State Legislature

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.

In handing down a prison term of 20-to-life for Auvryn Scarlett, the garbage hauler who had stopped taking his epilepsy medication before suffering a seizure behind the wheel and killing two pedestrians last year, Justice Richard Carruthers described the convicted as "a time bomb ready to explode at any moment on the streets of New York." The same could be said of the countless number of motorists roaming the city at any given moment though their licenses have been suspended or revoked due to a history of recklessness. Two such drivers killed three people in separate crashes over the Thanksgiving holiday.

While it took a lot of very public arm-twisting, last week brought a rare bit of good news from Albany: Lawmakers actually passed and adopted legislation to increase penalties for drunk drivers. And they did so, by their standards, with lightning speed. Reacting to the death of 11-year-old Leandra Rosado, who was thrown from a car driven by an intoxicated Carmen Huertas on the Henry Hudson Parkway on October 11, Governor David Paterson last Wednesday signed a bill making it a felony to drive drunk with children as passengers.

City district attorneys and NYPD have reached an agreement that could speed the process of collecting blood evidence from drunk driving suspects who refuse to take breath tests.

It's not news that a half-century of transportation spending to accommodate the automobile has made the typical American city hazardous and hostile to people on foot. But it's shocking how we still devote so few resources to correcting those mistakes. A new report released today by a coalition of advocacy groups, including Transportation for America and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, quantifies current funding disparities and the cost in human lives. From T4A:

"If I put train tracks down the street, you wouldn’t park your car on them. If I said this is a bus lane, somehow it becomes fair game. One person’s use of a road impacts upon another person’s use of the road. My point is, if we have to make a choice, make the choice for the bus, not for the car.”

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?

Following another revision to the Second Avenue Subway construction timetable, the first phase of the mega-project remains, as ever, about seven or eight years away from completion. Pete Donohue reports in the Daily News: