MTA

Last March, Assembly Member Adriano Espaillat stood with Mayor Bloomberg in Fordham Plaza, celebrating the announcement of the city's inaugural Select Bus Service line. In the thick of the battle over congestion pricing, its fate to be determined within days, Espaillat was one of few state pols to vocally support the mayor's proposal. Flanked by Bloomberg, Elliot Sander, Janette Sadik-Khan and other pricing advocates, the Northern Manhattan rep did not mince words.

Sheldon Silver's partial endorsement of the Ravitch Commission's MTA rescue plan [PDF], which includes East and Harlem River bridge tolls, offers the best political hope in years for reducing the daily truck tsunami pulverizing downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.

Included on the State Senate's "MTA Ideas" web site is a PDF of the governor's proposed MTA bailout plan. It is a huge bill which generally seems to echo the proposals made by the Ravitch Commission. Streetsblog will summarize the proposal as soon as we can digest its 78 pages. In the meantime, please share your impressions in the comments.

Biking the Triborough. Photo: E-BAD/Flickr.

We conclude our discussion with ITDP director Walter Hook with a look at potential BRT configurations. In yesterday's installment, Hook noted that the best BRT systems incorporate both local and express services within exclusive busways, which requires three lanes at station stops. Here he discusses how to make this work along First and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

This is the third of four installments in our interview with ITDP director Walter Hook about Bus Rapid Transit in New York City. Be sure to catch the first and second parts if you haven't yet. In this installment Hook discusses how BRT can succeed in New York, and the series will wrap up tomorrow with a look at potential configurations specifically for First and Second Avenue.

While the looming MTA doomsday scenario is desperate enough that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has put forward a proposal to charge drivers roughly the same as transit riders to cross East and Harlem River bridges, Democrats over in the Senate are balking at the prospect of requiring drivers to give up their free rides. The Daily News reports on yesterday's Ravitch plan talks.

In the second installment of our interview with ITDP director Walter Hook, we look at the package of bus improvements implemented last year along the Bx12 line, and how it stacks up against full-featured Bus Rapid Transit. Read the first part of the interview here. Parts three and four will examine how full BRT could operate in New York.

Perhaps no one knows the ins and outs of BRT better than Walter Hook. As director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, Hook has advised cities on four continents about BRT implementation, including Jakarta's seven-corridor network, the first full-fledged BRT system in Asia. Streetsblog caught up with Hook -- in between trips to Cape Town and Mexico City -- for an email Q&A about why New York City needs Bus Rapid Transit, common misconceptions of BRT in America, and what will make BRT succeed here.