Jeff wrote: > Pathetically petty politics it seems!
...on all sides, including (especially?) Bloomberg. Let's not forget that the perennially Republican NYS Senate could have passed this without a single Democratic vote if Republican Senators wanted to, but didn't, and Bloomberg seems to be going out of his way to antagonise Senate Democrats, asserting that he's an independent now while still opposing Democratic candidates. Rather than building a coalition in support of this, he instead continues to alienate the Senate Democrats who started out on the side of giving this plan a try. Why _should_ they bail him out if he doesn't even have much support in his "own" party (well, aside from reasons of potentially good public policy....) while he continues to bash them? > One thing that is not clear, however, is why NYC would even need a > federal grant to initiate a congestion pricing plan?? Certainly > congestion pricing could be seen as a means to eliminate only lower > income people from crowded streets rather than cut auto use equally > across all income ranges. Would the fed. grant have boosted the > capacity for public transit in NYC? Anyone know? I don't, but read what the article says about what the Assembly (with a similarly permanent Democratic majority) is seeking to do with respect to making any possible solution (potentially including congestion pricing) contingent on what happens with transit: ---- Under Mr. Silver's proposal, the Legislature would not vote to authorize any congestion plan until the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has issued its capital plan next year. The goal, Assembly members said, is to ensure that the mass transit improvements promised by Mr. Bloomberg as part of his proposal are in the pipeline before the Legislature authorizes the city to collect any revenue for them. The plan would also require the City Council to approve any of the commission's recommendations before the Legislature voted on them. ---- Mike Barrett's knee-jerk reaction to the article indicates his impatience that it may take several more months for some action rather than having it right now. In any event, I bet something will happen there a lot more quickly, by comparison, than it's (still) taking Madison to get an actual mass transit system... decades of talk and "study" and we STILL don't have even a starter system, much less the full multimodal light rail and dieselbus rapid transit system we desperately need. ...and don't even get me started on queue-jumping Sun Prairie getting a "locally preferred alternative" that we now learn their city council won't even support. _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
