Michael Bloomberg

"If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars."

While we weren't looking, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver apparently had a change of heart on congestion pricing, and is reportedly now willing to go along with some version of the plan, as long as it is supported by City Council Democrats.

Congestion Mitigation Commission chairman Marc Shaw has a big job ahead of him.

Webster Avenue and Fordham Road, the Bronx

Cities won't wait for national governments to solve their pressing problems, argues Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City in this week's Economist:

Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller's team at the Department of Transportation has been taking ideas offered up by Traffic Mitigation Commission members and running them through NYMTC's regional traffic model. Schaller's job is to help the Commission determine how effective each of these ideas will be in cutting traffic and reducing total vehicle miles traveled in New York City. To keep its $354.5 million federal transportation grant, the City must reduce VMT 6.3 percent using road pricing.

The third meeting of the 17-member Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission will be held at 2:00 this afternoon at the offices of Hughes Hubbard and Reed, 1 Battery Park Plaza (24 State St. @ Pearl St.), 10th Floor, in Manhattan.

In an op/ed piece in Monday's Daily News, Brooklyn-based transportation consultant Brian Ketcham proposed some changes to Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. Ketcham, who has been pushing for some form of congestion pricing since his time working for the Lindsay Administration more than 30 years ago, argues that New York City should:

The competition is heating up between Eurpoean cities seeking to build the best bicycling infrastructure. As we noted this morning, Amsterdam is mimicking Copenhagen's "green wave" for cyclists. And now Rome is bringing a Paris-style bike sharing project to the Italian capital by 2008.