Sen. Schumer's plan to salvage the jobs bill wouldn't resuscitate plans for $50 billion in transportation spending. Photo: AP

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer has proposed narrowing the bill down to two parts – one favored by Democrats, the other by Republicans. Under the plan, an infrastructure bank would be created in the model endorsed by the president and the Kerry-Hutchison BUILD Act. In exchange, there would be a tax holiday for corporations to bring back to the U.S. profits they made overseas.

Obama’s bill had also called for a $50 billion investment in transportation infrastructure, and that appears to be dead as the Senate pursues Schumer’s plan. The House had dismissed the transportation component long ago, with Republican leadership saying they might hold a vote on the pieces of the bill that appeal to them (surprise — stimulus spending isn’t one of them). Meanwhile, some insiders say that Republicans in the House are getting serious about passing a transportation reauthorization before March 31 so that they can show that they, too, are serious about job creation.

Of course, the path they seem to be setting out on involves paying for a higher level of transportation spending with oil drilling, a proposal that’s sure to run up against massive Democratic opposition and possibly even a presidential veto.

And many think that not much is going to happen on any of this until the super committee comes back with its proposals for deficit reduction before Thanksgiving.

Back to the Schumer jobs plan: We’ve written a lot, and will be writing more, about the pros and cons of an infrastructure bank. But what about this idea of repatriating overseas profits?

The plan would allow corporations to stash their profits made outside the country in U.S. banks without paying the 35 percent corporate tax rate they’d normally have to pay. There’s no guarantee that just because that money would now be sitting in U.S. banks that it would be used to create U.S. jobs, though – in fact, a similar repatriation plan in 2004 failed miserably on that front.

Dan DiMicco, CEO of the Nucor steel company, said last week that he’d be in favor of a repatriation holiday where the companies invested part of their repatriated profits in an infrastructure bank. However, Schumer’s thinking doesn’t go that far. The tax earnings from the lower tax rate imposed on the repatriated profits would go into the Treasury, plain and simple.

As for the prospects of the Schumer bill, in the GOP , even this scaled-back plan bears Obama’s mark since it is the offspring of his jobs bill, and therefore Republicans are reluctant to vote for it. Even Lindsey Graham, co-sponsor of the BUILD Act for an infrastructure bank, will only commit to “considering” the new proposal.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would rather pay for the infrastructure bank with a surtax on millionaires – a proposal Republicans persist in calling “class warfare.”

Senator Chuck Schumer, a frequent cyclist, walks his bike by the Prospect Park West bike lane, which he told bike lane opponents he does not like. Image: Brooklyn Spoke.

Throughout the Prospect Park West bike lane saga, intense speculation has surrounded New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer. Both his wife, Iris Weinshall, and his daughter, Jessica Schumer, played leading roles in the fight against the redesign, but Schumer’s office remained studiously silent throughout. “I am not commenting,” Schumer repeatedly told the New York Times when asked about the bike lane this March; in later press conferences, his staff barred reporters from asking about it.

Despite his public attempt to remain neutral, Schumer told opponents of the bike lane that he personally opposed it, according to correspondence obtained by Streetsblog via freedom of information request.

Members of the anti-bike lane group “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” also attempted to use the senator’s political power and network of contacts to their advantage. They exploited his connections to get access to top political consultants and hoped to use his clout to pressure local elected officials. David Seifman at the Post has reported that Schumer asked City Council members what they would do about the bike lane. Schumer may also have discussed the project with Mayor Bloomberg himself, according to a message from one leading bike lane opponent.

Schumer apparently revealed his opposition to the bike lane to NBBL leader Louise Hainline, who lives in the penthouse of the same Prospect Park West apartment building the senator calls home. “Schumer can’t help much with this issue, but I have seen him and he doesn’t like the lane,” wrote Hainline to two bike lane opponents on June 29, 2010. Though Hainline said Schumer “can’t help much,” NBBL repeatedly attempted to use his connections and clout to aid their efforts.

Bike lane opponents sought to wield the senator’s political influence to pressure local elected officials. Specifically, Hainline believed that she could leverage her Schumer connection to win the backing of City Council Member Steve Levin.

In an e-mail to a personal friend on December 24, 2010, Hainline reported on her recent meetings with members of the City Council. She came away believing Council Member Brad Lander wouldn’t turn against the lane, but that Levin might. Wrote Hainline: “Stephen Levin is a protégée of Vito Lopez, who if you are reading the papers is in some hot water, so Levin’s looking for some god father, and may want Vacca or Schumer to protect him, maybe both.”

It’s not clear whether Hainline’s plan for Levin was based on her recent conversation with him or was simply wishful thinking. Levin has not taken a public position on the bike lane, even when asked about it directly.

No written evidence of Schumer’s direct lobbying on the bike lane has surfaced, but one email is quite suggestive. On December 3, 2010, bike lane opponent and former deputy mayor Norman Steisel wrote to Weinshall: “Also heard abt a purported conversation betwn the mayor and our sr. senator you might find of interest.” In all the documents obtained by Streetsblog, the extent of Steisel and Weinshall’s communications was limited to the Prospect Park West bike lane, suggesting that the conversation “of interest” between Schumer and Bloomberg was likely about the same topic.

Weinshall, Hainline, and Jessica Schumer also tried to enlist a veteran of Chuck Schumer’s press shop. On July 12, 2010, Jessica Schumer reported on the latest ally her family had recruited in their fight against the bike lane: one of the state’s top media consultants. “My mom talked with Risa Heller on Saturday night – she used to do my dad’s press and then went on to work for the governor and now does PR work,” she wrote. “She said she would be willing to help us out a little – so I can get in touch with her if you would like.” Hainline said that she’d be interested, and Schumer agreed to contact Heller.

A few days later, Hainline proposed smearing Transportation Alternatives and Streetsblog for receiving funding from Mark Gorton, who at the time was enmeshed in a lawsuit with the record industry over his Limewire file-sharing software. “I’ll take a look at it this weekend,” Jessica Schumer told Hainline, copying Weinshall, “and will see what risa thinks of that angle as well.”

Nine days after Jessica Schumer first reached out to Heller, Hainline told two NBBL members: “We also have some advice from a media person who cannot be public but was recommending a press conference when we file the suit.”

Heller was the only media professional mentioned in the NBBL communications obtained by Streetsblog during this period, but she specifically denied that this email referred to her. “Iris reached out to me and as much as I love her I declined to get involved,” Heller told Streetsblog.

Schumer’s current staff appear to be keeping a close eye on reports that link him to the bike lane opposition. Of note is an email from Weinshall to two of Schumer’s top staffers, Martin Brennan and Mike Lynch. Brennan is Schumer’s New York state director, Lynch his chief of staff. The content of the email was of little consequence — a friend sent a clip from a Streetsblog article about the Schumer family to Weinshall, who forwarded it on to Brennan, Lynch and Jessica Schumer — but it was sent to their Senate email addresses, suggesting official business.

There remains much that we don’t know about Schumer’s involvement in the fight against the bike lane. We don’t know whether he played a role in convincing Gibson Dunn partner Randy Mastro to provide ample legal resources at no cost for the lawsuit backed by his wife and daughter. We don’t know what the senator said about the bike lane to City Council members or to Mayor Bloomberg. There is solid evidence, however, that Chuck Schumer, like the rest of his family, opposed the Prospect Park West bike lane, and that his political stature was vital to the fight against it.

The Senate Democrats predict enormous cuts to transit funding in the New York region if the Republican transportation bill becomes law. Image: Tri-State Transportation Campaign

Rep. John Mica’s proposed transportation bill would take a machete to federal transportation spending, cutting overall transportation funding by a third and entirely eliminating dedicated funds for pedestrian and bike infrastructure.

In New York, the effects would be especially dire. Statewide, the total cuts would inch up to 37 percent, according to calculations by the Democrat-controlled Senate Banking Committee (thanks to Ya-Ting Liu at the Tri-State Transportation Campaign for compiling these numbers).

While nationwide, Mica would maintain the 80/20 split between highway and transit spending, New York and its neighbors flex some of their highway dollars to support transit. In the tri-state region, cuts to federal “highway” spending translate into cuts to transit spending as well. Under the Mica proposal, federal highway spending in New York would fall by $568 million a year from current levels, while transit spending would be cut by $646 million. Those austerity levels would be locked in for six years.

At a time when the MTA is already facing a $10 billion deficit in its capital plan through 2014, those cuts could be devastating.

An MTA spokesperson told us that Mica’s plan, which is only an outline at this point, does not contain enough detail to assess the exact impact on the agency and transit riders. “While we support his efforts to promote efficiency, we are concerned about the level of funding that he intends to include in his legislation,” he continued.

New York representatives blasted the proposal. “We are extremely concerned about what a 34 percent cut would mean for all of New York’s needs,” a spokesperson for Rep. Jerry Nadler told Streetsblog. “This would be devastating when we’re already struggling to stay afloat with the resources already available.”

Nadler’s office also pointed out that Mica proposes increasing the share of transit funds that go to suburban and rural areas, as well as to the elderly, disabled and transit-dependent. Said Nadler’s spokesperson: “Given that the funding levels are cut, they can probably only accomplish this by taking money from the other transit programs that benefit urban areas like Rail Modernization. This is really bad for NYC/MTA and other cities with older subway systems (e.g. Boston, Chicago).”

Sen. Chuck Schumer responded to the Republican proposal over Twitter. “Rep Mica plan to cut infrastructure is job-killing, future-suffocating, pessimistic vision of US as ‘can’t do’ nation,” he wrote.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand focused on the economic impact of the Mica plan: “We all agree that we must reduce spending, but the House Republicans are determined to slash all the way to the bone and New York would disproportionally pay the price. Infrastructure investments are vital to New York and America’s economic future. But rather than invest in our future, this misguided House proposal would cut approximately 44,625 jobs in New York State alone, and more than 600,000 nationwide. New Yorkers and organizations from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the AFL-CIO agree that this proposal is the wrong direction.”

#3: Before NBBL was lobbying City Hall to remove the Prospect Park West bike lane, Marty Markowitz and Iris Weinshall were lobbying DOT to not even build the PPW bike lane (PDF). #4: NBBL has a U.S. Senator on their side.

If opponents of an effective street safety project repeat dishonest distortions about it often enough, does that make their position true? Apparently, the Daily News editorial board thinks so. An opinion piece they published over the weekend on the Prospect Park West bike lane might as well have come straight from the desk of Gibson Dunn lawyer Jim Walden, the corporate litigator, Chuck Schumer campaign donor, and rumored Brooklyn DA hopeful who’s now representing bike lane opponents “pro bono.”

A decade ago Daily News reporters were crusading for safety improvements on Queens Boulevard, leading to measures that prevented injuries and saved lives. Now, without any hint of skepticism, truthseeking, or other basic journalistic impulses, the Daily News editorial writers seem content to lift talking points straight from street safety opponents, aligning themselves with the goal of making New York more dangerous. They apparently believe the narrative spun by the anti-bike lane group known as “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” and their spin-off, “Seniors for Safety” — a story in which DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is the only person in New York who wants safer streets for biking and walking, and the local community could, at any moment, “erupt into open revolt.”

It can be time-consuming to visit the neighborhood you’re opining about, do nuts-and-bolts research, or fact-check the faulty assertions in a lawsuit before you reprint them for hundreds of thousands of readers, so Streetsblog has compiled this handy list for the future reference of the Daily News editorial staff, or anyone who’s actually curious about how this project came to be and what the opponents are really after (hint: it’s not safety or “better bike lanes”).

The NBBL narrative obscures the following:

1. Community groups asked for the project

   One of NBBL’s basic tenets, unchallenged by the tabloid dailies, is that the city foisted the Prospect Park West redesign on the neighborhood. But the fact is that public pressure to tame traffic on Prospect Park West had been mounting since 2006, when the Park Slope Civic Council’s traffic and transportation forum highlighted rampant speeding on PPW as a major quality of life concern.

   Later that year, after holding a series of public workshops, the Grand Army Plaza Coalition produced a report including recommendations for better bike access to GAP, and in 2007, Brooklyn Community Board 6 asked the city to study the implementation of a two-way, protected bike lane on PPW. Park Slope Neighbors later gathered 1,300 signatures asking for a two-way bike lane and traffic calming measures on the street — all before DOT proposed the PPW redesign in 2009. No one had to convince people that their neighborhood streets could function a lot better.

2. DOT’s safety data is rigorous and honest

   Data collected from the six-month study period after implementation of the re-design clearly shows that the incidence of speeding on PPW has gone down significantly, and the early results indicate that crash and injury rates have declined. You can’t be “for safety” and oppose a project that produces these benefits, so NBBL has attacked the data and cherrypicked numbers to undermine confidence in DOT’s methodology.

   To do this, NBBL claimed that DOT typically doesn’t use multi-year averages of crash data to ascertain the effect of street redesigns, when the truth is that this is exactly how DOT and other transportation agencies measure safety effects, because that’s the statistically rigorous way to do it. As Gary Toth, a 34-year veteran of the New Jersey Department of Transportation, told Streetsblog: “It is the opponents’ lawyers who are grasping at aberrations and doing the very thing they accuse the DOT of — selectively picking data to stack the deck in their favor.”

3. Before NBBL was lobbying City Hall to remove the PPW bike lane, Iris Weinshall and Marty Markowitz were lobbying DOT to not even build the PPW bike lane

   From the beginning, the campaign against the bike lane has been spearheaded by opponents with political clout. In October 2009, after the PPW redesign had been approved by CB 6, Borough President Marty Markowitz wrote to Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, asking her not to install the redesign. “I am joined in this request by former DOT Commissioner, Iris Weinshall — who absolutely agrees that the installation of a two-way, barricaded bike lane would cause incredible congestion,” Markowitz wrote in a letter [PDF] obtained by Streetsblog through freedom of information requests. The attempt to perform an end-run around a multi-year community-led planning process had begun. Weinshall would later join Louise Hainline and Norman Steisel in penning a letter to the New York Times on behalf of NBBL, speciously claiming that the redesign increased danger on PPW.

4. They have a U.S. Senator on their side

   NBBL leaders have taken to saying that only “a small number” of their members are politically connected. But it only takes one former deputy mayor to go over the heads of the local community board and get direct access to City Hall. It only takes one former transportation commissioner to lend an air of legitimacy to spurious claims about a traffic-calming project increasing risk. And if that former DOT chief is married to a U.S. Senator, that’s all you need to enlist City Council members to start agitating against the current DOT and its projects to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists.

