Your Guide to New York State's Judicial Nomination Process

As I mentioned recently, there were two bizarre judicial rulings in the New York State Supreme Court setting back transportation reform. On August 18, State Supreme Court judge Arthur Engoron declared that the Five Borough Taxi Plan was unconstitutional, and on August 22, State Supreme Court judge Bruce Cozzens declared that a payroll tax that funds a significant chunk of the city's transit operations is unconstitutional. They both rested their opinions on a dubious principle of home rule.

The State Supreme Court - that sounds like a big deal, huh? Like New York's version of Justices Breyer and Roberts? Actually, as I learned in eighth grade, the Supreme Court is actually the state's lowest court, able to be overruled by the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals, not to mention federal courts. But it's still significant. So where did these guys come from, anyway, and how did they get this kind of power?



Governing magazine has the answer, and it links to two editorials that are definitely worth a read. I sure didn't learn this stuff in eighth grade! It turns out that New York State has a hugely crappy, undemocratic system of electing judges. Sure, you can get nominated as an independent, but to get the nomination of the Democratic or Republican parties you don't run in the primary like you might for a legislative seat. You need to be chosen by a Judicial Nominating Convention.

Who votes in the nominating convention? Judicial Delegates. Who chooses the judicial delegates? In principle, you can vote for them in the primary, but in practice nobody bothers to collect the signatures to contest a judicial delegate election. The county party committee can nominate candidates for the primary without requiring signatures, and the party committee is controlled by the county chair. So in practice, the county chairs nominate the delegates and tell them who to nominate for judgeships, and the delegates do it.

Okay, so where do these County Chairs come from? They're elected by the county committee, which is made up of the party's State Committee members from that county. In theory, the State Committee members are elected in the primary elections, but just like the judicial delegates, it's very rare to collect petitions and run for the State Committee. Most people just get nominated by the County Chairs themselves. Once that happens, of course, they owe something to the chairs, so they keep re-electing them.

Now you might have noticed that in this system, the State Committee members and judicial convention delegates have effectively zero decision-making power. Their entire function is to obfuscate the system so that people can't tell what's going on, and give it a veneer of legitimacy. So why do they bother? What do they get out of it? Besides a chance for some kinky sex in an Albany motel, that is?

The most ambitious of these people are candidates for higher office. By attending the State Committee and the judicial nominating convention, they have a chance to prove their loyalty to their patrons. This marks their place in the hierarchy, and then when vacancies come up for elected positions, including judgeships, they may be chosen by the county or state chair to be the party's candidate and not have to collect petitions. The less ambitious people, or the ones marking time in between elected terms of office, are rewarded for their loyalty with powerful roles on the boards of government authorities, and sinecures at well-connected nonprofits and corporations.

The State Court of Appeals is actually nominated in a slightly cleaner way, by the state's Commission on Judicial Nomination, whose commissioners are nominated by the Governor, the Chief Judge and the majority and minority leaders of the two legislative chambers. Of course, how the legislative leaders get elected isn't exactly clean either, but it's a slight improvement.

So the next time you hear, "State Supreme Court Judge," remember that they're essentially appointed by the county party chairs. And the next time you hear about a scandal involving a county party chair, think about how many judges that chair has selected.

The high cost of cheap on-street parking

Last week I promised you another explanation for the crazy law that was passed by the New York State Legislature, essentially outlawing small curbside bus companies. (For a maddeningly Orwellian take on the legislation, go read this blog post by Tri-State's Nadine Lemmon where she spins it as "a victory for community leaders and sustainable transportation advocates.") I've given one explanation: established companies like Greyhound and Peter Pan raising the barriers to keep competitors out of the market. The other explanation is that too many powerful people want cheap curbside parking.

Of the nine complaints about curbside buses, seven related to illegal activities (idling, blocking the sidewalk, blocking the road, littering, physically attacking your competitors, excessive noise, and parking in city bus stops) that were not being prosecuted. The other two relate to parking:

6. Parked buses "could tie up deliveries, and other businesses in the area will be affected as well" (Tribeca Trib).
9. "People's homes and businesses are being blocked by buses, commercial areas, residential areas," says Senator Squadron (Metro).

If you've been following trends in the worlds of progressive and libertarian transportation policy, you've heard about UCLA urban planner Donald Shoup and his strong case that parking - on-street and off-street - is underpriced. Cheap parking leads to drivers circling for spaces, which compounds street congestion. It also leads to office workers, salesclerks and neighbors hogging valuable commercial spaces, so that they are unavailable for shoppers. And it encourages people to drive - at least, those who can get a space.

Imagine if curbside parking were charged at market rates. Shoup recommends that the rate be set at a level that allows for about 15% of the spaces on each block to be unoccupied at any given time. Rates in Midtown Manhattan would be sky-high, of course, and in Chinatown they'd be pretty high too. If they were still high enough for a bus company to make a profit picking up passengers, they could do that. If not, then they wouldn't pick up there.

If Greyhound didn't like Megabus paying for curb space outside the Port Authority, they could outbid Megabus, and maybe free up a gate in the terminal for another bus company. If a shopper or a delivery truck driver wanted to park in that space, they could outbid the bus company. But I'm guessing that the shopkeepers, office workers and status-seekers who currently take up a lot of the curb space in Midtown and Chinatown would find a garage space or take the train.

Would this price out some of the residents, shoppers and businesses that can't afford to pay so much for curb space? Maybe, but how is the current first-come, first-served system any better, with its circling and space-hogging?

Would market pricing also bump out smaller curbside bus operators? Probably some, but the DOT could institute some kind of incubator program where an up-and-coming bus company could get a discount on curb rates in exchange for submitting to more frequent inspections or something. Others could probably find a convenient corner where they could afford the parking rates, or even rent their own terminal.

Market-rate parking is a notoriously difficult political challenge, and one approach has been to sidestep the resistance by outsourcing the meters to a private company. After Chicago's 2008 deal was panned as a short-term sell-out, many people have been leery of such projects. But if done right, it could rationalize the curbside busing system without the need for a new cumbersome layer of bureaucracy. Imagine if Dan Squadron, Margaret Chin, CHEKPEDS and Tri-State had used that opportunity to push for rational curb pricing instead of giving us this turkey of a law.

Why do so many people care about curbside buses?

In my post about the crazy law passed last week by the New York State legislature to (over)regulate private curbside buses in the city, I asked for help getting the word out. I got numerous tweets and retweets, and two of the three people I asked by name responded. Matt Yglesias wrote a nice blog post highlighting the burden caused by requiring a "traffic study" for each new bus stop permit, and noting the double standard for buses versus cars. John Stossel had a post highlighting the connection between private enterprise and innovation, which is particularly strong in the transit field. Some nice person also reddited my post.

And for the record, I totally understand why Tom Vanderbilt didn't respond to my call. It's not really his area, while both Yglesias and Stossel have written specifically about private van services in the past. But thanks for everyone who took up the call! I doubt we'll get this thing repealed any time soon, but hopefully more people will be watching the next time this comes up.

So I promised you an explanation for the bizarre urgency with which politicians and (non bus riding) "community members" achieved consensus on the issue of regulating (out of existence) intercity curbside bus pickup here in New York City. The explanations they gave - chaos, danger, congestion - were unsatisfying, in part because these were all things that were already regulated. I've got another explanation: barriers to entry.

It's been widely observed that much regulation is pushed by existing businesses to make it hard for new competitors to horn in on their territory. Just the other day, Planet Money's Jacob Goldstein said that they like to "claim that they're dangerous" and need to be regulated. The more established private operators like Greyhound and Adirondack Trailways pay a "gate fee" to the Port Authority for use of their terminal. (This gets weird when small commuter bus lines like DeCamp get free buses from the New Jersey Department of Transportation to reduce their capital expenditures, because it becomes a net transfer of funds from the State of New Jersey to the Port Authority.) Curbside buses pay almost nothing for their street space, which was thrown in the faces of the established companies when Megabus relocated to 41st Street, in between the two wings of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.



One weird thing is that Megabus is owned by the conglomerate Stagecoach, from the city of Perth in Scotland. You would think that it would then be the patriotic thing to support the companies that rent in the Port Authority, but the biggest, Greyhound, is owned by First Group, headquartered in Aberdeen, Scotland; we're really just pawns in some giant multi-generational clan war. The other big non-Chinese curbside bus company, Bolt, is a joint venture between Greyhound and Peter Pan (a family-owned business based in Springfield, Massachusetts). Stagecoach actually owns a whole portfolio of small profitable bus operators that rent inside the Port Authority under the Coachusa brand: Short Line, Red and Tan, Suburban. The lawsuit itself is more First vs. Stagecoach than anything else: Bolt is not trying for a near the Port Authority, and is not being sued, and the Coachusa companies haven't joined the suit.

A big factor is definitely the established companies putting up greater barriers to their curbside competitors. There's another factor here, that I'll get into soon.

Who's sticking up for the bus riders?

Today the New York State Legislature killed bus innovation in New York City. What are we going to do about it?

Yes, you read that right. The State Senate passed two bills (one and two) sponsored by Marty Golden (who styles himself a friend of transit, but has often failed it when the chips are down), Daniel Squadron (who's been a more consistent supporter of transit and should really know better) and Toby Stavisky (who is hopeless). They have already been passed by the Assembly, where they were sponsored by Shelly Silver (the Assembly's creepy dictator who sometimes does the right thing, but can never be relied on), Cathy Nolan (who likes to think of herself as a progressive but is usually pretty backward-thinking when it comes to transit) and Grace Meng (who is running for Congress on a promise to "focus on transportation").



The bills will require "cities having a population of one million or more" (the Legislature's bill-of-attainder legalese for New York City) to set up a permit system for curbside intercity bus pickups. They will no longer be allowed to go where there's space. Now they will have to apply (and reapply every three years) under a process that can take up to a hundred fifty days. The DOT will have to do a traffic study for every. single. bus. stop. and "consult" with the MTA and Port Authority if the proposed stop would "overlap" with an existing facility owned by either agency. The application would have to go through the fucking community board for a "notice and comment period of forty-five days."

There's a lot of other weirdness if you read the bill, which shows that the people drafting it are either clueless about how buses are run, or want to make it impossible to run a curbside bus operation in the city, or both. The bus operator has to include the US or State DOT registration numbers of each bus that would use those stops, a proposed schedule and the number of passengers anticipated, and notify the City DOT if that information changes. They will have to post a copy of the permit in every bus and pay up to $275 per bus.

The schedule and anticipated number of passengers is a pain in the ass, for obvious reasons, and not just for jitney-type services. One of the great advantages of buses is to be able to respond, in a short time frame, to changes in demand. Big holiday weekend for the colleges? Throw on a few more bus runs. Slow business to the beach in the winter? Cut a run here and there. No more.

What's really crazy is tying this to specific buses. If you pay any attention to bus service, you'll know that bus companies buy new buses and sell old buses. They also rent and charter extra buses to respond to demand. If a bus company replaces a bus, do they have to pay a whole new $275 and go through the 150-day process? Is this $275 per bus per stop, so that if a company wants the flexibility to shift some buses from a Midtown pickup to a Downtown pickup and back, they have to buy two permits? Chartering will essentially be impossible under these circumstances.

Why this added layer of bureaucracy? Well, there have been a whole bunch of reasons given, but all the complaints boil down to the NYPD not doing their job. Squadron and friends have a solution! They'll make the DOT do the NYPD's job, and add a whole bunch of other things for the DOT to do on top of that - without any increased funding, of course; I guess they'll just have to take money out of the Select Bus planning budget! But that can't be all; I think this is a pretext, and I'll get into the other motivations later.

As I've written in numerous blog posts over the years, the explosion of intercity bus service in Manhattan has been one of the few areas of major transit expansion at a time when Amtrak has been stagnant in the Northeast Corridor, the ARC Tunnel has been blocked and New Jersey Transit's capital improvements have been squashed, the Metro-North and LIRR budgets have been funneled into East Side Access and a bunch of crazy parking garages, and government-run local bus and subway service has been cut. Well, now you can say goodbye to that.

This is now virtually a done deal. The bills have passed the Senate with near-unanimous votes, and the Assembly on party-line votes. There may be some tweaking to be done, but unless something crazy happens (and in Albany, you never know), they've got veto-proof majorities.

So how did we get to this point? Why did nobody call up Dan Squadron and say, "No offense, Senator, but your bill is fucking nuts and you need to pull it now"? Where were the transit advocates?

Journalists, who are seriously uninformed on this issue and have not taken the time to actually figure out what's going on, have covered it as your typical David and Goliath story, where Goliath is either the Port Authority or the bus companies. They like a transit story where there's someone who's losing their transit and they can stick a mike in their face and broadcast their pain to the world. They can sort of deal with the death of transit plans, like the ARC tunnel. They have a really hard time dealing with the loss of potential transit, or transit flexibility: something that's hard to pin down even though you and I know it's there.

What about bloggers? As far as I can tell, I'm the only one who's highlighting the threat to transit. Streetsblog and the libertarian blogosphere has cast a half-hearted glance over here every once in a while, but their think-tanks have been pretty oblivious. Will Doig at Salon, after telling us it's time to start loving the bus, then decided that we should only love government buses, because private buses are a failure of libertarianism. Jarrett Walker and Yonah Freemark seem completely uninterested in any transit innovation that isn't channeled through a government-run planning process.

A huge disappointment has been the absence of the fractal-thinking pattern-language dynamic-city crowd. They love to talk about pop-up this and guerrilla that, but for some reason pop-up, guerrilla buses have escaped their notice.

By far the most frustrating absence has been that of what passes for transit advocates in this town. Kate Slevin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Joan Byron of the Pratt Institute and Dani Simons of the Institute for Transportation Development Policy love to tell us how we can't have any trains because buses are the future. Buses are so cheap, you can roll them out for a fraction of the price of a train line!

Okay, Kate, Joan, Dani: here are buses so cheap that they require no public spending at all on capital or operations! All the government has to do is provide the roads and the sidewalks. It's the ultimate system! And where are they when we need them? The same place they were last year when we needed them for the 34th Street Select Buses: nowhere. This is the second time that these "advocates" have let bus riders down. Isn't it clear now that they don't give a shit about any buses that don't fit into their narrative about Cheap, Community Transportation that is So Much Better than the Train?

I end this rant with a call to action, or at least to make some noise. This issue will go precisely nowhere if it depends on one unpaid blogger sitting up until two in the morning to write about this stuff. I need you all to blog this. You're all welcome to join in, but I want to single out three people in particular that I would like to see pick up this issue.

John Stossel can be obnoxious, but he's got a television show and he's covered dollar vans in the past. This is right up his alley.

Matt Yglesias has picked up on some of my issues before, and he can see what's going wrong and explain it to a wide audience.

Tom Vanderbilt writes mostly about driving, but he has reviewed Jarrett's book. He likes to think things through.

Please, everyone, do what you can.

The wacky anti-bus campaign

I'm really starting to get sick of this shit.

Look, transit is good, right? The easier and cheaper it is to get to Boston or DC by bus or train, the less likely people are to rent or own cars. And buses are good; what I've been complaining about recently isn't buses, but people telling me that we should only have buses and not trains.

Private transit is a very good sign. If you follow transit advocates from the hinterlands like Sheryl Gross-Glaser or Helen Bushnell, they have a hard enough time trying to convince governments to provide transit to their citizens as a public service, as opposed to some charity for the desperately poor and disabled. The idea that it might ever be a profitable business is completely off their radar. But here in New York City we have so many people who want to ride buses that private operators are flooding in. Isn't that great?

Well, some people look at this and all they see are problems. In September 2008 it was Councilmember Alan Gerson and Manhattan Community Board 3. In October 2008 it was CHEKPEDS and Assemblymember Dick Gottfried. In May 2009 it was Gerson again, Borough President Scott Stringer and CB1, and again I proposed a solution. In April 2011 it was Gerson's successor Margaret Chin, State Senator Daniel Squadron, Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver and Assemblymember Dan Garodnick, and a raft of studies.

Now Silver, Squadron and Chin have gotten together with Commissioner Sadik-Khan and agreed on a bill to allow the city to regulate the buses. Fortunately they don't have a Republican sponsor in the Senate, which means that they probably won't pass a bill this year.

Okay, remind me why we need a bill? Well... everyone just ...kinda wants one. The complaints are actually pretty incoherent. Let's take a look.

1. The buses often idle. "Some neighbors believe" they can make residents' asthma worse (Gotham Gazette).
2. The buses make it "difficult to maintain a steady flow of ... pedestrian traffic" (Gotham Gazette).
3. "and automobile traffic" (Gotham Gazette)
4. and "to regulate trash and parking" (Gotham Gazette).
5. Competition also creates "the possibility of accidents and even violence" (Gotham Gazette).
6. Parked buses "could tie up deliveries, and other businesses in the area will be affected as well" (Tribeca Trib).
7. "Noise" is a problem, according to Council Speaker Quinn. (Greg Mocker).
8. The buses park in local bus stops. (Tri-State).
9. "People's homes and businesses are being blocked by buses, commercial areas, residential areas," says Senator Squadron. Whatever that means (Metro).

Many of these things are already against the law. We have laws against littering, idling, double-parking, and parking in bus stops. Do we really need a permit system to enforce them? Others are just vague and bizarre, like the city should create a pre-crime unit to arrest people before they commit violence. But the biggest complaint people seem to have, according to last year's press release, is that they're messy. Squadron's favorite phrase is that Chinatown is "like the wild west." It's "chaos," Chinatown is being "overrun" with "no clear rules." The proposal would "create a clearer system" that would allow the bus companies to operate "in harmony with the local community."

That part also makes no sense. To me, everything about Chinatown is chaotic and overrun, with no clear rules. Sometimes I really like that. Are they going to make laws against durian, fish and those little beckoning cat sculptures too?

The remaining concerns speak to a deeper issue: the allocation of street space. As with much of what goes on in New York, that's the real issue; the rest is just smoke. But it'll have to wait for another post.

The state budget's bogus parity

Every once in a while the debate over the New York State budget turns briefly to transportation, and we see where our leaders have their priorities. Back in January, Streetsblog reported that the Governor had allocated $150 million to the MTA Capital Plan for next year, 5.7% of the budget for that plan, while requiring the MTA to borrow six times as much. Even this paltry amount was blocked by the State Senate, until a budget deal was hashed out by the infamous "three men in a room": Governor Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Silver and Senate Majority Leader Skelos.

DeFrancisco, Libous and Skelos: making sure drivers get as much as possible.

State Senate Budget Committee chair John DeFrancisco made his priorities clear to Glenn Bain of the Daily News: "DeFrancisco also expressed concern that funding for upstate road and bridge projects were being treated fairly," wrote Bain. "We don’t have too many MTA trains going to Syracuse," DeFrancisco told him. When the deal was finally announced, Dana Rubenstein of Capital New York surmised that "what the Senate Republicans might have been holding out for, in this case, was more money for non-city road and bridge projects."

Republican Senators, in particular Tom Libous of Binghamton, the Deputy Majority Leader, were also concerned that there would be "parity" in road funding between upstate and downstate, and last week State leaders produced a "memorandum of understanding" that would send "$751 million to the upstate regions north and west of the Hudson Valley. ... the Hudson Valley, including Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Ulster and Dutchess counties, would get up to $158 million, Long Island would get up to $291 million, and New York City would get up to $415 million."

It's not clear what the actual basis is for the "parity" demanded by Libous and DeFrancisco. Are there the same number of drivers in the Hudson Valley as transit riders in New York City? As many drivers Upstate as in the City and the Island combined? Or is it based on land area, or taxes paid, or political contributions, or spiedie consumption? I don't have figures for those criteria, but let's take a look at the commuting population and how they get to work, from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey:

Region	Total commuting population	Drove alone, carpooled, taxi, bicycle or motorcycle to work	Public transportation to work
Upstate	3,029,501	2,841,155	11,399
Hudson Valley	1,003,833	797,964	122,356
Long Island	1,067,230	796,873	191,913
New York City	3,618,690	1,119,412	1,998,795
Total	8,719,254	5,555,404	2,324,463

Let's combine the public transit commuters from the Hudson Valley, the City and Long Island as the total constituency of the MTA. Some of them may only use their local county bus systems or even private buses like Red and Tan, but I'm guessing that most of the commuters from outside the city ride Metro-North or the Long Island Rail Road. We have to exclude Upstate transit commuters, because those transit agencies apparently got zero capital support from the State budget. You could say that people who walked to work benefited from State DOT money, but the state DOT spends so little of its money on pedestrian infrastructure it might as well be zero. True, everyone indirectly benefits from roads because they get things delivered by truck, but the enormous inefficiencies of truck freight would probably cancel out any indirect benefit.

Constituency	Commuters	Percentage of commuters	Capital funding	Percentage of capital funding
Upstate car/bike commuters	2,841,155	36.1 %	$751,000,000	32.2 %
Hudson Valley car/bike commuters	797,964	10.1 %	$158,000,000	6.78 %
Long Island car/bike commuters	796,873	10.1 %	$291,000,000	12.5 %
New York City car/bike commuters	1,119,4125	14.2 %	$415,000,000	17.8 %
MTA riders	2,313,064	29.4 %	$150,000,000	6.44 %
Total	7,868,468		$1,765,000,000

You can see that something's off there. Needless to say, bicyclists are a tiny share of commuters, but none of the percentages match. Now what if we allocated it differently, based on population?

Constituency	Percentage of commuters	Capital funding approved	Capital funding by population	Favored by budget
Upstate car/bike commuters	36.1 %	$751,000,000	$637,308,123	$113,691,876.61
Hudson Valley car/bike commuters	10.1 %	$158,000,000	$178,993,733	($20,993,732.96)
Long Island car/bike commuters	10.1 %	$291,000,000	$178,749,007	$112,250,992.57
New York City car/bike commuters	14.2 %	$415,000,000	$251,098,712	$163,901,288.03
MTA riders	29.4 %	$150,000,000	$518,850,424	($368,850,424.25)
Total		$1,765,000,000

So there you have it. The Upstate drivers, led by Tom Libous and John DeFrancisco, and the Long Island drivers, led by Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Transportation Chair Charles Fuschillo, each got over $112 million more than they would if it were based on simple commuting numbers. City drivers, led by Republicans Marty Golden and Andrew Lanza and Independent Democrats Jeff Klein and Diane Savino, got $163 million more. A tiny bit of this ($20 million) came from Hudson Valley drivers, but the vast majority, $369 million, came from city transit riders.

There is no "parity" here, even for drivers. The formula is simple: the more powerful "legislators" get more money for their constituents, and every driver is worth as much as 4.5 transit riders.

Keep this in mind next time you hear Skelos, Fuschillo, Golden, Lanza, Klein and Savino complaining about MTA cuts. They may act like they care, but when the money's on the line they're not fighting for transit riders.

Mike Gianaris and Marge Markey and Joe Crowley will again stab straphangers in the back

Transportation Alternatives sent around a Media Round-Up to their members - and I am one - saying that the Daily News editorial on the latest MTA fare hike is a "must read." And wow! It certainly is a must read - as a great example of how not to hold anyone accountable for anything. This is the tale of the fare hike as told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

First, anyone who writes, "The MTA should" about anything that involves more than a million dollars is either clueless or lying. "The MTA" - presumably the MTA board and its Chair, Joe Lhota - don't have control over much more. It was the State Legislature, specifically Malcolm Smith and Sheldon Silver, who promised that any fare hike would be tied to service increases.

Second, anyone who writes, "Albany will" without mentioning specific legislators is either lazy or lying. Unless you have good evidence to the contrary, any time you read "Albany" in the paper, replace it with the names of your legislators. My legislators, Mike Gianaris and Marge Markey, have repeatedly insisted that drivers should never have to pay to maintain the bridges they drive on or the streets they park on at night, but they have shown no such tenacity when it comes to subway fares.

Third, since most State elections are not competitive, it's not the voters but the party leaders who decide on the candidates. The Queens Democratic machine has come down hard on anyone who even thinks about challenging incumbent legislators or their anointed successors, and worked with the Republicans to rig the election laws to make it much harder for anyone from another party to run. Party Chair Joe Crowley and the State Committee set it up so that last year I had no choice but to vote for Mike and Marge.

So it's not "Albany will," it's "Unless the MTA slashes expenses or the governor and Legislature come up with new funding, Mike Gianaris and Marge Markey and Joe Crowley will again stab straphangers in the back." Replace with your own legislators and party boss, and your state committee members if you know them, and remember it when they come asking for campaign contributions, and when they appear at the next bogus rally blaming "the MTA" for service cuts.

If I had 10,000,000,000...

... I would buy out John Aston and every one of the current taxi medallion owners who believe they've made an investment in "the American dream," but don't understand or care that investments are gambles, and that the government has no responsibility to guarantee their investment.

All you taxi rentiers, please take your $800,000 and get out. Anyone who is willing to hold the city hostage to ensure their rate of return does not deserve to do business here. I don't want you paying people like Ethan Gerber, Fernando Mateo or Lew Fidler to stand in front of City Hall and spew garbage about killing jobs, community service and local control. You want a guaranteed investment? Put $250,000 in a savings account, or buy Treasury bills.

Contrast this attitude with Bhairavi Desai, who simply negotiated some measures to mitigate the impact of these changes on her members. Let's hope that the other groups are bluffing too, and that over the next few days they'll take their concessions and quietly walk away.

Fernando Mateo actually told the Times, "It’s better that we keep the status quo as it is. Why create change? It’s not right. I don’t understand what the mentality at City Hall really is right now."

Well, Mr. Mateo, it's really pretty simple. As "the Changeling" in Bed-Stuy writes, (1) from a distance it's hard to tell whether a car is a livery cab and whether it's already taken, (2) the honking that substitutes for availability lights is annoying, (3) haggling is difficult, and some passengers resort to flirting, (4) some cars and drivers are unlicensed and some dispatchers are unprofessional.

That's why we want to create change: to replace the messed-up system of illegal street hails with a professional service that people in the outer boroughs can rely on so that they don't feel as much pressure to blow their hard-earned money on a private car. That's better for New Yorkers and better for the environment. That's what the mentality at City Hall is right now.

According to the Times, Matteo also "said that he feared that if livery cars began picking up passengers on the streets, fewer of those cars would be available to respond to radio calls and pick up people who do not live near major thoroughfares." Well, no. If there's demand for radio calls and the current drivers aren't fulfilling it, then new drivers can come in to fill the gap. After all, there's no cap on the number of people who can respond to radio calls. Is a successful entrepreneur like him really so ignorant of basic issues of supply and demand, or is he bullshitting?

Bus capacity background, again

In my last post, I discussed the brewing storm over bus capacity in Manhattan. It wasn't the first time: in 2008 I wrote that the Lincoln Tunnel vans were a shining beacon of profitable transit that Dick Gottfried was threatening to firebomb. In 2009 I wrote that Alan Gerson (anybody miss him?) was holding up the East River Esplanade because he didn't want buses stored on West Street in Tribeca. A better way, I argued in both cases, would be through-running of commuter buses from New Jersey to Brooklyn and Queens.

As Joel pointed out in the comments to yesterday's post, and as the Wall Street Journal detailed recently, the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan serves a truly staggering number of buses. It has already been expanded once, in 1979, and has been at capacity for years - anyone know how many years it's been full without anyone in power trying to add capacity? This is why buses are picking up and dropping off passengers on the street - if you want to add a route, there is literally nowhere else to go.

There has been significant discussion of bus storage: I've been very critical of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign recently, but they have been involved - in their high-level way, without much organizing at the local level. Christine Berthet, of the Hell's Kitchen community group Chekpeds, has been a strong and sane voice on this issue, as she is on most transportation issues. City Planning has undertaken a study of bus parking in Chinatown, and something called the Mayor's Midtown Citizens Committee did a study in their part of Manhattan. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is looking to adapt the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel garage for buses.

I'll have more about potential solutions and about the media and governance issues, but in the meantime I want to highlight the fact that I've been talking about this for two and a half years now, and not much has changed. I'm loath to compare bus frequency to the shooting of unarmed civilians, but I have to ask: how long do we have to keep repeating that the bus riders matter? How long must we sing this song?

The Working Families Party wants the MTA to stop defunding itself

Streetsblog reports that the "Working Families" Party is at it again. After being completely AWOL in the congestion pricing debates, last year they came out with a "Halt the Hike" campaign that coyly refused to take a position on Dick Ravitch's proposal to toll the "free" bridges. Last May they asked candidates to support Bus Rapid Transit - but not necessarily to fund the buses. This February, in response to the planned service cuts, they targeted first the MTA, then Mayor Bloomberg, and finally Governor Paterson.

Yesterday, Streetsblog's Ben Fried linked to a petition on the Party's website, which is so short I'll just quote it in full:

Another Fare Hike? Tell the MTA No Way

The MTA just announced another round of fare hikes -- including a new, limited ride $100 monthly MetroCard. Enough is enough! Sign our petition to the MTA and help us reach our new goal of 5,000 7,500 signatures:

"Limited unlimited MetroCards for $100? Fuggedaboutit! The MTA needs to stop using fare hikes as a short-term fix and come up with long-term solutions to solve its budget crisis."

There it is again, that weird frame that anti-transit people use to attack government-run transit agencies. The WFP is pretending that the MTA is not a government agency, that its revenue streams aren't determined by state law, and that it has some kind of control over its income, like it can go out and take a second job washing dishes to pay off its debts or something. Congratulations, Dan Cantor! You're using the same kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that right-wingers like John McCain and Wendell Cox use to attack Amtrak.

This petition demands the impossible, and because it does so, it sets the MTA up for failure. It's like that stupid bully trick where the bully hits you with your own hand and says, "Stop hitting yourself!" In this case it's a tag team effort where the State Legislature is the bully, and the Working Families Party is the sidekick who gets to play the moronic - but sadistic - mind games. Stop defunding yourself, MTA! Heh, heh! Now make like a tree and leave!

Of course, "the MTA" doesn't have feelings, and Jay Walder probably has a good therapist to help him deal with the stress of running the agency. The bullies' real victims are you and me, the people who actually ride the subways and buses. When the MTA hits itself, we're the ones who get bruised.

Of course, the Legislature has been relying on the public authority structure to hide the fact that the MTA is the state that is us. The WFP knows that if they tried to hold every state legislator accountable for defunding the MTA they'd have nobody left to endorse, and if they don't endorse a large subset of the candidates they risk being seen as irrelevant, so they go along with the lie.

Unfortunately, it seems to be working. The WFP was looking for five thousand signatures, and they had more than that as of this morning. They've now raised their target to 7500 signatures, and they're at 6257 right now.

