Today’s Headlines

  • As Rescue Stalls, MTA Takes Step Closer to Doomsday Cuts and Fare Hike (News)
  • Will Albany Ever Allow the MTA Blame Game to End? (Post)
  • Carl Kruger’s Transit Funding Plan Is Crazy… and Probably Illegal (News, Newsday)
  • No Mayoral Run for Weiner? (City Room, News, Post)
  • News Slams Carrion for Accepting Favors in Exchange for Granting Permits
  • The Bronx DA Is Investigating Former Beep (NYT)
  • Remembering Fallen Cyclist Dan Valle, Killed While Riding Last Month (MTR)
  • Parents Fear for Kids’ Safety Crossing Brooklyn’s Eighth Ave (Your Nabe)
  • East New York Residents Have City’s Longest Commutes (Post)
  • The Allure of Buffalo and Other Rust Belt Cities (Joe Urban via Streetsblog.net)
  • Larry Littlefield

    Say it ain’t so Anthony!

    Please tell me that this doesn’t mean that the $3 billion per year the MTA needs to continue to maintain the system won’t be coming from Washington, via gas taxes paid by the whole rest of the country after all! Because thanks to people like you who have promised something for nothing for years, we need the money or else!

    I promised I’d vote for you if you delivered! Come back Anthony!

    I guess we’re down the Brodsky billions that won’t come from taxes on property, wages (unlike the Ravitch plan) or jobs, and the “hidden billions” the city and state comptrollers have promised is sitting in accounts somewhere every time a fare increase has been proposed.

    SHOW US THE HIDDEN BILLIONS COMPTROLLER THOMPSON! And no, federal capital aid sitting in accounts for capital investments approved by the Federal Transit Administrtation does NOT count as hidden billions that can be used to postpone collapse for a few years. Once the transit system collapses, we’ll have to give that money back.

  • Nicole Gelinas, author of the “Blame Game” column, is a hardline libertarian who’s often scornful of government subsidies and ready to pounce on anything resembling mismanagement. If she’s saying that the problem isn’t the MTA management, you know it’s probably true.

  • Rhywun

    RE: Nicole Gelinas

    I read her a lot in City Journal; she’s the best writer there. And she’s not as “hardline” as all that–for example she’s pointed the blame for the financial meltdown on executive mismanagement where it belongs rather than at duped borrowers like the real hardcore libertarians do.

  • Man, that Kruger plan really is stupid, isn’t it?

  • First sensible thing Weiner’s ever done. He knows that Bloomberg would wipe the floor with him, tainting him as a loser in the post-Bloomberg era. The Giuliani exception notwithstanding, not many unsuccessful mayoral candidates have made a comeback, at least not in my lifetime. Also: The job is going to be tougher than ever, presiding over a shrinking government, inescapably making a lot of people unhappy. Weiner hasn’t got the brains or the guts to do it.

  • Rhywun

    RE: The Allure of Buffalo and Other Rust Belt Cities

    I lived in Buffalo for 8 years and it certainly has its charms, but it also has rampant crime, a very racist population (on all sides), and a predatory suburban ring that takes advantage of everything positive about the city while continuing to do everything in its power to drag the city down even farther. As a consequence even the metro region is losing people.

    PS. I’ve long heard good things about Pittsburgh–so why is its population still dropping even more precipitously than Buffalo’s? Some people claim these old cities were “overpopulated” but I think they’ve long since dropped to the point where instead of relieving any perceived overcrowded, instead we’re seeing boarded up houses and empty storefronts.

  • To me, the truly despairing thing about the MTA’s fiscal situation is that despite the abundant evidence of incompetence in the State House, we voters keep sending the same old perpetrators of dysfunction back to Albany year after year. Until the Shelly Silvers and Carl Krugers and countless others can be dealt a real electoral scare — let alone a defeat at the ballot box — they’ll just further emboldened to continue putting their own parochial interests before the true needs of the people of New York.