I’ll admit I didn’t think that maybe if he broke it up into part that it would have been excepted better.

Nevertheless, I am still amazed as to how the plan was NOT excepted. would the government except the plan without the congestion pricing?

Well, it would seem one way or another we will still get it, just without the instant money and we will get it at a higher cost to implement.

But at the same time, why couldn’t the feds have given us money for BRT independent of congestion pricing? They didn’t need to take it all away if DOT had been vocal about a commitment to BRT plans.

While most of the blame has to rest with Speaker Silver, Mayor Bloomberg deserves a share, too. It was just not smart to insist that we needed a big, new, Bloomberg-branded idea, rather than focusing on incremental improvements that don’t require Albany approval. Now we have to make those improvements anyway; we just have to use our own money.

Reading about their plan, though, I can’t help wondering why our application had to be so dependent on congestion pricing. Chicago’s proposal sounds a lot like the rest of NYC’s transit plan. Couldn’t we have built in some sort of contingency plan, so that we could have at least won a smaller grant to use for BRT and parking ourselves? (I guess it would have undercut the argument for congestion pricing. But look how well that worked out.)

“While it’s sad that Washington, which most Americans agree is completely dysfunctional, is more willing to try new approaches to long-standing problems than Albany is,” Mr. Bloomberg’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, said, “we’re glad other places aren’t as allergic to innovation.”

I wish I was more up to date on just why the project failed (other than Mr. Silver who seems to have just a little bit too much power). As many people said that this wold effect the poor and the working class, I am still trying to figure out just how many poor and working class people drive to lower and midtown Manhattan 5 days a week.

I want to know where they park, how they afford the gas, the car insurance, and a few other tidbits just to have the necessary car driving privileges to get to work.

I think congestion pricing actually effected people WITH money and that was the problem.

Now we have to do everything without the 300+ million. Yes, we will still HAVE to do the same things that were proposed, its just going to be pushed back about a decade. We are going to get our BRT and about 1/4 to 1/3 of the 2nd ave subway, train and bus service increases, and maybe the LIRR to grand central… at a cost: 3.00 MTA fares, 3-6 dollar a hour parking meters, bigger traffic tickets, buses with cameras taking shots of people parked in bus areas, higher tolls on bridges, high gas tax, higher city tax… we will pay for this, make no mistake.

And wasn’t the whole price congestion thing an experiment in the first place? They were acting like we were gonna make it permanent. If it didn’t work the poof BE GONE!

Seems like something else is at work here.