Today’s Headlines

  • The Subway Fare Just Went Up (Post, NY1, News)
  • New Yorkers Have No Idea Why This Fare Hike Is Happening (News, News)
  • Report: States Spending One-Third of Their Transpo Stim Cash on Road Expansion (MTR)
  • GOP: Climate Bill Going Nowhere in the Senate (NYT)
  • Van Driver Hits and Kills 72-Year-Old Cyclist on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue; No Charges Filed (News)
  • Drunk Driver Injures 4-Year-Old Queens Girl (News)
  • Sadik-Khan Shows Off NYC Bike-Share Preview — Village Audience Bursts Into Applause (Villager)
  • This Year’s Summer Streets Set for August 8, 15, 22 (Post)
  • Study: Nearly Thirty Percent of Brooklyn Ikea Customers Don’t Come By Car (Bklyn Paper)
  • Meet Your Anti-Atlantic Yards Candidate for Brooklyn Beep: Eugene Myrick (Post)
  • 100 Years Ago, Fifth Avenue Had Glorious 30-Foot Sidewalks (NYT)
  • Larry Littlefield

    RE Fifth Avenue: so did drivers pay to build Fifth Avenue? Were gas taxes and tolls used to remove the sidewalks and expand the lanes?

    Today, drivers in some ways subsidize transit, but only because of the state of transit after several decades of the reverse. And in any event, most motor vehicle specific taxes go to limited access highways.

  • TKO

    Actually drivers did pay for all that work. Like it or not they also pay taxes both state and federal.

  • Larry Littlefield

    “Actually drivers did pay for all that work. Like it or not they also pay taxes both state and federal.”

    And how many of those were there at the time Fifth Avenue was built and the sidewalks were narrowed? Not too many.

    Transit riders and pedestrians were paying all the taxes back then, and they paid, because motor vehicles appropriated an infrastructure others had paid for.

    An analogy would be taxing drivers to pay and endow a first class passenger rail system, and subsequently claim that if paid for itself.

  • vnm

    Let’s not forget: Woman killed in RFK Bridge smashup (News)

    (One charged with driving with a suspended license after Saturday fatality.)

  • It’s funny, I always thought the sidewalks in Midtown (or, generally, anywhere north of 14th Street where the 1811 plan was put into place) were reasonably generous. It never occurred to me there were once “courtyards and gardens” where today’s sidewalks are.

  • Re: GOP: Climate Bill Going Nowhere in the Senate

    Usually, they don’t allow bills to get to the Senate floor at all unless they have the 60 votes to stop a filibuster.

    My fantasy is that, in this case, they will let the bill get to the floor in the fall and will let the Republicans show that they are ignorant obstructionists by filibustering. Everyone will see that the Republicans are not only trying to obstruct a bill passed by the House and supported by the majority of the Senate; they are also trying to stop the entire world from making progress at Copenhagen. I expect there would be a long series of statements from world leaders and from scientists condemning the Republicans’ tactics and pointing out their factual errors. And I expect that the filibuster would ultimately collapse.