5. They have media access that would make Snooki jealous

   In the annals of NYC NIMBYism, NBBL may be the only neighborhood-level opposition group that has hired a PR firm to get its message out to the press. They’ve also received a helping hand from Marty Markowitz’s office, which offered to put members of NBBL in touch with CBS2 reporter Marcia Kramer last October, according to email correspondence obtained by Streetsblog. CBS2 aired a Kramer segment in February featuring Markowitz, NBBL member Steve Spirn, and video footage provided by NBBL. The coordination between all these parties is never revealed to the viewer, who sees a series of bike lane opponents that seem unrelated to each other. Kramer never mentioned NBBL herself during the segment; only after she kicked it back to the anchor did he say that a group called “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” planned on suing the city.

6. Most people like the redesign

   A phone survey commissioned by Assembly member James Brennan found a 3-2 margin of support for keeping the bike lane — and that was using a sample skewed heavily toward car owners. A web survey put out by City Council Members Brad Lander and Steve Levin and Brooklyn CB 6 received 3,000 responses and found 70 percent support for keeping the redesign. And at the last CB 6 hearing that invited public testimony on the bike lane, about eight times as many people signed up to speak in favor of the redesign as signed up to speak against it. The only way to set off a community “revolt” related to the bike lane would be to remove it.

7. NBBL is very upset about a single blog comment

   In the NBBL narrative, DOT conspired to, in the words of Gibson Dunn attorney Jim Walden, “enlist an individual (the ‘Blogger’) to wage a viral campaign against critics of the PPW configuration.” The “viral campaign” Walden refers to consists of a blog comment posted here on Streetsblog last April by Aaron “The Blogger” Naparstek (who had stepped down as  Streetsblog editor-in-chief about three months before posting the comment in question). The Blogger’s notorious comment was not, in fact, prompted by DOT overlords calling on him to attack opponents. It wasn’t even directed at specific individuals — all that was known at the time was that bike lane opponents had put up an anonymous flyer around Park Slope advertising an upcoming meeting. The comment was mostly a parody of that flyer. Yes, this is what all the fuss has been about.

8. The defense of the Prospect Park West bike lane came from the bottom up

   Picture this scenario: You’re engaged in the goings on in your neighborhood and involved with a local civic group, and about five years ago you participate in public forums and workshops where people talk about what needs to change to make the neighborhood a better place to walk and bike. The ideas coalesce into a vision. It can be tough to get the city to take a community-generated plan and run with it, but after a lot more organizing and signature-gathering, the city draws up an official plan based on part of this vision. The community board approves the plan, and then the following year the city implements it.

   This is the point in the Prospect Park West story when NBBL appeared on the scene, sending letters to deputy mayors and then threatening to sue the city for installing the PPW redesign. All those engaged neighborhood residents who put in the hours to brainstorm how to fix their streets and gather signatures in support of their ideas didn’t need any prodding from the city to defend the new bike lane. There was no DOT-orchestrated campaign to “collude with bike lobbyists to mislead the public and attack opponents,” as the NBBL lawsuit alleges. The defense of the PPW bike lane is the work of many engaged residents who want to preserve a hard-won safety improvement for their neighborhood.

9. The NBBL lawsuit is flimsy

   The NBBL complaint is “largely public relations, with no more law behind it than is minimally necessary to avoid sanctions for frivolity,” according to an NYU Law School professor who specializes in government law.

10. 

    Photo copyright Dmitry Gudkov, used with permission

Noah Kazis contributed reporting to this post.

Senators Chuck Schumer and Barbara Boxer on the return leg of their journey this morning. Photo: Carly Clark

Senator Chuck Schumer broke his long public silence on the redesigned Prospect Park West in dramatic fashion this morning, leading members of Congress on a two-wheeled tour of the physically separated bike lane that runs past his Brooklyn home. Schumer used the occasion to announce that he’ll be introducing new legislation to promote investment in bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.

“I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this bike lane, and I just wanted to wait until this moment to say, ‘What’s not to like?’” Schumer told a press gaggle at Grand Army Plaza. “There’s much less speeding and more people feel safer riding their bikes to get around the neighborhood thanks to this new design. America needs more streets like this.”

Schumer’s bill, the Livable Streets Act of 2011, would make $3 billion available to states and cities each year for investment in walkable street networks and improvements to bicycle and pedestrian safety. The bill is intended to be part of the upcoming long-term reauthorization of the nation’s transportation law.

At the presser, Schumer was joined by California Democrat Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee and will shepherd much of the transportation bill through the Senate. Schumer said he’s been waiting since the redesign was installed last summer to show it to Boxer as an example of what bicycle and pedestrian investment can accomplish.

“Nothing beats a nice, long Brooklyn bike ride with my friends from Congress, but it used to scare them to death getting passed on this street by traffic going 40 miles an hour,” he said after leading a leisurely round-trip ride, in a light drizzle, to the opposite end of the bike lane and back. “Now you can start off comfortable and relaxed, and you see so many other people out biking. They’re going to work, they’re taking their kids to school.”

“You know, the President talked about ‘winning the future’ in his state of the union speech this year,” he added. “Well, we’re winning the future right outside my front door. This is what progress looks like.”

After the ride, Boxer said she looked forward to working with Schumer on incorporating his legislation into the final transportation bill. “You really get incredible bang for the buck out of projects like this, which make a whole lot of sense when you consider that 40 percent of all the trips we make in America are within two miles of home,” she said. “Factor in what you save from having fewer crashes and injuries and less wear-and-tear on the roads, and this is going to pay for itself.”

Invoking his policy muses, the imaginary Massapequa couple he calls the Baileys, Schumer noted that smarter zoning and safer streets could make bicycling a viable transportation option even if you have creaky knees and live in the suburbs. “These days the Baileys are getting squeezed at the pump,” he said. “Gas costs $4 a gallon. They can’t afford to make every trip by car. If we think we can drill our way out of this situation like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and the other extremists who get marching orders from Big Oil, we’re kidding ourselves. We need better choices for getting around, and transit and bikes have got to be part of the mix.”

When asked about the lawsuit filed last month by opponents of the bike lane, Schumer defended NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and called the plaintiffs’ campaign against the redesign “a cynical concoction of distortions and lies.”

“Janette is taking it on the chin from what I call the culture of inertia, this small group of self-appointed people,” he said. “Here we have kids, families, and grandmas who finally feel safe biking on this street, and people want to sue it out of existence? We can’t give in to this shameless bullying. If we do not change, we will die.”

There are many things we still don't know about the involvement of former transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, and former deputy mayor Norman Steisel in efforts to erase the Prospect Park West bike lane and undermine the city's street safety policies.

Thanks to some rescheduling, we’ve got nearly two months until the first court hearing on the Prospect Park West lawsuit. Flimsy as the plaintiffs’ case may be, they now have a long time to run their smear campaign against DOT and the neighborhood advocates who put in years of organizing to make this street safer.

So we’re probably going to be seeing more of Gibson Dunn lawyer Jim Walden in the media — he’s quite skilled at getting the papers to reprint his arguments, no matter how scurrilous. And the more we hear from Jim, the less we seem to read about the political maneuvering his clients have engaged in to erase a project that enjoys broad support and has slowed speeders while opening up a neighborhood street for all-ages cycling.

Which is too bad, because there are an awful lot of public figures connected to this campaign to erase a single bike lane. Think of the political story that will eventually be written. It involves City Council members, a borough president, former deputy mayors, a former federal prosecutor and top candidate for U.S. Attorney, a former transportation commissioner, a sitting U.S. Senator, and maybe a certain political correspondent at CBS2.

We’d like to find out more about the connections between all these players, and we’re not going to find out by calling them up and asking politely. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

At the beginning of February, Streetsblog sent a freedom of information request to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s office, asking for his staff’s communications about the Prospect Park West project. The request was delivered on February 8, according to the U.S. Postal Service, but when we later checked in with Markowitz’s office, they told us they never received it. Markowitz’s staff counsel asked us to email the request to him, which we did. He then said he’d let us know by March 16 if the request would be granted. We’re still waiting to hear back on that one.

Streetsblog needs some muscle behind this FOIL request if we’re going to get any information out of it. So we’ve hired attorney Steve Vaccaro of Rankin & Taylor to manage the process. We’re not getting pro bono assistance on this one, and our budget doesn’t usually include a line for FOIL-related legal expenses, so if you can contribute to Streetsblog this spring, it will help us see this important reporting project through to completion.

In addition to Markowitz, Streetsblog is seeking information about PPW-related political activity from Iris Weinshall and Louise Hainline, both prominent members of the bike lane opposition and high-level employees at the City University of New York who are subject to the state’s freedom of information law. We are also FOILing Hainline’s husband, CUNY professor Micha Tomkiewicz, who has been closely involved in the opposition, and City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca, to learn more about lobbying that preceded last year’s bike policy hearing, where PPW opponents received an inordinate amount of attention.

Streetsblog is interested in gleaning information from these FOIL requests to help fill in some of the big gaps in the political backstory surrounding the Prospect Park West project, the attempt to eradicate it, and the smear campaign aimed at the people who requested, planned and supported it.

There’s a lot of information out there still to be uncovered. We know Senator Chuck Schumer has had words with City Council members, asking what they’re going to do about the Prospect Park West bike lane (and other bike lanes), but we don’t have any details about whom Schumer tried to influence or how.

We know that Iris Weinshall and Norman Steisel — a guy who used to run City Hall — had sit-downs with City Council members before last December’s committee hearing on bike policy, but we don’t know how they managed to get so much camera time for Steisel before anyone else got to testify.

We know that bike lane opponents have managed to get free services from a very expensive litigator at a politically-connected white shoe law firm, but it’s never really been explained why Jim Walden took this case pro bono, unless you believe that suing the city to undo a popular and effective street safety project is really an exercise in “good government litigation.”

These are some of the questions we hope to answer when people disclose the information we’ve requested. If you’re fed up with watching the city’s program to promote cycling and prevent traffic deaths and injuries get bogged down in the fight over a single project on a single street, I hope you’ll support this work and contribute to Streetsblog. We believe that telling the political story behind the Prospect Park West fight will have implications not just for this project, but for street safety improvements all over the city.

Photo: Clarence Eckerson

This was the scene in Jackson Heights yesterday, where Mayor Bloomberg, Anthony Weiner, and the top dog on Prospect Park West, Senator Chuck Schumer, joined a bevy of other pols to contest the surprisingly low Census counts in Brooklyn and Queens. (That’s Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez between Bloomberg and Schumer.)

During the presser, the Senator was extremely chatty about a recent bike ride through the neighborhood, humorously pointing out how his impressions just didn’t jibe with the Census numbers showing scant 0.1 percent population growth in Queens over the last decade: “Incredibly, I was just riding my bike yesterday through Middle Village, Woodside, Maspeth, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, and as I biked all I noticed was rows and rows of abandoned homes everywhere and there is nobody on the streets.”

Afterward, as the Times reported today, Schumer clammed up when questions turned to the bike lane in front of his house on Prospect Park West, which he has reportedly lobbied against. His wife, Iris Weinshall, is closely affiliated with the groups currently suing the city to remove the lane. “I am not commenting,” was his refrain. According to the Times, Schumer’s office had expressly forbidden questions about the bike lane at the presser.

In case you’re wondering, Schumer does comment about bike projects, just not ones in front of his house. Here’s an excerpt from a letter his office sent just last week, urging the freight rail company CSX to sell some land for a rail trail link in Dutchess County:

“The Walkway has transformed the City of Poughkeepsie into a destination, allowing local businesses to flourish during an economic downturn, and I am confident the extension of the Walkway to the Greater Rail Trail will only increase economic activity in the region,” Schumer said in his letter.

Okay, back to the caption contest: What is Chuck Schumer saying in this picture? Leave your entries in the comments.

Former DOT commissioner Iris Weinshall, Senator Chuck Schumer, and former deputy mayor Norman Steisel are waging a campaign to overturn a street safety project initiated by their neighbors and supported by most of the local community.

If the goal of the Prospect Park West bike lane lawsuit is to smear the Department of Transportation and sow doubt about the city’s street safety initiatives, it’s already doing a bang-up job. The Post and the Daily News both ran pieces yesterday basically lifting arguments straight out of the plaintiffs’ complaint [PDF] without a shred of analysis. Both papers repeat the same basic distortion: Bike lane opponents are fighting DOT’s agenda. But that’s not really what’s going on here.

The plaintiffs — the group of politically-connected residents who go by “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” and have the backing of former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall, who happens to be married to Senator Chuck Schumer — are mainly fighting their own neighbors. If the DOT’s efforts to make streets safer citywide become a casualty in this fight, that’s collateral damage.

Last October's rally for the PPW redesign: These are the people whom bike lane opponents are looking to circumvent via litigation.

Let’s be clear: Residents of Park Slope asked for the Prospect Park West project. The idea for a two-way, protected bike path did not debut with DOT’s April 2009 presentation, as the Daily News suggests. It was not imposed, in the words of the Post’s Rich Calder, “to push an anti-automobile agenda.” The initiative to slow down speeding traffic on Prospect Park West and give people safer space to walk and bike predates Janette Sadik-Khan’s tenure at DOT. It came from people who live in the neighborhood — people who organized and attended public meetings and put together ideas for how to improve local streets.

These are the people whom the “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” and their corporate litigator-turned-pro bono counsel, Gibson Dunn’s Jim Walden, are fighting.

They are fighting the results of a community organizing effort that goes back to the days when Iris Weinshall was in charge of DOT. In 2006, well before Sadik-Khan became transportation commissioner, rampant speeding on Prospect Park West and Eighth Avenue emerged as a top concern at the Park Slope Civic Council’s annual traffic and transportation forum. Shortly thereafter, another neighborhood group, the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, made it a core goal to create safe bike access to and through Grand Army Plaza.

A physically protected bikeway on Prospect Park West would address both those concerns, and in June 2007, Community Board 6 requested that DOT study a two-way separated bike lane on Prospect Park West [PDF] when it approved plans for a bike lane on Ninth Street (a project initiated on Iris Weinshall’s watch and completed under Sadik-Khan). Sadik-Khan’s DOT then received 1,300 signatures requesting the bike lane, gathered by the group Park Slope Neighbors, before coming back to CB 6 with a proposal, which was approved by the full board in June 2009.

A year later, the lane was installed. Radar surveys commissioned by DOT showed that the incidence of speeding dropped dramatically after implementation, and bike counts jumped substantially. The principal goals of the project, to reduce dangerous speeding, improve bike access, and get cyclists off the sidewalk, had been achieved. In a survey of 3,000 Brooklynites conducted by City Council members Brad Lander and Steve Levin and CB 6, more than 70 percent of Park Slope residents said they wanted the lane to stay.

But because the public process did not produce a result that pleased the plaintiffs, bike lane opponents have mounted a concerted campaign to embarrass and discredit the DOT and the neighborhood advocates most closely associated with the project (including my former editor at Streetsblog, Aaron Naparstek). The lawsuit is the inevitable culmination of that campaign. In the narrative laid out in the plaintiffs’ complaint, none of the public process before DOT’s 2009 proposal ever happened. There were no community workshops to identify problems with the existing streets. There was no public demand for safer biking and walking. There’s only the DOT and the “radical bike lobbyists.”

Whether the lawsuit has any legal validity is beside the point now. As a PR strategy, the plaintiffs’ complaint marginalizes broad public sentiment within their own community by naming DOT and Janette Sadik-Khan as defendants. DOT is getting tried in the press, while the wealthy insiders who are circumventing the public process with “pro bono” assistance from a top campaign contributor to Chuck Schumer are mostly getting a free pass.

As you can see in the Daily News, the Post, and Walden’s face-off with Lander on Inside City Hall last night, the opposition is relying heavily on the fact that traffic injuries on Prospect Park West increased from four during the second half of 2009, to five during the second half of 2010, after the street was redesigned.

The thing is, high-quality studies of traffic-calming projects rarely use year-over-year comparisons to evaluate effects on street safety. They use multi-year averages of injury data instead, especially to track events subject to bias from random variation. Statisticians know to look at numbers from several years to dampen the effect of outliers and statistical noise. In this federal study of traffic-calming projects, for instance [PDF], the “before” data uses multi-year averages covering time frames as long as 23 years. Not a single before-and-after case study cited in the report compares merely a single year’s data to the following year’s data. The methodology that Jim Walden and the PPW plaintiffs insist should have been applied to Prospect Park West is as simplistic and misleading as their insistence that the idea for the redesign was imposed from above.

In its injury and crash report on Prospect Park West, DOT used a three-year average for its “before” data, sampling only the last six months of each year to align with the six-month “after” study conducted during the second half of 2010. In his complaint, Jim Walden says that this method “deviated from DOT’s usual approach in reporting its crash statistics.” Walden conveniently ignores other DOT studies that employ multi-year data sets on traffic injuries, like this report on the recent Allen and Pike Street redesign [PDF], which also used multi-year averages to measure injury rates before the installation of a traffic-calming project.

DOT used a six-year average for “before” data on injuries in the Allen and Pike report. Why a three-year average for Prospect Park West? I can’t speak for DOT, but according to the plaintiffs’ own complaint, the city changed the signal progression on Prospect Park West in 2007. The period from 2007 to 2009 would thus be the longest possible time frame to collect injury data on Prospect Park West as it was engineered before the bike lane was installed.

There was no “shaky math.” Data was not “manipulated.” A group of powerful people just don’t agree with their neighbors, so they have decided to litigate.

In an effort to undo a bike lane reportedly opposed by Senator Chuck Schumer, Jim Walden, a partner at Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, is providing free legal services to wealthy Prospect Park West residents who live in some of the most exclusive real estate in Brooklyn. Photo: Gibson Dunn.

Jim Walden is a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the kind of white shoe firm where lawyers represent major corporations at rates of nearly a thousand dollars per hour. His name has been popping up on Streetsblog recently because he represents a politically-connected group attempting to undo the redesign of Prospect Park West. According to press accounts, Walden is doing this work at no charge to the client. Walden would not comment to Streetsblog for this story.

Under the ethical standards of the legal profession, lawyers are expected to donate a certain amount of their time pro bono publico, for the good of the public, and some of Walden’s pro bono representations are quite impressive. In 2007, he received Gibson Dunn’s top award for exemplary pro bono work for representing 11,000 New Yorkers whose food stamps had been wrongfully terminated. Last June, Walden won a pro bono case in front of the United States Supreme Court preventing a legal resident from being deported for a minor drug offense.

Walden’s newest pro bono case, however, doesn’t rise to the standard he’s set in the past. In representing a group of Brooklyn residents fighting against the traffic-calming Prospect Park West street redesign, Walden is devoting his pro bono time to the affluent and politically connected, not those in need.

The New York City Bar Association’s statement of pro bono principles, which Gibson Dunn has signed on to, defines pro bono work as legal services provided without fee to:

• “persons of limited means,
• charitable, religious, civic, cultural, community, governmental and educational organizations committed to serving the needs of persons of limited means and/or in matters which are designed primarily to address the needs of persons of limited means,
• individuals, groups or organizations seeking to secure or protect civil rights, civil liberties or public rights,
• individuals, groups or organizations who have been harmed by a natural disaster or public emergency or who are providing assistance to persons harmed by a natural disaster or public emergency, and
• charitable, religious, civic, cultural, community, governmental and educational organizations in matters in furtherance of their organizational purposes, where the payment of legal fees would significantly deplete the organization’s economic resources.”

Esther Lardent, the president of the Pro Bono Institute, wouldn’t comment on the particulars of a specific case, but did share some general principles about pro bono work. “If this is something that could be handled on a contingency basis in the marketplace,” explained Lardent, “that would be unlikely to be something that could happen on a pro bono basis.” If the clients can afford to pay, in other words, it’s not likely to merit pro bono services.

The Pro Bono Institute is a non-profit organization that helps support pro bono work; Gibson Dunn has signed on to the institute’s Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge. “In recognition of the special needs of the poor for legal services, we believe that our firm’s pro bono activities should be particularly focused on providing access to the justice system for persons otherwise unable to afford it,” reads one section of that challenge.

The pro bono coordinator of another major law firm, who asked to remain anonymous in order to protect the firm, told Streetsblog that while different firms have different approaches to pro bono work, “We try to focus all of our pro bono on helping the poor, or helping institutions that help the poor, or advancing rights.”

It’s hard to call the leaders of the anti-bike lane group either poor or powerless. The group’s leading spokespeople are Norman Steisel, a former deputy mayor, and Louise Hainline, a dean at Brooklyn College. They have published letters in print and online media alongside Iris Weinshall, a former DOT commissioner and the wife of Senator Chuck Schumer.

The group’s membership form [PDF], which solicits donations to help pay for “incidental costs of our litigation expenses,” instructs donors to send their non-tax deductible contributions to 9 Prospect Park West, PHA — the penthouse apartment in one of the most exclusive addresses in Brooklyn.

A co-op apartment in 9 Prospect Park West recently sold for $3.2 million dollars, with $3600 per month in maintenance fees. The penthouse apartment, one can safely assume, must command a higher price than that. To repeat: According to its membership form, the group receiving free legal services from Jim Walden and Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher is headquartered in an apartment likely worth several million dollars.

While the ability of the client to get legal help on their own is an important consideration in pro bono work, it isn’t the only one. Lardent gave the example of the pro bono work many law firms provided to members of Congress in the Citizens United campaign finance case. While those clients weren’t low-income or without power, explained Lardent, the case wasn’t really about the particular client. If a case “would benefit the legal system as a whole, benefit access to justice,” said Lardent, “we’re very likely to say that’s an appropriate pro bono representation.”

Even if you believed that helping politically-connected insiders overturn a multi-year public process was an issue of access to justice, in such cases you also have to apply a higher level of scrutiny. “Is this a loss leader or a business development strategy?” asked Lardent. “How did the firm take this case on? What was its motivation?” If a case came in through an established pro bono committee and received a vote of support from that committee, she said, that’s very different than if a case reached the firm through its commercial work. “You want to make sure this wasn’t in some way a client accommodation.” You also need to be sure it isn’t a personal favor for either clients or the firm’s attorneys, she explained.

One inappropriate use of pro bono that firms are presented with all the time, explained the coordinator at the other law firm, would be supporting an elite private school that a lawyer’s child attends. Although such a school could qualify under a loose reading of the pro bono guidelines, “it doesn’t really fit into our reading of the Pro Bono Institute definition.” Those cases don’t make it through the firm’s pro bono committee.

While it isn’t clear what process Gibson Dunn went through in taking on this case pro bono (we have tried to contact their New York office, their pro bono coordinator, their press office, and Jim Walden), the details that have emerged suggest that it may not meet the standards that Lardent set out.

It has been reported, for example, that the bike lane opponents were put in touch with Walden by Randy Mastro, a deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and a current partner at Gibson Dunn. Walden’s connections to Senator Chuck Schumer raise additional ethical questions for the case. Walden made the maximum contribution to Schumer’s 2010 re-election campaign and was almost Schumer’s pick to be U.S. attorney in 2009. Schumer has reportedly lobbied City Council members against the bike lane and is married to Weinshall.

William Simon, the Everett B. Birch Professor in Professional Responsibility at Columbia Law School, explained that most pro bono guidelines include an escape clause broad enough to cover Gibson Dunn’s decision to take this case on a pro bono basis. “You’re going to find a catch-all in most of the promulgated definitions” of pro bono, he said. But, he noted, “If I were in a firm, I’d certainly push for a definition of pro bono that focused on relatively disadvantaged people who really need the assistance.” If the point of pro bono work for most law firms is primarily to boost their reputations, he said, taking on this particular case “may undermine some of the reputational advantages they’re going to get.”

To Simon’s point, Gibson Dunn’s own pro bono page states proudly, “Whether protecting constitutional rights, working to preserve historic buildings, battling slumlords, protecting the environment, or facilitating adoptions and guardianships, our attorneys have provided access to justice for those who could not otherwise afford it.”

Fighting a bike lane that is making the street safer and preventing injuries probably won’t be one of Gibson Dunn’s featured pro bono suits any time soon.

Ben Fried contributed reporting to this post.

Clarification: The post has been updated to clarify that Esther Lardent of the Pro Bono Institute was not commenting or rendering judgment about this specific case. After publishing, we received an email from the Pro Bono Institute stating that “the article leaves the inaccurate impression that Lardent’s words apply specifically to the case that is the focus of the story, when in fact her explanation of pro bono was a general one and wholly divorced from the case in question.” This was not Streetsblog’s intent, and we have amended the post to explicitly reflect that Lardent was referring to “general principles about pro bono work.”

U.S. Senator and Prospect Park West resident Chuck Schumer. Photo: Noah Kazis

They call themselves “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes,” but in a press release sent out yesterday, opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign make it pretty clear that, in a world where things are called what they actually are, NBBL would stand for “Never Build Bike Lanes.” The group, which is closely affiliated with Schumer’s spouse, former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall, wants to see a citywide moratorium on bike lane construction while the city puts into effect new bills that open up data on traffic crashes to the public. In behind the scenes conversations with members of the City Council, Schumer himself has lobbied against bike lanes, the Post reported last month.

NBBL’s press release mistakenly assumes that Council Speaker Christine Quinn and transportation committee chair James Vacca also back the idea of a bike lane moratorium. But Andrea Bernstein at Transportation Nation reports that Quinn and Vacca don’t support such a policy.

In addition to putting words in the mouths of City Council members, the NBBL press release perpetuates the myth that data on the Prospect Park West redesign has been lacking.

In fact, data on the Prospect Park West bike lane has been exhaustively collected and promptly made available to the public. The numbers show that injuries caused by traffic are down since the redesign was implemented last summer. The NYPD has reported no injuries caused by bike-ped collisions. DOT has presented information on travel times, traffic volumes, speeding, bike volumes, and sidewalk cycling in multiple installments, and the raw numbers are all available online for anyone to see [PDF].

Robust statistical analysis indicates that NBBL’s moratorium would delay progress on making NYC streets safer for pedestrians as well as cyclists. Citywide, DOT’s 2010 study of 7,000 pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries found that crashes on streets with bike lanes are 40 percent less deadly for pedestrians than crashes on streets without bike lanes.

The city’s data is solid. NBBL, on the other hand, has a history of inflating their own support and using worthless apples-to-oranges comparisons to argue for undoing an effective street redesign.

Despite their lack of credibility, NBBL was able to get themselves some press in the Brooklyn Paper after sending out their latest piece of propaganda. So, it may be instructive to appreciate how they pulled it off. The steps seem to go something like this:

1. Make stuff up
2. Send out press release, including your fabricated, erroneous claims
3. Wait for the phone to ring
4. Get quoted in the press as if you were a credible authority on street safety

Senator Chuck Schumer. Photo: Noah Kazis

In a speech at a Crain’s breakfast this morning, Senator Chuck Schumer called for reinvesting in infrastructure, including repairs to New York’s existing transportation system and new transit projects. Schumer also blasted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for killing the ARC tunnel and for his proposal to use Port Authority funds to pay for maintaining New Jersey roads.

Schumer’s prepared remarks, sent to reporters in a press release, focused exclusively on the capital side of the transportation system. Instead of discussing fare hikes or service cuts, both of which were completely absent from his remarks, Schumer spoke about the megaprojects that will reshape the region’s transit network, including the Second Avenue Subway, the 7 train extension, East Side Access and Moynihan Station, as well as new projects that have yet to reach the construction phase, like high-speed rail and a single-seat train trip to LaGuardia airport.

Encouragingly, Schumer’s call for reinvesting in infrastructure was limited almost exclusively to transit. While he noted that billions of dollars more are needed to keep the state’s transportation system from crumbling, Schumer did not mention any new highway projects and repeatedly made the conceptual case for transit. “On any given weekday, there are two million people commuting into Manhattan alone,” he said. “And it is this very density, which only mass transit allows, that has always allowed our region to attract the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor, all seeking one or more of these opportunities.”

Schumer didn’t reveal what he’ll be fighting for when the Senate eventually takes up the new federal transportation bill. But New York’s senior senator did offer one clue as to his priorities. Schumer opened his remarks by arguing that concerns about the deficit shouldn’t get in the way of new transportation spending. “In trying to fix the long term problems we face, it would be counterproductive to reducing our long-term deficits if we eat our seed corn,” he said, adding that New York built the George Washington Bridge, Triborough Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel and LaGuardia Airport during the Great Depression. With the question of how to fund transportation the thorniest issue in federal policy circles, you can be sure those comments will draw attention inside the Beltway.

In the Tri-State area, Schumer’s attack on Christie may make the most headlines. “Pulling the plug on ARC was a terrible, terrible decision,” he said. “Historians may well look back at this decision – to put a stop to the largest transit project in the country – as a turning point, as a moment that the region, and the nation, stopped looking towards the future.” Schumer noted that the inevitable impact of Christie’s ARC decision will just be to stuff more cars onto the existing Hudson River crossings.

Even worse, said Schumer, is Christie’s attempt to use the Port Authority to bail out the state’s Transportation Trust Fund by paying for work on certain state roads. “We cannot allow the agency to be cannibalized in order to solve short term budget problems,” said Schumer. “Nothing less than the future of the agency and the future of our region are at stake.”

In his recent re-election campaign, Chuck Schumer touted his support of transit tax benefits. Those benefits are about to expire, however.

For many transit riders, there’s another fare hike coming down the track, one that many may not even be aware of.

A provision of the stimulus bill that offered a larger tax break for some transit riders is set to expire at the end of the year. A new report by TransitCenter [PDF], a non-profit that works to provide tax-free transit benefits, outlines just how many riders will be affected by the end of those benefits, and how hard it will hit ridership numbers. By letting the transit benefit revert back to its pre-stimulus levels, Congress would push Americans away from riding transit and pinch the pocketbooks of those who keep riding.

The tax break was slipped into the stimulus bill by New York Senator Chuck Schumer in early 2009. Previously, riders could buy up to $120 in transit fares per month without paying taxes on that income, while those driving to work could deduct up to $230 in parking costs (one example of how the incentive to drive is embedded in the tax code). Schumer’s proviso equalized the caps, but only temporarily. It expires at the end of this year.

TransitCenter found that the higher transit benefit helped increase the number of people who took advantage of it. In 2010, 17 percent more firms offered the pre-tax transit benefit than in 2009, and 29 percent of employers reported higher enrollment in commuter benefits programs while the higher cap was in effect.

Without the higher cap, transit riders paying the national average tax rate of 31.6 percent could see their commuting costs rise up to 18 percent higher. For riders facing such a large effective fare hike, the train won’t look so appealing anymore. The report looked at studies of previous fare hikes and found that an 18 percent increase in price will translate into a five to nine percent drop in ridership among that group.

The cap reduction won’t affect every transit rider. On the nation’s largest urban transit systems, like New York City Transit or L.A. Metro, the cost of a monthly pass is below $120. However, TransitCenter found that of all Americans taking advantage of the commuter tax benefit, around 30 percent spend more than $120. Many of those are commuter rail riders; more than 200,000 people take advantage of the increased tax benefit on New York City’s three commuter rail lines alone, according to TransitCenter.

Schumer has a bill in the Senate, S. 322, that would make the increased transit benefit permanent, but it only has 14 co-sponsors, none of whom are Republicans. The House version of the bill, sponsored by Massachusetts rep Jim McGovern, has 47 co-sponsors, including two Republicans.

Senator Chuck Schumer joined a coalition of labor unions and transportation advocates at Penn Station today to call for emergency federal funding for the nation's transit systems.

The rally made the case for the Public Transportation Preservation Act, which would authorize $2 billion in operating funds for struggling transit systems. Transit riders from New York to Sacramento, Chicago to Atlanta are currently facing service cuts or fare hikes that an injection of federal aid could avert.

If the bill is enacted, New York City's transit system, by far the largest in the country, would receive approximately $345 million. Mass transit "is the lifeblood of our city," said Schumer. "This beautiful, crowded, pulsing city could not be this way unless we had mass transit."

Schumer singled out the potential loss of discount student MetroCards as an unacceptable outcome, recalling his trips to junior high on the B2 bus.

New York's transit cuts go into effect in two weeks, however, and federal aid is unlikely to come that quickly, if it comes at all. The bill is currently sponsored by eight senators, all Democrats. In the House, a version is sponsored by Staten Island Democrat Michael McMahon. Supporters have yet to secure a clear path to passage.

"Every major piece of legislation gets stuck in the Senate," said Ya-Ting Liu of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. She told Streetsblog that the most likely scenario for passing the transit aid bill is to attach it to other legislation, probably a jobs bill or a small business tax-credit.

In the meantime, noted Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign, the MTA still has a budget hole of about $350 million -- even taking the imminent service cuts into account -- and no plan to close it. "It makes me think a lot of that plan is going to be a big fare hike," he said.

When asked about opposition in Congress to addressing the transit crisis with $2 billion in deficit spending, Schumer tied the health of the nation's transit systems to the health of the national economy. "We will never get out of the deficit if the economy shrinks," he said.

]]> http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/06/11/schumer-labor-leaders-rally-to-keep-buses-and-trains-running/feed/ 3 http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/02/16/moynihan-station-is-the-first-big-tiger-stimulus-winner/ http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/02/16/moynihan-station-is-the-first-big-tiger-stimulus-winner/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:35:05 +0000 Elana Schor http://www.streetsblog.org/?p=150211 [...]]]> New York City's Moynihan Station project has snagged $83 million in grant money from the stimulus law's Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced today.

A rendering of the proposed Moynihan Station. (Photo: The Real Deal)

The grant makes the intended successor to the current Penn Station, a longstanding priority for New York's congressional delegation, the first winner in a highly competitive chase for $1.5 billion in federal transport funding aimed at moving the U.S. DOT towards a more merit-based decision-making process.

The TIGER funding will allow the project to begin its Phase I of construction, which includes building vertical access points from the street to the new transit hub. Work should begin by the end of the year, according to Friends of Moynihan Station, a private-sector advocacy group founded by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (D-NY) daughter.

"Moynihan Station is the poster child for the best way to use federal funding -- it creates jobs, upgrades aging transportation infrastructure, and leaves behind an economic engine for the entire region," Schumer said in a statement.

Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer also hailed the federal grant through his spokeswoman: "For too long, Moynihan Station has been stopped dead in its tracks. Now that our congressional delegation has been able to secure a down payment, we can begin moving forward on this project, which will create jobs, ease congestion, boost tourism, and right the wrongs of half a century ago" -- a reference to the destruction of the original, above-ground Penn Station, which urbanist pioneer Jane Jacobs fought to preserve.

The rest of the Obama administration's TIGER grants are expected to reach public view starting tomorrow, with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood slated to visit Tuscon (hoping for streetcar aid) and Kansas City (home to the ambitious Green Impact Zone).

The U.S. DOT may have notified car dealers last night that its watered-down "cash for clunkers" plan was already out of cash, but that doesn't mean the rebates are on their last legs. With the White House vowing to protect the program, Congress soon could have to decide whether to keep the good times rolling for auto companies.

(Photo: AP)

That rush to capitalize on the "clunkers" deal has led Democrats as well as many in the media to frame the program as, essentially, a victim of its own success.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), co-author of this Congress' landmark climate change bill, said in a statement that he hopes to spur a million car trade-ins: "Cash for Clunkers may have run out of cash, but America’s consumers haven’t run out of clunkers."

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) echoed Markey's call to keep the program alive, calling it "maybe even too successful." He suggested giving the rebates "a tuneup so that we get the most stimulus, conservation, and efficiency for the buck."

Indeed, the question this morning may not be whether the program gets more money but if environmentally-minded lawmakers heed the warnings of conservation groups and insist on greater fuel-efficiency improvements in order to qualify car buyers for the deal.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), who joined Schumer on a rival "clunkers" bill that would have set stricter fuel standards, announced last night that they would only support a stronger version of the program:

We believe that any extension of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program must go further in advancing the goals of better fuel efficiency and greater emissions reductions. We will not support any bill that does not meet these goals.

We will insist than any extension of the program requires that the minimum fuel economy improvement for newly purchased vehicles be at least two miles per gallon higher than it is under the enacted Clunkers program. It is also important to include lower-income consumers who are disadvantaged under the current program. So, we would also include a voucher for the purchase of fuel efficient used vehicles.

Collins and Feinstein are likely to face resistance from lawmakers from auto-producing states such as Michigan and Ohio, who won looser rules to help resuscitate their local industry and moved environmental concerns to the back seat.

One thing is certain: With the House set to depart this weekend for a month-long recess, prospects of reaching an agreement on more cash for the program appear slim. But Congress and the White House have proven themselves willing to go the extra mile to help automakers -- so lawmakers may still pad car buyers' pockets before leaving town.

Earlier: Debate on the stimulus package is moving rapidly in the Senate today, with amendments debated as I type. There are two amendments on the table right now with big implications for transportation spending. Senator Chuck Schumer's amendment is the one to throw your support behind. It boosts transit funding to $14.9 billion overall and leaves highway funding untouched.

Another amendment sponsored by Senators Patty Murray and Diane Feinstein would ramp up highway portion of the stimulus from $27 billion to $40 billion, while bringing transit funding up to only $13 billion. Crucially, this amendment would also strike a provision in the current legislation that would allow smaller cities to spend stimulus funds on transit operations.

We're getting word from Transportation for America that Schumer may pull his amendment to clear the way for the Murray/Feinstein amendment. Schumer's amendment is superior and would yield more investment in clean transportation and help to keep more buses running. To support green infrastructure and green jobs, call your Senator now and urge them to support Schumer's amendment, not the Murray/Feinstein amendment. If you're a New Yorker, it's especially important to call Schumer's office -- (202) 224 6542 -- and encourage the Senator to bring his amendment to the floor.

Schumer in Chautauqua. When was the last time you saw Chuck with a majestic cityscape behind him?

The provision would raise the monthly cap on mass transit commuting costs not taxed by the federal government to $230 from $120.

A commuter in the 30% tax bracket with mass transit costs of $230 a month could see annual savings double to about $1,000 from about $500, according to Larry Filler, president of the nonprofit TransitCenter.

This is great if you ride to work on the LIRR or Metro-North. But what if your transit commute already costs less than $120 per month? New Yorkers who ride the subway or the local bus to work -- millions of Schumer's constituents -- get nothing out of this deal. Express bus riders, who pay $41 for an all-inclusive weekly pass, get next to nothing.

As for maintaining service and transit jobs in the face of sweeping cuts to New York City's system, Schumer's proposal is utterly useless.

Schumer has the opportunity here to speak out for straphangers in New York and around the country by calling for transit operating assistance to be included in the stimulus package. His erstwhile junior colleague, Hillary Clinton, introduced a bill in the Senate to fund transit operations back in the summer. Over in the House, Oregon's Peter DeFazio made an all-out effort to get operating assistance into the stimulus bill -- going so far as to criticize the president's top economic adviser on national television -- before ultimately falling short.

Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer brags about helping Westchester, Nassau, and Fairfield, while leaving commuters in the five boroughs to fend for themselves.

As Politico reports, rather than talking about climate change and auto dependence, Schumer is pushing a Democratic plan to go after "Wall Street speculators, OPEC, price gougers and Big Oil":

[R]egardless of the legislative realities — not to mention the futility of promising short-term decreases in gas prices — Democrats have embraced a political opportunity. By proposing aggressive legislation that takes on the boogeymen of the oil tycoons and profiteering speculators, Democrats are trying to corner Republicans into choosing between a president who is chummy with the oil industry and a decidedly populist energy bill.

“We need to stop the speculation” that’s driving up oil prices, said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who has been involved in discussions with Democratic leaders who debated energy policy at a closed-door lunch Tuesday. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) promised “short-term relief and long-term relief” and insisted that “Big Oil should pay” for any suspension of gas taxes.

As Politico points out, the main elements of the plan, which include substituting gas tax revenues with new taxes on oil companies, investigating price gouging, and diverting oil from national reserves to increase supply, are mostly long shots and short-term fixes. Why can't Schumer and Clinton take a cue from the New York City Model of transit oriented development and show some true leadership?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Schumer argue that New York City risks losing its place of global pre-eminence in a Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday. The editorial is a response to growing conventional wisdom that says London is overtaking New York as the world's leading financial capitol. In the editorial, available online only to subscribers, Bloomberg and Schumer say that there is much the city can learn from its British counterpart.

One lesson not mentioned in the editorial, which reads mainly as a push to reform the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, is the role that long-term urban planning, quality of life improvements and agressive traffic reduction measures have played in London's ascent.

For London's Mayor Ken Livingstone, projects like congestion charging, banning cars from Trafalgar Square and the creation of the London Climate Change Agency, aren't just about altruistic environmentalism. "Ken's a very savvy marketer. He knows that these initiatives make London a more attractive place for big companies to set up shop and attract employees," an official at Transport for London told me.

Today's Guardian reports that macro environmental issues now inform everything that London's Mayor does:

Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, is these days possessed of one great idea. Climate change, and how to avert it, consumes him. It now informs all his decisions on transport. It is top of his agenda for social housing and new building developments. He reads about it in his spare time. He talks about it to anyone who will bend an ear and he will travel to the ends of the earth if necessary to cut deals with other politicians, to steal the best ideas from other cities and to communicate with anyone the urgency and scale of the problem.

Though Livable Streets issues weren't mentioned in the Bloomberg-Schumer editorial, New York City's business community is increasingly aware of their importance. As Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City has said, "The gridlock on New York City's streets has become a brake on the city's economy. She warns, "It is going to be increasingly difficult for New York to market itself as a place where you can get the most done in the least period of time with the best workforce if we're not able to solve the congestion problem."

Meanwhile, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, a possible 2009 Democratic mayoral candidate, is off to visit the World Travel Market expo in England to sell UK travel groups on package tours that include a trip to Brooklyn. Marty told the Daily News, "Tourism is one of Brooklyn's biggest and most vital growth sectors, and I'll do whatever it takes to show the world the beauty of our borough."

There are a couple of things, of course, that Marty won't do to enhance the beauty of his borough. He won't support London-style traffic reduction measures. He won't stop parking his SUV and about a dozen other vehicles on the pedestrian plaza, technically park land, outside of historic Borough Hall. And he won't push the city, state and developer Forest City Enterprises to do smart, thoughtful, long-term planning around the massive "Atlantic Yards" project.

Welcome to Brooklyn, Brits. Perhaps the traffic congestion will remind you of what it used to be like in London. Don't forget to look to your left when you step out into the street.