Transit

Four New York City members of Congress joined the chairman of the MTA today to bluntly denounce the House GOP's anti-transit transportation bill.

Today's Jim Dwyer column in the New York Times is a nice little encapsulation of everything that can go wrong when NYC's press corps turns its attention to matters of transportation.

If you're like most New York commuters, you took a train or bus to get to work today. And like most New Yorkers, you are invisible to the City Council and speaker Christine Quinn.

Brooklyn commuters -- already some of the biggest transit riders in the country -- are opting for transit at ever higher rates. New numbers from the Center for the Study of Brooklyn at Brooklyn College, first highlighted by City Limits' Brooklyn Bureau, crunch Census data to reveal the evolving commuting patterns in the borough's 18 community board districts. (To see the citywide breakdown of these numbers by state legislative district, check out Streetsblog's prior coverage.)

Governor Cuomo, your neighbors have something to tell you.

The MTA needs new revenues, announced chairman Joe Lhota during a broad-ranging panel discussion at Fordham University this morning. "There's going to be the need for broad-based tax revenue somewhere within the system over the next couple of years," Lhota said, noting that he's generally the kind of conservative person loath to call for tax increases.

Governor Andrew Cuomo's 2012 budget, released this afternoon, offers what now passes for good news for transit: maintenance of the status quo.

This piece of City Council scheduling hit the Streetsblog inbox on Friday and was too groan-inducing not to share:

New York's infrastructure is dangerously underfunded and threatening to cripple the region's economy, warned former lieutenant governor and MTA chairman Richard Ravitch in a speech on Thursday.