Working Families � Public Transportation

Working Families � Public Transportation: "We need massive new investment to meet the demands of a growing city, but city and state aid for the MTA hasn’t kept up.

Now, faced with looming budget deficits, the MTA is talking about raising fares again, further driving up the cost of living in a city working people already can’t afford.

We need a transit system that’s affordable and reliable. But without increased state and city aid, more fare hikes are inevitable."

Streetsblog New York City � NYPD Let Witnesses Leave Scene of Fatal Fort Greene Crash

Streetsblog New York City � NYPD Let Witnesses Leave Scene of Fatal Fort Greene Crash: "Aileen McKay-Dalton
The NYPD failed to follow up with at least one key witness in its investigation of the crash that killed Aileen McKay-Dalton earlier this month, according to a woman who saw the collision and stayed at the scene."

This is heart-breaking. But, let's face it. We don't care. Why do we blame the police? This is not a problem of individual accountability. It is a system problem. Saying otherwise is to prolong the agony. We have let this monster, private auto traffic, grow and kill... and we have done little or nothing. Now, you CAN do something. Join the international campaign for free public transit. Let's get rid of this killer once and for all.

Pump price doesn’t cover gasoline cost / LJWorld.com

Pump price doesn’t cover gasoline cost / LJWorld.com: "That means the gasoline you’re buying at the pump is — stick with me here — too cheap. The price you pay is less than the product’s true cost. A lot less, actually. And it’s not just catastrophic spills and dramatic disruptions in the Middle East that add to the price. Gasoline has so many hidden costs that there’s a cottage industry devoted to tallying them up. At least the ones that can be tallied up."

Pollution Free Cities

Pollution Free Cities: "Key Quotes:
“I would have mass transit be given away for nothing and charge an awful lot for bringing an automobile into the city.” (Michael Bloomberg, Mayor New York City)
“in 2000 the government subsidy to each private vehicle owner was about $5,378 in Canadian dollars. In that year, the average cost of providing each trip taken by transit in Vancouver was approximately $5. The equivalent subsidy for transit users would have been 1,075 free trips’
“Revenue for any system drops when ridership dips or when fares are increased.. the Simpson-Curtain rule.. It drops 3.8 per cent for every 10 per cent increase in fares, researchers have found.”
“public transport .. an essential public service, and as such, like health and education, should be paid for out of general taxation.”
“72% of people interviewed in a recent survey said they would not give up their car until they could use public transport without charge (UK survey)”"

Students fight for the free transit pass

NEW YORK -- About 1,000 New York City high school students chanted "This is what democracy looks like!" and waved homemade signs and banners Friday as they marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest a plan to eliminate their free transit passes.

The students walked out of classrooms all over the city at noon and converged at City Hall Park for a rally with elected officials and transit union members.

Then they marched across the bridge for a second rally near the former headquaters of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Brooklyn.

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=940476&category=STATE#ixzz0qgKDj4Ys

New York Students fight for free transit

Students are planning to walk out of 23 high schools to demonstrate outside City Hall against the threatened end of free bus and subway rides to and from school, protest organizers said Thursday. NYTimes

 http://wcbstv.com/topstories/mta.metrocard.student.2.1745808.html

Komanoff and Kheel New York Heroes

Reuters/Eric Thayer

Komanoff’s work may not have made him a celebrity, but his rigor gained him a reputation within the rarefied world of traffic geeks. In 2007, he got a phone call. Ted Kheel, a legendary labor lawyer and one of Komanoff’s heroes, had made it his personal mission to completely rethink New York City’s traffic policy. Was Komanoff free to help?

Now 95 years old, Kheel has been trying to improve New York’s traffic for more than half a century. He is obsessed with the economic damage that cars do to cities—damage that’s much greater than most people realize. In 1958, as the New York City Transit Authority was preparing to raise subway fares, Kheel wrote a paper citing a survey that found that traffic congestion cost more than $2 billion a year. “This vast sum,” Kheel wrote, “equal to $1 a working day for every man, woman, and child in the city, has to be paid by someone, and it is. It is assessed against all of us in the form of higher prices, inflated delivery costs, and increased taxes.” It would be cheaper, he argued, to subsidize public transportation and save the hidden costs associated with driving.

Kheel made the same point a decade later, in a New York magazine cover story arguing against another fare increase: “Any balanced analysis will surely prove that the taxpayer actually pays, for every person who chooses to drive to and from work in his own car, an indirect subsidy at least 10 times as great as the indirect subsidy now paid the mass-transit rider.” Reuters

Light Rail plans for 42nd Street New York

Michael Bloomberg - have the courage of your convictions !

He did venture to suggest his plan to charge people for driving into Manhattan would funnel millions into mass transit. He noted that more money would come from increased ridership and that the feds would kick in a bigger chunk of change. He allowed himself to imagine an ideal that is not likely ever to come to pass.

"I would have mass transit be given away for nothing and charge an awful lot for bringing an automobile into the city," he said.

A reporter might have expected a politician to then rumble away in a black SUV. He instead walked the two blocks to the G train without a single news camera to record the event. The subject of the subway fare again came up as he strode toward the turnstiles and he noted that the MTA currently offers significant discounts geared to those who commute underground.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/06/07/2007-06-07_its_hizzoner_to_ride_train-2.html#ixzz0l529D0I9

Peak Auto?

... The question is whether or not we in the USA will wake up to this new reality in time to take advantage of the economic opportunities and needs of the new era -such as the need for American manufacturers of streetcars, for instance.
The really good news in this story is that this could be a transition to a time when the carnage from motor vehicle crashes will no longer be considered an accepted part of modern life. A time when our urban places will once more be designed for people and not be trashed to accommodate cars. And when the profligate burning for mobility of the earth’s finite store of petroleum will be looked at as a quaint relic of the past. A past not unlike the one now regulated to the movies where people smoked in doctor’s offices and on airplanes. A past that causes us to say: what were they thinking?...Norman Garrick on Planetizen