It may not be much, but I put up a counter-petition asking the WFP to deny its ballot line to those who voted to cut funding for transit. I threw it up in ten minutes, and the Petitionspot site is kind of weird, but I've already gotten 36 signatures today, with just a link on Streetsblog and a single tweet.

The Working Families Party is clearly afraid to deny its ballot line to too many candidates, because they don't want to be seen as irrelevant. I actually think it's the other way around. If they endorse only 10% of the candidates in a given year, they send the message that they've got strong principles - and the ballot line is that much more valuable to those who actually get it. On the other hand, if they endorse a candidate in almost every contest, then it becomes clear that they have no principles, that they just choose the lesser of two evils. That really lowers the bar, because all you have to do to get the ballot line is be slightly less evil than your opponents.

I kinda figured out that the WFP was a craven, spineless organization back in 2000, when a Working Families volunteer handed me a flyer supporting Hillary Clinton for Senate. I keep hoping that some day they'll grow up and figure out that it's okay to have principles and to hold others to them, and that you can wield power without turning yourself into a half-assed version of Ray Harding. Maybe next year.

A Senate candidate worth fighting for

You may remember that two years ago the State Assembly killed a plan to charge drivers for using the "free" East River bridges - currently maintained with general tax dollars - and use the money to make up for funding cuts to subways, buses and commuter rail. Last year, the State Senate killed another version of the plan.

While it can be fun to put the blame on obstructionist leaders like Assemblymembers Brodsky and Dinowitz and Senators Espada and Diaz, the fact remains that even those legislators who were the most in favor, like Senator Duane and Dick Gottfried, gave very tepid support. The rest of the legislators clearly didn't see tolls as a win for their constituents, and were probably holding out for some deal that never materialized.

People all over the state are frustrated with the legislature for other issues like voting down gay marriage, shutting down the Senate with partisan squabbling, and the current budget craziness. There is probably more momentum for replacing the incumbents than at any time in the past.

Sadly, although some of the challengers this year would be better on LGBT issues or gerrymandering, most of them, like Michael Gianaris, seem content to continue lavishing our tax money on "free" bridges for solo suburban drivers.

But I don't want to be completely depressing. There are a few bright lights here and there. One of them is in Senate District 16 ("the Jewish Gerrymander," PDF), which has long been represented by the useless Toby Ann Stavisky. During the debate on the Ravitch Plan, Stavisky was "unalterably opposed" to tolls on the 4.5% of her constituents who use the bridges, but "excited" about the plan that wound up being passed - which turned out to be a total failure. One particular quote from Stavisky is amusing - in a frustrating kind of way: "One of the problems is that there’s a sense of distrust between the legislators and the MTA — well-earned I must say." Yes, she certainly worked hard for it.

In probably the most reassuring news about the Senate this year, Stavisky is being challenged by retired biologist Isaac Sasson, who will be spending a million dollars on the primary. How did a cancer biologist get a million dollars? He won $13 million in the Lotto in 2007.

Unlike many Senate candidates, we don't need to ask Sasson whether he's in favor of bridge tolls. In 1991, long before he was a multi-millionaire, he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that while vehicles with three or more occupants should cross for free, those with two occupants should pay five dollars and those with only one should pay twenty.

Of course, per-vehicle tolls already provide an incentive to carpool: if the toll is $10, then two occupants each pay $5, and three would pay $3.33 (and take turns paying the extra penny). Maybe Sasson felt that carpoolers need an even greater incentive. Or maybe it's evidence of the lottery being a tax on people who flunked math. Either way, replacing Stavisky with Sasson would be a big win for the people of the 16th District, which is as much of a doormat for suburban cars as the 12th.

Brilliant but lazy

The key thing to know about the word "but" is that it really matters whether a given phrase comes before the "but" or after it. For example, "brilliant but lazy" means something quite different from "lazy but brilliant." You can do this with a number of adjective pairs, like "attractive but dishonest" and "unhealthy but delicious."

The order reflects the judgment of the person speaking. If they think a woman is lazy but brilliant they're going to hire her, but if they think she's brilliant but lazy they're not. The term that comes after the "but" is always the more important criterion that leads to the final judgment. Similarly, if someone thinks a man is attractive but dishonest they're going to avoid being in a relationship with him, and if they think a dish of food is unhealthy but delicious they're going to eat it anyway.

There are other expressions that have basically the same function, and here we get to the topic of bridge tolls and the State Senate. For example, here is Senator Bill Perkins (79.8% of households car-free):

Bill Perkins of Manhattan has indicated support of Silver's plan but noted, "We have to proceed with caution, and maybe some refining."

Support but caution means that if something comes up he doesn't like, it's a no-go. Contrast this with Senator Duane (77.7% car-free):

State Sen. Thomas Duane supported the Ravitch report, though he was concerned that placing booths on the East River bridges might cause vehicles to back up into Brooklyn as drivers wait to pay a toll. Aside from that concern, he supported the plan and funding the MTA.

That "though" is like a "but," except it works backwards. The thing before the "though" is the conclusion. "Aside from" is like a "but" in that the last element is the deciding factor, but it comes before both elements. So Duane is saying tolls might cause backups but he supported the report. He has that concern but he supports funding the MTA.

These are important because they tell us where the speaker's priorities lie, and what conclusion they expect to reach. Of course the wise thing for politicians to do is acknowledge the concerns of all their constituents, but the "but" tells us how important those concerns are relative to each other. For Perkins, it's support but caution. For Duane, it's concerns but support.

So why is the guy representing the least car-dependent district in the State Senate, and probably the least car-dependent district of that size in the country, placing concerns ahead of support?

Senate 12: Exchanging bad for worse

Gay marriage advocates have something to cheer about, but transit advocates are facing unpleasant prospects in Senate District 12. George Onorato, who recently voted against the same-sex marriage bill, announced that he will not seek re-election to the Senate seat he has held for 27 years. Assemblyman Michael Gianaris from Astoria, who publicly criticized Onorato for his position on marriage equality, announced that he would run for the seat.

Transit advocates in District 12 have long been frustrated with Onorato's lack of interest in the system that helps most of his constituents get around every day. Despite the fact (PDF) that 56.8% of households in District 12 are car-free, and only 3.7% of commuters drove to Manhattan for work, Onorato was initially undecided on congestion pricing and then made more and more negative statements. Streetsblog today described him as a "road pricing skeptic."

Gianaris meets with Richard Ravitch in February 2009 to try to find a way to pay for the MTA "without imposing new bridge tolls." Apparently, they failed. Photo: Queens Gazette.

However, that skepticism pales by comparison with Gianaris's outright hostility to road pricing. Streetsblog's characterization of Onorato was based on a quote pulled from a Queens Gazette article about a January 2008 town hall meeting to discuss congestion pricing. But the town hall meeting was sponsored by the publisher of the Gazette and Gianaris, who both spoke forcefully against it. Here are Gianaris's statements as quoted in the article:

I oppose it. A big concern is people will park in Astoria and Long Island City and hop on a train [to Manhattan]. I would hate to displace the [traffic congestion] problems of Midtown Manhattan to us.

It's really a way to tax people who don't live in Manhattan. It's not only who's paying but who's not paying-the wealthiest of the wealthy. I am not going to support a plan to make Manhattan a rich person's paradise.

There are people who do not have easy access to mass transit. It's a long way to go before this (congestion pricing) becomes a reality. I am going to fight this.

In December 2008, when Gianaris and his colleagues in the Assembly had succeeded in defeating congestion pricing, he had this to say about Richard Ravitch's follow-up plan to use bridge toll revenue to pay for the MTA:

Any solution that disproportionately burdens middle- and working-class people who live in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn is not a fair way to deal with this, and that’s what tolling the bridges would do.

In February of 2009, when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver proposed a compromise bridge toll plan, here's what Gianaris had to say:

Honestly, I'm still evaluating it. This idea is certainly better than the Ravitch plan, but I remain very apprehensive about any tolls on the East River crossings.

Keep in mind that Gianaris's Assembly district 36 (PDF) is only slightly more car-oriented than Senate District 12: 51.4% of households car-free, and 4.4% of commuters to the Central Business District traveling by car alone. But while Onorato waffled, Gianaris was in full-throated opposition, with the kind of dramatic rhetoric we mostly heard from legislators representing much more car-dependent districts, like Richard Brodsky or David Weprin.

By last May, Gianaris and Onorato had won: Governor Paterson conceded that he would have to accept the plan devised by Senators Kruger, Espada, Monserrate and Diaz. At the time, it was widely acknowledged by everyone outside of the legislature that this plan would just postpone the crisis. Streetsblog noted that all three dailies panned it. The Times: "Albany’s latest M.T.A. plan fails to provide enough steady revenue for the authority’s capital needs." The News: "there will be scant money to maintain the system, starting riders on a trip back into the nightmare of broken-down trains and filthy stations." The Post: "their plan makes scant provision for the future. Indeed, it follows precisely the logic that led to the system's demise in the '70s: Put off needed funding today, and worry about it tomorrow. Only "tomorrow" never comes." As far as I remember, the MTA was silent, preferring to let the politicians decide.

Well, now the crisis predicted by the editorial boards has come to pass, maybe a little sooner than expected. The MTA, facing a $600 million deficit and a fare hike already scheduled for 2011, has proposed a set of service cuts. In response, craven lawmakers from around the city have been holding bogus rallies where they criticize the MTA as though their own actions had nothing to do with the current situation.

The rally held in Astoria last week by Gianaris and City Councilmember Peter Vallone Jr. seemed by most accounts to be typical of these things. But the Gazette had the most damning quote from Gianaris (emphasis mine):

The MTA is looking to scare us. The city makes us pay more taxes each year to keep trains like the W line running. And now, despite heavy taxes, the MTA has lied to us and they are threatening to cut our services.

Whatever taxes "the city" is making us pay, its contribution to the MTA has been going down for the past sixteen years, so it's not going to the W train. I'm sure the MTA has lied about something, and they're clearly looking to scare people and threatening to cut services. But Gianaris surely knows that the State contribution has been going down - he voted for the 2008 budget that cut $50 million - and probably the same for the city.

The MTA is simply not responsible for the service cuts that Gianaris is protesting, the State Legislature is - including himself and Onorato. There are two possibilities. Either Gianaris has knowingly forced the MTA to cut service and is lying about it, or he just blindly protested bridge tolls and voted to cut state funding, and was too stupid to figure out that there was no way for the MTA to pay for its operations without them. One way or another, he's not someone I want representing me in the State Senate.

Before Onorato retired, there were rumors that Gianaris would run for Attorney General and leave it to a junior political figure to challenge Onorato in the primary. Now that Gianaris has said he will be running for Senate, there's the question of who will run for his seat in the Assembly. One of the favorites to challenge Onorato was lawyer and activist Jeremiah Frei-Pearson, and we can imagine that Frei-Pearson will at least consider running for Assembly. I wish I could say that Frei-Pearson would be an improvement over Gianaris in the Assembly, but he showed up at the same rally where Gianaris said "the MTA has lied."

Frei-Pearson's statement at that rally just addressed the impact of the proposed service cuts, not the question of blame or solutions, so it's possible that he just doesn't know the extent to which Gianaris is responsible for the current situation. Let's hope that he's better than Gianaris, figures out what's going on soon and shows true progressive spirit. Otherwise, the chances for Astoria's transit riders look pretty slim.

Addendum: Streetsblog today linked to an article in City Hall News about possible contenders for Gianaris's seat. Unfortunately for those of us who care about a candidate's position on the issues, this article comes from an exclusively horse-race perspective. All we learn is who's got what connections, and that one Republican thinks the 36th is "definitely a conservative-leaning district." Thanks, Chris Bragg!

They're not in Woodhaven's corner

This breaks my heart. I am totally serious. I really like Woodhaven: it's a cute little neighborhood tucked away under the el, with a great shoe store and a couple nice parks nearby. It's very sad to see them treated this way.

The proposed MTA service cuts will deprive Woodhaven of Z skip-stop train service to Manhattan, and the Q56 bus from Jamaica to East New York. This was on the front page of last week's Queens Chronicle.

Concerned residents called a press conference and invited their alleged representatives to speak out on their behalf. Assemblymember Miller and Councilmembers Ulrich and Crowley are too new to know where they really stand, but Crowley's cousin did speak in favor of congestion pricing back in 2007. Of course they did attack the MTA instead of their colleagues in the State Legislature who cut its funding.

State Senator Joe Addabbo, who this summer sat on his hands as his colleagues killed bridge tolls to fund the MTA, did not attend the meeting, but his office issued a lame press release putting all the blame on the authority.

The biggest hypocrite has to be Assemblyman Rory Lancman of Fresh Meadows, whose district stretches down to pick up the few white votes left in Woodhaven. You may remember Lancman as the Assembly's point buffoon during the congestion pricing debates. Yes, he's the one who released one of many unworkable "alternative plans" to congestion pricing, notably involving $500 million to improve bus service.

Okay, Rory, where's that $500 million? The MTA could really use it now. What's that? You cut the budget by $53 million instead? Of course, Lancman seems to have completely forgotten that proposal, falling back on his tried-and-true blame game: "The MTA needs to start at the top. It needs to reform itself. It needs to restructure itself."

The most depressing thing is that the Woodhaven community leaders seem to have fallen for that trick. Back in March, the Chronicle reported on the efforts of Maria Thomson, the executive director of the Greater Woodhaven Development Corporation and the Woodhaven BID, to prevent cuts to the Q56 (emphasis mine):

In her testimony to the MTA board during its public hearings, Thomson asked the members, "What are you thinking? How can you discontinue a bus that has no replacement?"

Thomson has reached out to a number of elected officials to make them aware of the situation. "They are lobbying for us," she said and working on the community’s behalf to get the line reinstated in the budget.

Your faith is touching, Ms. Thomson, but you do know that legislators don't have to lobby anyone but their colleagues and maybe the Governor to get a budget increase? How many times will you reach out to the same elected officials after you've seen them cut funding when they promised to increase it? Please don't tell me that you're planning to support Addabbo and Lancman's re-elections campaigns next year after all this?

Sadly, I'm guessing that she will. The Project Woodhaven blogger - clearly an ally of hers in this fight - ends the story with this line: "Well, the ball is rolling -- and we've got the right people in our corner." As long as they keep thinking that, nothing's going to change.

Bad transit funding frames

When you think of the word "bailout," what comes to mind?

If you're a real old salt, you might think of a leaky boat (or a good boat in a bad storm) that keeps taking on water. Bailing out is throwing the water out with a pail. And you'd want to know who was the jerk that took the boat out in the first place without properly sealing it.

You might also think of someone who's been arrested and is offered the opportunity to post bail. Bailing them out is going to the court with enough money to get them released. And you'd want to know who was the jerk that went and got arrested in the first place.

If you're thinking more of current events, you would probably think of the homeowners who bought houses with mortgages they couldn't afford to pay. Or you might think of all the banks, investment firms and insurance companies that wound up losing so much on defaulted mortgages that they couldn't afford to repay their debts or deposits. In that case, bailing out is when the government arranges for a loan to be forgiven or renegotiated, or simply pays it back on behalf of the debtor. And in that case you want to know who was the jerk that took out a loan in the first place without making sure they had enough money to pay it back.

The boat scenario, the jail scenario and the banking scenario are what the linguist Charles Fillmore calls frames, and what his colleague George Lakoff has used to explain why some political arguments succeed or fail regardless of whether they're logically sound, or even true. The boat bailout frame contains other concepts such as sea, oars, rain and tarp. The jail bailout frame contains concepts like bondsman, recognizance and court date. The financial bailout frame contains concepts like foreclosure, derivatives, the Fed and TARP.

They're different frames, but they have a lot in common, and the term bailout was first applied to the financial world as a metaphor to indicate that someone was coming to the rescue of someone else who was in trouble. Note that in all the cases they usually got themselves into the trouble, and the person bailing them out is not necessarily doing it out of kindness.

So now what do you think of when you think of an MTA bailout? You think "Okay, now who are the jerks that got themselves into this mess, and why do I have to come pull them out of it?" MTA rescue is almost as bad: you're thinking, "What, they need to be rescued again? What are they doing that they keep getting into these kinds of situations?"

In the typical bailout there is no external agent who's causing the trouble. The fault is the person who's in trouble. Similar with the kind of rescue being evoked here: it's not the innocent maiden being rescued from the dragon, it's those overconfident mountain climbers having to be rescued from the storm again.

Lakoff's argument is that frames bypass the logical parts of our brains and go straight to our emotions, so you have to be really careful to evoke the right ones. Using the word "bailout" or "rescue" in an article or blog post about a financial crisis is pretty much guaranteed to get a big chunk of the readership wondering whether they didn't bring it on themselves.

Of course, they didn't - not completely at least. Pataki was the first to cut the State's contribution to the MTA, and Giuliani cut the city contribution. That has continued under Bloomberg, Spitzer and Paterson - although to be fair, the legislature cut some of that money on its own. And when Bloomberg and later Paterson tried to toll the city's bridges to make up at least part of those cuts, the State Legislature voted against the plans. In this case, more than two-thirds of the shortfall is the documented fault of the legislature: they miscalculated how much tax revenue it would take to properly fund the MTA, and they refused to cut anything else from the budget, forcing Paterson to cut everything across the board. The MTA may be partly at fault, but in this case, the fault is mostly that of Shelly Silver and Pedro Espada.

This means that when people use words like "bailout" and "rescue package" to describe what's going on with the MTA, they're obscuring an important part of the story. No wonder the comments sections of the major papers are full of people who think that the MTA doesn't deserve the money. The frames lead them to that conclusion.

Now, it may be entirely innocent, that these reporters and bloggers are just repeating what they've heard from other sources, but it's still counterproductive. Anyone who repeats these words together is really not doing the MTA any favors.

If you want to do the right thing, use words that will portray the situation in a light that fits more with the reality, and point towards ways to properly fund the agency. Contribution suggests a shared endeavor for the good of all. So does paying their fair share. Investment implies that the money will probably pay off in the long run.

State Senate quintiles

This week New York voters re-elected most of their City Council members, and elected a few new ones, with most of them not having taken much of a stand on transportation issues. It's time to start looking to next year and the state legislature. Of course, the biggest obstacle to real reform this year was the dysfunctional State Senate, where the Democratic and Republican patronage machines clashed in a titanic struggle while largely ignoring the needs and wishes of their constituents. Because of this, the real winners were the "fare hike four" (sometimes more, sometimes less) who withheld their votes for power and got it: Pedro Espada, Hiram Monserrate, Ruben Diaz Jr. and Carl Kruger.

The fate of the Ravitch plan shows that the State Senate can have a big influence on the MTA. Transit advocates should pay attention to this race, and try to do what they can to get crappy senators replaced with more transit-friendly ones. Here's the quintile map, based on one from the Department of City Plannning, converted with MapShaper and colored with data from the Tri-State/Pratt factsheets:

In the green districts, with Perkins, Serrano, Duane, Squadron and Krueger, more than 73% of the households are car-free. In the yellow districts, with Espada, Schneiderman, Montgomery, Dilan and Diaz, it's between 65% and 73%. In the orange districts, represented by Adams, Onorato, Sampson, Parker, Hassell-Thompson and Monserrate, between 50% and 65% of households are car-free. In the red zone, Savino, Kruger, Golden, Stavisky and Smith represent districts that are between 34.4% and 50% car-free. The purple districts, with Huntley, Addabbo, Klein, Padavan and Lanza, are less than 34.4% car-free.

Duane, Squadron, Krueger and Schneiderman have mostly been pro-MTA - although they certainly could have been more vocal about it. Espada, Dilan, Diaz, Monserrate, Montgomery, Parker, Hassell-Thompson, and Kruger have actively obstructed funding the subways through bridge tolls. Savino talks about MTA funding, which is better than nothing. Adams, Smith and Klein have all been disappointing in various ways.

Republican Senators Golden, Padavan and Lanza are especially disappointing, because they had an opportunity to form a grand coalition with the rest of the Democrats in favor of transit funding, but instead chose to play power politics and allow the Gang of Four to kill the Ravitch plan.

Some of the seats will be contested in 2010. The Democrats have only a single-vote majority, so they will be trying to expand that caucus, and the Republicans will be trying to win back control of the chamber. The stakes are high: whoever controls the Senate will control the 2010 gerrymandering - not only for the Senate and Assembly, but also for Congress. Rather than blindly supporting along party lines, transit advocates should look for good candidates to support - no matter what party they're from.

Monserrate was recently convicted of misdemeanor assault for slashing his girlfriend's face with a broken bottle. He has not resigned or been expelled, but Queens Democratic party chairman Joe Crowley has said he will back Assemblymember Jose Peralta in the primary this fall. George Onorato will be 82 next year, and will also likely face a primary challenger.

The senators representing the "green zone" have pretty much supported transit. The "yellow zone" is a different story, with both Espada and Diaz. Since they both were responsible for the dysfunction in the Senate this year, it would be only right if they faced strong challengers, and transit advocates should throw their support behind those challengers, or even recruit some. One possible candidate to run against Diaz would be Majora Carter, who has brought nationwide attention to transportation justice issues in the district. Martin Malave Dilan and Velmanette Montgomery have been disappointing on transit issues as well, and I personally know several transit advocates who live in their districts.

The current State Senate is an embarrassment to the people of New York, in support for transit and many other ways. Let's hope that changes in 2010.

"Atlantic Yards" project will shrink the yards themselves

Since we're on the subject of central rail terminals and track capacity...

Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project was supposed to benefit everybody: he would renovate and expand the Long Island Railroad's Vanderbilt Yard, build the tallest building in Brooklyn (designed by Frank Gehry!), bring pro sports back to the borough, build condos for the rich and affordable housing for the poor, and provide millions for the MTA.

Some people were skeptical, and it turns out that almost all of those promises have been broken. If you needed another reason to oppose this stinking heap of corruption, the Atlantic Yards Report tells us that the latest iteration of the plan would not actually enlarge the Yards so that they could store 76 cars instead of 72; instead, it would shrink them down to 70 cars or less.

LIRR president Williams let that slip in a Senate hearing in May, in which she said that it was settled on as part of a "value engineering exercise" with Ratner's staff. Gee, I'm so glad she's in control of the entire MTA now. Thanks, Senator Smith!

Fairness for upstate

One of the worst aspects of the current plan to properly fund the MTA is that out of a concern for parity and "fairness" to upstate it would tax cab rides to fund upstate road and bridge construction. Some have rightly argued that this would encourage more car use upstate, offsetting any gains in transit ridership. However, there's something to be said for people upstate feeling left out.

The simple solution is to use revenue (not taxi surcharges, because that would encourage more private car use) to fund upstate rail and bus use. That would do a lot more for upstate than simply feeding their driving habits. The DOT just released a state rail plan; I'd be happy to chip in for that. Also, transit systems around the country are facing budget shortfalls, and I'm sure that some of those systems are upstate.

Getting Something Together

In my last blog post, I reprinted a press release from the Empire State Transportation Alliance, one of the few groups holding actions directed at the State Legislature, but tweaked them a little for not having a website. Today I got a new press release about their action pointing me to a website, http://www.keepnewyorkmoving.org/, where you can fill out a postcard to Governor Paterson.

It seems a little odd to send a note to the Governor when he's pretty much on board. In his State of the State address he seemed pretty satisfied with the Ravitch commission's recommendations. I guess if you send it to him, he can then turn to the Legislature and say "I got this many petitions in favor of the Ravitch plan." Still, you might want to look up your State Senator and Assemblymember by zip code and let them know directly how you feel.

In any case, this web page was set up in December (if not earlier) by the Campaign for New York's Future. It's just a single page on their website, but hopefully it'll be enough. Here's the press release:

NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release Contact:

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 Gene Russianoff, (917) 575-9434, grussian@nypirg.org ;

Neysa Pranger at (917) 532-0567, npranger@rpa.org ;

Bennett Kleinberg, (212) 576-2700, bkleinberg@goodmanmedia.com

Groups to Legislature: Rescue Transit System

Unless Albany Acts by March, Downstate Fares Will Soar, Service Will be Slashed, and Rebuilding Work Faces Grim Future

Coalition Urges Governor, Legislators to “Keep New York Moving”; Launches New Campaign to Benefit Commuters, New York City and State Economies

ALBANY – Two broad coalitions of civic, business, labor and environmental groups gathered here today to urge Governor Paterson and the state legislature to rescue the downstate transportation system or face a deeper and far more serious economic crisis.

The two coalitions -- led by the Empire State Transportation Alliance (ESTA) and the Campaign for New York’s Future -- launched the “Keep New York Moving” campaign and vowed a ‘full-court press’ until state legislature agrees to take action. Campaign partners will aggressively reach out to the public and elected officials through an on-the-ground and advertising effort. The groups already have set up a website, www.KeepNewYorkMoving.org, and they have distributed leaflets to transit riders urging they take action at the site. Thousands of people already have signed the online petition and postcards in support, which were on display during the news conference. Coalition partners also will hold community events, such as funerals for the “death of transit services,” and will visit Albany regularly.

“Riders are looking to Governor Paterson and the legislature to come to our rescue,” said Gene Russianoff, senior attorney for the Straphangers Campaign. “We urge them to agree on new revenue sources to make sure the costs and benefits of transit are shared fairly.”

The potential impact on riders on the pending MTA “doomsday” budget is staggering. Transit officials say they will vote by late March to raise the base subway and bus fare from $2.00 to $2.50; charge $103 for a 30-day MetroCard (up from the current $81); and make major service cuts, including eliminating two lines (W and Z), shortening three others (G, M and N) – increasing subway wait times and crowding – and eliminating or shortening dozens of bus routes.

Not only would commuters suffer, but the economies of both the city and state would be at serious risk. The current MTA 2005-2009 Capital Plan already has resulted in $29.2 billion dollars in statewide economic activity and sales in municipalities as far north as Plattsburg and west as Buffalo and Rochester. The effect on the downstate economy would also have wide ranging impacts for all New Yorkers. Every $1 billion in MTA capital spending generates 8,700 jobs, $454 million in total wages and $1.5 billion in economic activity in the NYC metropolitan region. Under the MTA “doomsday” budget, almost 30,000 construction jobs would be stripped from the city’s workforce by 2010, which would lower construction spending by 22 percent, putting industry employment at its lowest level in a decade and the effect on state revenues will be disastrous.

“We have a transit crisis on our hands with major service cuts, fare increases and no capital funding available. If not averted, it’s a crisis that will affect every community in the state,” said Kevin S. Corbett, co-chair of the Empire State Transportation Alliance. “The state is going to have to make tough choices for saving the transit system. It is in every New Yorker’s interest to keep transit, and revenues, flowing. We’re looking to Albany for the leadership New York State needs.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is projecting a $1.2 billion deficit in its $10 billion operating budget for 2009 and having no money available for its next $25 billion-plus five-year rebuilding program. The MTA has set a deadline of March 25 for the state legislature to act before the “doomsday” budget goes into effect.

“Even with the investments of the last several years, the transit system still is relying on portions of infrastructure that have been in place for eight decades. We need to ask where we would be today had previous generations of leaders not had the foresight to invest in the transit system, and we must recognize we are still are paying the price for those generations of leaders who did not maintain that investment,” said Denise Richardson, managing director of the General Contractor’s Association of New York. “We are faced with a clear choice: are we the leaders that will make the investment to maintain jobs and create a 21^st century transit system or are we the leaders that will skirt responsibility and put New York City’s future as an economic powerhouse at risk?”

“Adequate support for operating, maintaining, and expanding New York's transit system is essential for not only the New York City metropolitan region but also for the economic well being of New York State,” said Jim Melius, President of the New York State Laborers’. “We have procrastinated for too long. We need to provide a solid base of support for the MTA now and for the future.”

“In these tough economic times, fully funding and expanding transit is the key to keeping New York open for business,” said Mary Barber, campaign director for Living Cities at Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s not just essential for the economy; it’s also a green solution that improves the downstate quality of live and residents’ health. It is time to expand the transit lifeline to more people.”

“New York City’s transit system keeps virtually all New Yorkers moving since 94% of all commuting within the city use mass transit,” said xx, of the Transit Workers Union. “Transit workers know just how important the system is to the city and state, and we know that the way to keep that commitment is through improving and expanding service, not through cuts that cripple mobility and the economy.”

Recognizing the transit’s system critical role in the health of the downstate region’s economy, last June, Governor Paterson appointed former MTA chairman Richard Ravitch and a panel of experts to examine how the state could meet the MTA’s financial needs,. In December, the Commission released its plan, which recommended bridge tolls on the Harlem and East River bridges, a modest fare increase and a regional payroll tax.

Members of the Keep New York Moving campaign added that they believed that city and state leaders now had the chance to hammer some combination of the proposals into a stable funding program to keep commuter rails, buses and the subways running and growing to meet riders’ needs.

“We will need strong leadership to turn the ideas into reality,” said Kate Slevin, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a regional policy watchdog group. “There will be tough choices, but we must share the transit system’s cost. Everyone benefits from our robust public transportation network, so everyone – including businesses, riders, and drivers – should share the burden of paying for it.”

“Riders already bear an extremely high percentage of the cost of transit service and are now threatened with an even higher burden,” said William Henderson, Executive Director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. “It is time for our elected officials to back up their statements of support for transit with decisive action to ensure all who benefit from the MTA system will make an appropriate contribution to meeting its operating and capital needs.”

“Full, fair funding for a high-quality transit system is vital to keep New York moving toward a greener, healthier, more prosperous future, especially as we confront climate change, continued population growth and global economic turmoil,” said Michael O’Loughlin, director for the Campaign for New York’s Future. “The Commission’s recommendations should jumpstart action from our elected leaders on a plan that stems the draconian cuts certain in the next few months, while also making the long-term investments that are so essential to New York’s long-term environmental and economic sustainability.”

“With the MTA facing its worst crisis in a generation, business-as-usual will not cut it this time. Unless legislators act now, the riding public will face skyrocketing fares and crippling service cuts,” says Peter Goldwasser, General Counsel and Special Projects Director for Transportation Alternatives.

Those signing on to today’s call for action and joining the “Keep New York Moving” campaign include prominent members of the business, civic and labor community, including the Regional Plan Association, NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign, Tri-State Transportation Campaign, New York League of Conservation Voters, Environmental Defense Fund, General Contractor’s Association of New York, Campaign for New York’s Future, New York Building Congress, Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, Long Island Contractor’s Association of New York State, Natural Resources Defense Council, Construction Industry Council, Associated General Contractors of NYS, Transportation Alternatives, Vision Long Island, American Council of Engineering Companies, New York Roadway Improvement Coalition, New York State Laborers’ Unions, Building Trades Employers’ Association, NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management and Partnership for Sustainable Ports, Inc. (*list subject to revision)