Ben Fried

So it's come to this. With transit revenues plummeting to the point where the MTA has to deal with a $400 million shortfall on top of an austerity plan that already calls for deep cuts in service, Governor Paterson yesterday proposed shifting the burden of the MTA payroll tax to fall heavily on New York City businesses. The idea is to tax city payrolls at .54 percent and suburban payrolls at .17 percent, skewing the flat .34 percent rate established last spring.

Sometime around 2019, the state DOT will begin reconstructing the segment of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway that runs through downtown Brooklyn. There are years and years of review before a shovel goes in the ground, but when construction starts, local streets already jammed with trucks and car commuters heading for free East River bridges will see even more spillover traffic. And the project itself, which will run from Hamilton Avenue to Sands Street, will have important consequences for bus transit, access to the waterfront and Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the quality of life in nearby neighborhoods.

Hat tip to Ben Kabak at Second Avenue Sagas for plucking this graph from yesterday's urgent session of the MTA finance committee. It charts where the money comes from for New York City's free and discount student transit passes -- of which there are more than half a million. And it says a lot about the transit funding mess we're in today.

Yesterday word surfaced that the MTA will receive $200 million less from the recently enacted payroll tax than the state of New York originally projected. The news came less than a week after Albany legislators slashed $143 million from the MTA so the state can keep paying its bills. Add it up, and the agency has about $340 million less than it expected to have just a few days ago. To put that in perspective, the "doomsday plan" that Albany supposedly averted back in the spring contained about $25 million in annual subway service cuts and $88 million in annual cuts to New York City bus service.

This just in: The State DOT will not widen exit ramps from the Major Deegan Expressway, the Mott Haven Herald reports. NYSDOT Region 11 spokesperson Adam Levine confirmed to Streetsblog that the agency will also refrain from adding "auxiliary lanes" as part of its plan to fix a segment of the Deegan along the Harlem River. Instead, the agency has opted to rehab but not expand the 50-year-old roadway.

Last week we reported on the state DOT's expensive plan to widen part of the Major Deegan Expressway in the southwest Bronx, even as the agency fails to maintain upstate bridges. The dubious Deegan project sucks up $266 million in the state DOT's new five-year capital plan, while more promising initiatives -- like the potential removal of the Sheridan Expressway -- languish without much money at all.

Earlier this week we asked why the state Department of Transportation still thinks it's a good idea to widen highways in the middle of dense urban neighborhoods. The agency met with stiff resistance Monday when it presented plans for bigger ramps and more lanes where the Major Deegan Expressway passes through a redeveloping neighborhood in the southwest Bronx.

These are enlightened times for New York City's local streets. The city is building sidewalk extensions, protected bike lanes, and better busways. But at the state DOT -- the agency that controls the vast majority of New York's federal transportation funding -- much of the playbook still comes straight from the Robert Moses era. At a pair of public meetings yesterday, representatives from the state DOT's Region 11 office presented plans to jam more space for cars through the dense urban fabric of the southwest Bronx, just as the area appears poised to construct new housing, parks, and retail.

Jimmy Vielkind at the Politicker files a dispatch from the first State Senate hearing about MTA chair nominee Jay Walder's severance package (yes, there will be more than one).

If you're a livable streets optimist, you probably suspected that car-free Times Square critics like Andrea Peyser, Susan Dominus, and John Liu were out of touch. After all, most New Yorkers don't own cars, and many of those who do spend more time as pedestrians than drivers. And really, how many people were driving their own private vehicles right through the middle of Times Square, anyway?