Streetsblog New York City

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver could make a slew of transportation bills move through his chamber or let them languish as in years past. Photo: Daily News

This year’s legislative session is rapidly coming to a close in Albany. With the state legislature wrapping up its regularly scheduled official business on June 20, the Capitol is entering a period of intense activity as legislators and lobbyists make a final push for their priorities.

Albany has some big items on its agenda this month: rent regulations, a property tax cap, ethics reform, and gay marriage. Somewhat below the radar, the push is on for a number of street safety and sustainable transportation priorities as well. Time is of the essence, as advocacy momentum built up over the year dissipates after the session ends. Bills that falter this time around will have to start over again after the legislature reconvenes in January.

If support gels for any of the following bills, the legislature can act extremely quickly to turn them into law. That’s especially true in the Assembly, where Speaker Sheldon Silver controls a large majority and where most of this legislation is currently stalled or has died in past sessions.

Complete Streets

Complete streets legislation would require planners to consider the needs of all road users when designing a road receiving state and federal funding. Last year, it passed the State Senate but stalled out in the Assembly.

After talking with the legislation’s opponents, complete streets supporters made some revisions to the language, and an updated version of the bill is headed to the Senate Transportation Committee today, said Nadine Lemmon, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s Albany legislative advocate. As now written, the complete streets bill would cover the large set of projects that already need to conduct extensive reviews as part of the federal approval process, which involves filling out thick binders of paperwork. “We’re targeting projects that already have to do a lot of review and we’re just adding two pages to their world,” said Lemmon.

Purely local projects wouldn’t be covered, but Lemmon argued that as towns or counties prepare complete streets plans on some projects, they’d grow more familiar with the concept, leading to what she called a “trickle down effect.”

In the Senate, the complete streets bill is sponsored by both Charles Fuschillo and Martin Dilan, the chair and ranking member of the Transportation Committee, respectively, along with twelve other senators. In the Assembly, however, the companion legislation hasn’t been introduced yet. That said, Lemmon reported that preliminary conversations about the bill with both the governor’s staff and state DOT officials have been encouraging.

Read more…

In driver-on-pedestrian crashes, a few miles per hour can be the difference between life and death. Graph: Transportation Alternatives

Legislation allowing the city to curb deadly driving through the use of speed enforcement cameras will soon resurface in Albany.

A bill introduced last year called for a pilot program of 40 cameras, to be installed at crash-prone city intersections. Photographs would be taken of license plates (not of drivers), and tickets issued to vehicle owners. Tickets would not result in license points and could be contested in court. The bill included a five-year sunset provision.

A spokesperson for Manhattan Assembly Member Deborah Glick, sponsor of the original bill, told Streetsblog a draft is now being prepared for the current session.

In the meantime, Transportation Alternatives has been drumming up support, finding receptive audiences across the boroughs. Says TA’s Lindsey Ganson:

Five resolutions in support of using speed cameras in NYC have already passed full community boards — in Manhattan, Community Board 2, 4, and 7; in Staten Island Community Board 2; and in Brooklyn Community Board 7.  Many other community boards are in the process of showing their support. The transportation committees of Staten Island’s Community Board 1, Manhattan Community Boards 11 and 12, Bronx Community Board 4 and Queens Community Board 8 will be presenting resolutions to their full boards at their next meetings.

Speed cameras have the endorsement of NYPD, NYC DOT, and the city’s Department of Health. And with good reason. Speeding-related crashes killed 71 people in New York City in 2009, and injured 3,739. Not only have cameras have proven to be a potent deterrent — reducing the number of drivers speeding by 10+ mph by up to 88 percent, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety — they offer a cost-effective means of enforcing the law, and allow police departments to direct manpower to other crimes.

“Safe speed detectors will save lives,” Ganson says. “In New York City speeding is the number one cause of deadly crashes, claiming more lives than drunk driving and distracted driving combined. Speed detectors have cut speeding and reduced crashes in the 89 U.S. communities in 14 states where they’ve been authorized.”

Manhattan’s Tom Duane sponsored last year’s Senate version of the speed camera bill. He could not be reached for comment as of this writing.

From Transportation Alternatives' Spring 2008 magazine:

On Monday, April 7, Sheldon Silver walked out of a closed door meeting of State Assembly Democrats and announced congestion pricing was dead. Never mind that New York City's mayor and City Council supported the plan along with the governor, the State Senate and an unprecedented coalition of business, labor, environmental and civic groups. Like so much else in Albany, the decision was made in secret, without a debate, a vote or even a record of the proceedings.

Until congestion pricing came around, I never paid all that much attention to Albany. Sure, I knew about the sex and graft scandals, the "three men in a room," and the Brennan Center reports showing New York's government has more in common with the old Soviet Politburo than America's 49 other state legislatures. I knew "dysfunctional" was the official adjective to describe Albany. But the dysfunction never seemed to impinge on my own life in any immediate, tangible way. Until congestion pricing.

I was really looking forward to seeing motorists pay to drive into Lower Manhattan. While I understood the importance of $354 million in federal aid, $491 million per year in revenue for transit and fewer kids growing up with asthma, this wasn't what pumped me up. What I liked most about congestion pricing was the fact that the people who make life in New York City most miserable -- the armada of horn-honking, exhaust-spewing, space-hogging, oil-guzzling, climate change-inducing motorheads that rolls through my neighborhood every day, to and from the free East River bridges, were finally going to have to pay for the privilege.

With higher gas prices pushing drivers onto the city's trains and buses, the Daily News today blasted Speaker Sheldon Silver and Assembly Dems for passing up the billions of dollars that congestion pricing would have brought to MTA coffers. 

The trends prove that the theory of congestion pricing was valid: When the cost of driving rises, people actually do switch to mass transit.

Had Silver and the Assembly passed congestion pricing, as the City Council did, the MTA would already be using that $354 million in federal aid (which has now been disbursed about the country) to make more bus and subway seats available.

Then, the congestion fee would have given the MTA a half-billion dollars a year to pay for big projects like completing the Second Ave. subway and extending LIRR service to Grand Central Terminal. When that money vanished, the MTA's building plan was eviscerated.

The agency does not have the money it needs to keep the transit system in good repair, let alone to expand. Gov. Paterson has asked the estimable Richard Ravitch, a former MTA chairman, to hunt up cash.

He'll find no easy fixes. Option 1: Raise taxes. Option 2: Raise fares. Option 3: Congestion pricing.

Pricing foes must be waiting for Ravitch to make the next move, because we've heard virtually nothing from them since the plan was smothered behind closed doors over a month ago -- other than demands for improved transit service.

But what of Brodsky, Glick, and Weiner? Or Bearak and McCaffrey? Where are they now that their storied working class drivers, priced out of their cars, must rely on a beleaguered transit system that doesn't have the fiscal boost promised by congestion pricing?

Oh, right. They're stuck in traffic.

Graphic: New York Daily News 

Welcome to Glickville

As Deborah Glick herself would tell you, no state legislator had more reason to support congestion pricing than she did. In a district where 95.4 percent of working residents would not have paid the charge, where households with a car are outnumbered by households sans vehicle three to one, and which nonetheless finds itself in hellish, fume-choked purgatory largely due to transient car commuters lurching their way to and from the Holland Tunnel, the city-initiated program to reduce gridlock and clear the air while improving transit should have been a gift.

But to Glick, it wasn't. To the contrary, when the Lower Manhattan Democratic Assembly member said anything about congestion pricing -- which, publicly, wasn't all that often -- it was likely to be negative. Rather than tout its obvious merits and work to amend its shortcomings, Glick remained a skeptic throughout the eleven months of the plan's life, repeating often unfounded criticisms spouted by the likes of Richard Brodsky and Anthony Weiner while adding a few zingers to the canon for good measure.

Now that she and fellow Assembly Democrats have killed pricing in its original iteration, Glick has issued her own post-mortem in the form of a constituent letter. After the jump: a breakdown of each of her anti-pricing points, followed by the letter itself.

Can't wait for someone to challenge Shelly Silver, Deborah Glick, Hakeem Jeffries, Joan Millman and other members of the Albany crew that didn't allow congestion pricing to even come up for a vote? Neither can the New York Times.

In a scathing editorial published on Saturday, the Times issued a call for change in the state capital, appealing for more Paul Newells to step forward and run against incumbent pols.

Any New Yorker who is not furious at the mention of their state capital, Albany, has not been paying attention. There are the sex scandals that forced one governor out of office and prompted his replacement to confess more details of his own indiscretions than anyone wanted to hear. The state comptroller quit last year after pleading guilty to misusing public assets. This week an Assembly member was convicted of corruption and faces up to a decade in jail. Angry yet?

The place needs a thorough cleaning -- a giant broom to sweep out the rascals, starting with the State Legislature. We are not in favor of term limits, but the idea gains currency when most people who get elected in New York State keep their seats until they retire, die or go to jail.

The ballot box is still the best form of term limits. So, here is how to change Albany: find and support somebody daring and thick-skinned enough to run against the local legislator.

We've said it before and we'll say it again: Congestion pricing is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enact progressive transportation policy for New York City.

With the midnight deadline to receive $354 million in federal aid approaching in a matter of hours, now is the last chance to call your representatives in Albany to express your support, no matter where they may stand on the issue. And don't forget, when you call you can have these handy fact sheets at your disposal.

As we learned from reader reports last week, several representatives who seem to be leaning against pricing in the press are in fact uncommitted. Your phone calls today will make a difference.

With the fate of congestion pricing likely to be decided over the weekend, we're going to beat this drum some more this afternoon.

Yesterday we heard that Assembly Member Deborah Glick's office told a constituent the congestion pricing bill could lead to worsening air quality. (Because, you know, building mass transit infrastructure will cancel out all the particulate pollution that pricing will keep out of the air.)

If Glick ends up basing her decision on that tortured logic, here's a look at what she would deny her district [PDF], according to the Campaign for New York's Future:

• 46 new subway cars, primarily for the E and F lines
• 3 additional buses for the M20/M104 Routes
• 5 additional buses for the M101/102/103 Routes
• 6 additional buses for the M15 Route
• 9 additional buses for the M1/M2/M3/M4 Routes

Those are just the short-term enhancements that will be implemented before congestion pricing goes into effect. (And it's worth repeating that the data comes from CFNY's district fact sheets, an excellent tool to help bolster your argument when you call your reps.)

Reader Sarah Ferguson reports that Assembly Member Deborah Glick (right), who represents Lower Manhattan, has come up with a novel twist on Richard Brodsky's call for further environmental review of congestion pricing. Read on for the full story, and keep making those phone calls. We want to know what else legislators are telling their constituents today.

I just called Deborah Glick's office as an outraged constituent to ask why she was not doing more to support congestion pricing, since she represents a swath of Manhattan on the West Side that would certainly benefit from reduced cars, better mass transit, etc.

I spoke to one of her top aides, Theresa Swidorski, who told me that while Glick "has not taken a position," one of her main concerns is the fact that the Congestion Pricing bill is not currently subject to SEQR--the State Environmental Quality Review Act.  http://www.dos.state.ny.us/lgss/seqr.htm

I asked why this should be of such a concern that Glick would risk shooting down the whole Congestion Pricing bill and federal funding for better mass transit. Swidorski responded that Glick's worried any work to expand the subways could "negatively impact the air."

With conflicting reports on congestion pricing's status in Albany, and given his own ambiguous statements, it remains to be seen whether Governor David Paterson will get behind the plan -- though a look at census data published by the Tri State Transportation Campaign shows that most of those he once represented in the New York State Senate could only benefit.

In District 30, which stretches from the Upper West Side to Washington Heights and includes Harlem, Morningside Heights and Sugar Hill:

• 54.5% commute into the proposed congestion pricing zone for work
  
• 45.5% take transit into the zone
• 2.8% drive alone into the zone
• 79.8% of households do not have a vehicle (average annual income: $38,089)
• 20.2% of households have one or more vehicles (average annual income: $89,390)
• 96.8% would not pay the congestion charge

Along with perks that would be enjoyed by the entire city -- reduced traffic, cleaner air, improved overall transit, funds for livable streets amenities, etc. -- Paterson's former district (where he still lives) would also see a host of bus service upgrades. Among them: