Sheldon Silver

It seems like only yesterday that the three men emerged from their room with vague talk of an emerging scheme to spare transit riders -- temporarily, at least -- the pain of fare hikes and service cuts required, minus help from Albany, to keep the MTA afloat. But as the Times reports, a new development would catch the triumvirate flat-footed.

Breaking news from The Politicker's Jimmy Vielkind:

The MTA's doomsday scenario came closer to fruition today, as agency board members took a step toward implementing planned fare hikes and service reductions while state lawmakers appeared mired in stalemate. Here are a few tidbits.

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.

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.

On Thursday, Sheldon Silver re-appointed Rochester's David Gantt to chair the Assembly Transportation Committee (Excel spreadsheet via Daily Politics). Gantt is the chairman who engineered the defeat of bus lane enforcement cameras last June, when six co-sponsors of the bill wound up voting against it in his committee. With the city's bus rapid transit plans relying on bus-mounted cameras to help keep BRT lanes free of auto traffic, the committee vote dealt a big setback to New York City bus riders.

Dig deep enough into Governor Paterson's austerity budget and you'll actually find a few pieces of good news. Case in point: One provision would allow New York to expand its red light camera program, currently limited to 100 cameras, and a second would authorize other cities to launch their own automated red light enforcement programs (see page 65 of this PDF, or follow the jump).

On Sunday, the editors of Crain's proposed that a reinstatement of the commuter tax, as called for by several local pols -- including Sheldon Silver, who helped kill it in 1999 -- should be considered in concert with, and not instead of, tolls on East River bridges. The editorial is behind the pay wall, so here is an excerpt:

With New York City's mostly uncontested primary elections less than a week away, attention turns to the 64th State Assembly district in Lower Manhattan, where New York Times-endorsed insurgent Paul Newell is running a long-shot campaign against Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Facing his first Democratic challenge since the coining of the word "cyberspace," the decidedly analog Speaker has joined us here in the Information Age with a fancy new campaign web site, ShellySilver.org. It features an eye-catching Google map illustrating "What Shelly's Doing Near You" with some of the $3 to $7 million in member items he distributes annually.