MTA

For months, graffiti-laden MTA Capital Construction trailers have been parked curbside on Broadway north of Isham Street, in Inwood, presumably due to ongoing work on the A line. Yesterday we snapped this shot of one trailer's new position, on the sidewalk alongside Isham Park.

The people over at CTA Tattler ("seen and heard on the Chicago Transit Authority"), as part of their tireless efforts to monitor the movements of the Chicago Transit Authority, have turned to the microblogging tool Twitter and created a Twitter feed with the user name ctatweet. It's a way for people using the city's transit system to post updates about train delays and breakdowns from their cell phones or PDAs.

Not to steal anyone's thunder, but the MTA has rolled out the second of three prototype grates designed to keep stormwater out of the subways while doubling as street furniture. The first design, though incorporating a bench, is more artful and less functional than the prototype shown above, which includes seating as well as bike racks. Fifteen of the bench/bike rack prototypes will be coming to Lower Manhattan, along West Broadway between Chambers and Leonard Streets, and on Varick Street between Leonard and Franklin.

In today's New York Times, Jim Dwyer poses a question that some city transit advocates have to this point discussed only in hushed tones: "Is it really such a great idea to be digging subway tunnels in Manhattan?"

This morning a number of public officials, including Governor David Paterson, joined Google co-founder Sergey Brin in announcing his company's new city transit mapping tool.

The panel headed by former MTA chief Richard Ravitch held its first public hearing yesterday at NYU's Kimmel Center. Representatives of advocacy groups, local government, think tanks, trade associations, and unions gave the commission a variety of proposals, including but certainly not limited to road pricing, to help the MTA navigate its funding crisis.

SBS lanes are the first phase of the 34th Street Transitway concept

As the Ravitch Commission's first public hearing on how to fix the MTA's budget woes gets underway, this paragraph from today's Times story on the Rochester Regional Transit Service (annual budget: $62 million) bears mentioning:

Saturday's Times delved into the history of the MTA's mounting debt burden, which, along with rising fuel costs and plummeting revenues from the real estate transactions tax, has severely squeezed the authority's finances: