MTA

Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith has come out with another MTA funding proposal, which again gives commuters who drive across East and Harlem River bridges a free pass. The $1.76 billion it would generate annually for the MTA falls more than $300 million short of the projected revenue from the original Ravitch plan ($2.1 billion). Liz Benjamin at the Daily Politics has the details:

The ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria is packed right now for the RPA's 2009 Regional Assembly, where Richard Ravitch just accepted a lifetime achievement honor. Many luminaries from the worlds of transportation, planning, and politics are here, and I've got a few minutes to post some interesting exchanges from earlier in the day, so here goes.

State legislators are about to head home for the Easter and Passover holiday, leaving transit riders to twist in the wind a while longer without an MTA funding plan in place. Martin Malave Dilan, chair of the State Senate's transportation committee, gave Politicker's Jimmy Vielkind one last debriefing before the legislative break:

One of the more common excuses we've been hearing from local pols during the current MTA crisis is that "service never improves," so why bother to fund transit? Set aside, for the moment, the fact that subways and buses are moving way more New Yorkers than they did just a few years ago. Courtesy of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, here's an interesting case study of service actually getting worse and why it happened.

State Senator Andrew Lanza called this afternoon in response to yesterday's post about his MTA rescue stance. He first took issue with the characterization of Senate Republicans as "refusing to budge" on a transit funding plan, saying that his conference has effectively been shut out of the process. "If they wanted to come forward with an MTA rescue package," he said of the Democratic leadership, "there's not a thing a Republican can do."

Here's State Senator Andrew Lanza, a Staten Island Republican, explaining why he supports tolls on the East River bridges. For Staten Island drivers looking at a $3 hike in cash tolls to cross the Verrazano (or a $1.32 hike for locals with E-ZPass), the sight of other motorists getting a free pass into Manhattan must be a source of perpetual gall and resentment.

It's a long walk from the Red Hook West houses to the nearest subway stop at Smith-9th Street, and even longer to train connections at Fourth Avenue. Without night-time B77 service, a lot of commuters from the largest public housing project in Brooklyn will have to make that trek -- including a dash beneath the BQE -- on a regular basis. With MTA rescue talks currently at a standstill in Albany, about 100 Red Hook residents marched yesterday in protest of the austerity measures that will soon take effect. Clarence Eckerson documented the rally, organized by the Red Hook East and West Tenants Association.

Yesterday, after bridge tolls were officially ruled dead and before the latest breakdown in MTA rescue talks, the Working Families Party sent out an alert that its "Halt the Hike" campaign is back in full swing. In an email exchange with WFP spokesman Dan Levitan, I asked why, given the big income disparities between car commuters and transit riders, the party waited so long to join the fray. Does the Working Families Party oppose bridge tolls and road pricing? He wrote back:

The Fare Hike Four have absorbed most of the fire from advocates and editorial boards for derailing the Ravitch plan, and rightfully so. But by calling so much attention to themselves, they've also given cover to other members of the State Senate. So, what does the rest of the Senate majority have to say? Here's what Brooklyn's Velmanette Montgomery, re-elected on the Democratic and Working Families Party ballot lines in 2008 (with more than 96 percent of the vote), told her constituents: