Special Reports

The General Contractors Association of New York, which represents heavy construction contractors, says it wants a funding solution to the $14 billion gap in the MTA's capital plan -- just not the Move NY toll reform plan that's being shopped around Albany. It's a shift in tone from the group's interest when the plan was being developed a few years ago, and a stark contrast from eight years ago, when the group was one of the biggest backers of congestion pricing.

Members of Families For Safe Streets asked Council Member Helen Rosenthal at a town hall meeting last night why she reappointed street safety foe and longtime Community Board 7 transportation committee co-chair Dan Zweig. But Rosenthal refused to answer questions from Upper West Siders who have lost loved ones to traffic violence.

The trickle of elected officials endorsing toll reform is starting to become more of a steady stream, and a look at who belongs to the coalition suggests that the politics of the Move NY plan are indeed different than the politics of congestion pricing.

Community board meetings in central Harlem have officially gone off the deep end.

New York politicos couldn't have asked for a better deflection of their own responsibility to keep our transit system running than this piece served up yesterday by Times opinion writer Eleanor Randolph:

The problem seems simple enough: The federal transportation program is going broke because Washington has allowed the gas tax to be eroded by inflation for more than 20 years.

State Senator Jose Peralta, who opposed congestion pricing and East River bridge tolls as an Assembly member, is the first state legislator to publicly endorse the Move NY toll reform plan. The proposal would create a consistent toll cordon for Manhattan south of 60th Street while lowering tolls on outlying bridges to raise funds for transit and roads (mostly transit).

The Move NY toll reform plan, which would create a consistent toll cordon around the Manhattan central business district while dropping toll rates on outer-borough crossings, has received the endorsement of Council Member James Vacca of the Bronx.

Add street safety to the list of benefits from congestion pricing. That’s the takeaway from a new “working paper” analyzing traffic crash rates in and around the London congestion charging zone by three economists associated with the Management School at Lancaster University.