Transit

Since 2009, Albany has stolen roughly $260 million dollars from dedicated transit funds in an attempt to plug the state government's enormous deficits. Those cuts have wreaked havoc upon the MTA's budget, precipitating major service cuts and fare hikes.

The MTA will not lose another $170 million in budget negotiations, according to the office of Jim Brennan, who chairs the Assembly's authorities committee.

Update: Transportation Committee staff says Mica has confirmed what he meant: "He was referring to the share. Keep in mind that we have no numbers or details for a bill yet -- the hearing process is not yet finished and we have not drafted a bill. He was simply speculating at this point."

What's the most important problem facing New York City? Three times as many registered voters say it's the quality of transit service compared to the number who say traffic congestion, according to a new poll. While transportation remains a second-tier issue relative to education and the economy, the poll does show the importance of transit for those who care most about the issue.

Transit officials spent the day on Capitol Hill yesterday, meeting with Congressional offices as part of the American Public Transportation Association's legislative conference.

In the fifth chapter of "Moving Beyond the Automobile," we demystify the concept of congestion pricing in just five short minutes. Here you'll learn why putting a price on scarce road space makes economic sense and how it benefits many different modes of surface transportation.

"Consensus" and "process" were the buzzwords last night when NYC DOT presented its new concept for improving transit on 34th Street [PDF]. Gone was the plan for New York's first physically separated busway -- scuttled by local property owners and residents seeking drive-up curbside access. In its place was a package very similar to Select Bus Service on the East Side of Manhattan: bus lanes offset from the curb, off-board fare collection, camera enforcement, and bus bulbs to speed boarding and relieve sidewalk crowding.

As the New York Post continues its increasingly tedious assault on pedestrians and crosstown transit riders, its writers always seem to suggest that giving priority to buses in an important retail area is both radical and self-evidently bad for business. If they bothered to look just one borough away, they'd see that nothing could be further from the truth. The eight bus- and pedestrian-only blocks of downtown Brooklyn's Fulton Mall make up the most successful retail strip in the city outside of Manhattan.

Three years ago, when Streetsblog first wrote up NYC DOT's proposal for a transitway and pedestrian plaza on 34th Street, we called it a "transit miracle." For this story, however, there will be no Hollywood ending.