Today’s Headlines

  • Cuomo Continues Gubernatorial Tradition of Trying to Make the MTA Someone Else’s Problem (NYT)
  • Advocates, Budget Watchdogs Aren’t Impressed With Gov’s Transit Funding Outline (Crain’s 1, 2)
  • Daily News: Cuomo’s Wrong, Move NY Has Changed the Politics of Road Pricing in NYC
  • Northeast Corridor and Trans-Hudson Rail Tunnels Held Together With Duct Tape (NYT, WNYC)
  • Chris Christie Has a Tunnel Under the Hudson He’d Like to Sell You (NYT, WNYC, 2nd Ave Sagas)
  • WSJ: Citi Bike’s Upgrades Are Improving the Experience for Riders
  • More Coverage of Citi Bike Expansion (NYT, DNA, News)
  • Schumer: Feds Should Accelerate Tech to Prevent Drunk Driving (News)
  • Meet the VC-Backed Companies on a Mission to Get New Yorkers to Drive Private Cars (Crain’s)
  • Uber’s Pick-Up Patterns in NYC Don’t Look That Different From Yellow Cabs (NYT)
  • Manhattan and the Bronx Celebrate the Reopened High Bridge (Gothamist)

More headlines at Streetsblog USA

  • vnm

    Re the Daily News on Move NY, the Staten Island Advance also had an editorial in support of it.

    http://www.silive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/07/the_move_ny_plan_is_islanders.html

  • stairbob

    Like most “Wacky News,” the Christie/Tunnel/Presidential campaign is ultimately just very sad.

  • Simon Phearson

    Gosh, it’s almost like the “political reality” of “congestion pricing” comes down to one man…

  • van_vlissingen

    The best way to prevent drunk driving is better zoning. If you have density next to destinations and transit people will generally make that choice. When our land use policy has many folks in less dense transit deserts it’s no wonder they get behind the wheel rather than stumble home on foot.

  • HamTech87

    Cuomo’s logic on the MTA — City residents use it, so the City should pay more — should frighten non-city residents. Take the new Tappan Zee Bridge. What if Cuomo asked Rockland and Westchester counties to pay half the cost?

  • Mark Walker

    Christie says he’d be willing to green-light the Gateway tunnel if NJ, NY, and the feds go “even steven.” That would be 33.3 percent of the cost for NJ. For the ARC tunnel project, NJ would have paid 14.4 percent of the cost (GAO via Wiki). How is paying twice as much of the cost a better deal for NJ? Especially if the rising cost of everything means Gateway may cost more than ARC? Then there’s the question of timing. ARC would have been finished two or three years from now. I would put the chances of the 105-year-old tunnels surviving another decade at one in ten. They’re going down — it’s just a matter of time. Killing ARC is the biggest transport policy blunder since NY’s wanton destruction of Penn Station.

  • Bolwerk

    If they weren’t corrupt, or braindead, when Cuomo said something paraphrased as,

    New York should contribute more to the MTA because New York City gets most of the benefit.

    just about every NYC public official – mayor, council members, NYC senators/assemblypersons in both parties – should have said something like,

    Good point. And the rest of the state should contribute its fair share to the operations of the state government.

  • Bolwerk

    It’s probably wrong to reflexively accept Christie was concerned about costs in the first place.

    It was probably a mix of other factors like regionalism (how dare New York benefit from our hard work! Let’s mutilate ourselves!), sticking it to political opponents (ARC was a creature of Democratic dealing, for good or for ill), and general anti-transit hysteria and double standards. Sure, highways are crowded, but in an hour a few lanes of highway might move the equivalent of a few individual trains of people.

  • Bolwerk

    Well, the absolute best way to prevent drunk driving is to discourage driving. The neo-prohibitionists should have made the drinking age 16, and the driving age 21.

  • Mark Walker

    While it’s true that there’s been an epidemic of Republicans spiking transit projects around the country, it should also be noted that a large portion of the ARC money came from the Bush administration. It was very much a bipartisan project and that’s one reason why Christie’s action was so shocking. Much of the money for congestion pricing would also have come from the Bush administration.

  • Larry Littlefield

    New York doesn’t get one-third the benefit, unless West of Hudson NY transit gets a whole lot more of the service.

    That is like NY demanding that NJ pay for half of a freight tunnel to NY, with most of the benefits going to NY.