug the state government’s enormous deficits. Those cuts have wreaked havoc upon the MTA’s budget, precipitating major service cuts and fare hikes.

Now, however, some legislators are trying to help put an end to those raids. A new bill introduced by Assm. Jim Brennan and Sen. Marty Golden won’t be able to put a stop to the raids directly, but it has the potential to make a statement in support of protecting transit riders and educate their fellow legislators.

“Unfortunately, New York has a history of raiding the MTA’s funds,” said Brennan in a prepared statement. “This bill requires that funds raised by taxes for the express purpose of funding the MTA or its subsidiaries be used for their intended purpose. By retaining these funds for the system, we stabilize fares and protect funding for the system’s operation.”

The Brennan/Golden bill would make it slightly harder for the executive branch to raid transit funds. For two years following a fare increase, the bill would forbid the state Division of the Budget from including dedicated transit funds in the “blanket sweeps” it is currently allowed to perform. However, while blanket sweeps have raided hundreds of millions of dollars statewide from dedicated funds in recent years, according to a report from the state comptroller [PDF], only a small fraction of the sweeps have affected transit funding.

The sole transit funding taken using blanket sweeps since 2009 was $1.3 million in aid to the LIRR and Metro-North. The rest of the $260 million in transit raids were done through legislative action, and there’s no way short of a constitutional amendment to prevent transit raids from being included in future laws.

The Brennan/Golden bill, therefore, isn’t really an outright ban on raiding transit funds, according to Gene Russianoff of the the Straphangers Campaign. “I’m just not sure that we could do that legally,” he said. Instead, Russianoff is hoping that Brennan and Golden “use this as an organizing vehicle to make their colleagues aware of this problem of theft.” If the bill is passed, it could also make it politically costlier for the legislators who vote for it to later support additional transit raids.

The political benefits of the legislation would be even stronger if it included provisions to shine some sunlight on the raids, which Russianoff is hoping to include. “Right now, it’s a game of Clue uncovering this stuff,” he said. “It should be easier for the public and the media and affected riders to tell right out front if they’re the victims of theft.” Russianoff said he’s spoken with Brennan and the assembly member is open to adding disclosure requirements to the bill.

Currently, the bill has one co-sponsor in the Assembly, Southern Brooklyn Democrat Alan Maisel, and one in the Senate, Queens Democrat Tony Avella.

Governor Cuomo and legislative leaders announced their budget agreement last Sunday. The deal does not change the amount of transit funding included in Cuomo's budget. Photo: Governor's Office via Flickr

The final budget agreement reached by Albany leadership will not make additional cuts to transit funding, a state budget division spokesperson confirmed this afternoon. Negotiations with the legislature did not ultimately change the total amount of transit funding from Andrew Cuomo’s executive budget, which raided $100 million from dedicated transit funds.

During budget negotiations, it was possible that the MTA would lose another $170 million. The Senate wanted to provide a $70 million exemption from the payroll mobility tax for school districts while the Assembly was opposed to Cuomo’s plan to use $100 million in their discretionary funds for transit. There were also high-level discussions about somehow responding to the massive Long Island Bus cuts. As promised by Assembly Member Jim Brennan’s office, however, the MTA did not lose any more money in budget negotiations. We are still waiting for confirmation that the structure of transit funding, in addition to the top-line number, remains the same as in the executive budget.

Update: We originally reported that the budget included a requirement that the MTA hire an accounting firm to conduct a forensic audit of the authority. The forensic audit was included in a Senate-only version of the budget bill, however. The final version of the budget, as presented to Governor Cuomo, does not include the requirement for a forensic audit.

As we reported yesterday, two open issues in budget negotiations threatened $170 million in funds for the MTA. The Senate Republicans were trying to exempt schools from the payroll mobility tax, which would have cost the MTA $70 million, and the Assembly was opposed to a Cuomo plan to shift $100 million in Assembly discretionary funds to the MTA.

According to Brennan’s legislative director, Lorrie Smith, the Assembly remains opposed to having its money be used for the MTA, but will find another source for that $100 million. “The MTA is not going to lose that money,” she said. “Mr. Brennan’s main goal here is to protect the MTA’s budget.” It is not clear, however, what the alternative source for that $100 million will be.

Smith also told us that the payroll tax exemption was not going to make it into any final budget. “The payroll tax, as I understand it, is off the table,” said Smith, “because the Assembly is adamantly opposed to it.” According to the leaked memo we reported on yesterday, the Cuomo administration is also opposed to cutting back the payroll tax in this budget.

Finally, Smith revealed that a third transit issue is keeping the transportation section of the budget from being completed: Long Island Bus, which recently cut more than half of its lines. “This is an issue that is being decided some place above us,” said Smith, who knew only that negotiations were ongoing.

We have calls in with the governor and Senate Transportation Committee chair Charles Fuschillo’s offices to confirm that these issues are indeed off the negotiating table.