Transit

For years, transit agencies and other companies have been harassed by a patent troll seeking to extort them for "settlements" when they use real-time vehicle tracking technologies. ArrivalStar and Melvino Technologies, offshore firms led by one Martin Kelly Jones, claim to hold the rights to those ideas.

At a mayoral forum on transportation this morning, the first since a February event hosted by Transport Workers Union Local 100, eight candidates offered ideas on how they would improve the city's road and transit network. For the most part, the candidates were eager to support buses, quick to get agitated about bike lanes, and short on realistic ideas for how to fund their plans.

Here's a refreshing take on metropolitan economic health from the right side of the aisle: The conservative Free Congress Foundation says it's time America got serious about investing in transit in its metro areas.

Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a resiliency plan to better prepare New York for flooding due to climate change and severe storms. The report's team, put together in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and led by Economic Development Corporation President Seth Pinsky, used the administration's PlaNYC 2030 sustainability plan as the foundation for a sweeping set of resiliency-specific recommendations, covering everything from temporary bikeways to new landfill development on the East River.

The answer to that question is: Probably not. Reps. Daniel Lipinski, a Democrat from Chicago, and Michael Grimm, a Republican representing Staten Island and a little slice of Brooklyn, announced their new transit-focused Congressional caucus just last week, and this week the House has been in recess.

At the local level, business has been a key force in cementing transit victories. But at a national level, the business voice has been largely absent from heated, high-stakes debates about transit. With a new report called “Bosses For Buses,” Good Jobs First investigates the disparity between local- and national-level organizing efforts by employers.

Yesterday we reported that State Senator Bill Perkins' office has finally expressed satisfaction with the 125th Street bus improvement project, now that DOT has watered it down by shortening the dedicated bus lanes. Previously,  Perkins had called on the city to "slow down" the plan to bring Select Bus Service to 125th Street due to what he claimed was insufficient community input, even though DOT and the MTA had been holding public workshops since last September. Streetsblog hit the streets yesterday afternoon to see what bus riders on 125th Street had to say about the situation.

Congratulations are in order for State Senator Bill Perkins, who has successfully condemned more than 32,000 crosstown bus riders to travel on 125th Street at speeds that are often slower than walking. His pressure to revise a plan for dedicated bus lanes and other measures to prioritize surface transit -- culminating in an "emergency" town hall meeting last Thursday -- resulted in DOT watering down its proposal.

Spurred by transit activists demanding improvements to 125th Street buses that often crawl slower than walking speed, DOT and MTA have been moving forward with a project to improve bus service along the major crosstown corridor. But last month, State Senator Bill Perkins sent DOT a letter [PDF] in which he said Select Bus Service improvements were a "failure" and demanded that "the agency slow down" the process of bringing better service to bus riders on 125th Street.