March 2010

Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York Assembly and powerful leader of that body’s Democratic caucus, has a love-hate relationship with transit initiatives in New York City. He represents District 64 which encompasses Lower Manhattan, Chinatown and parts of the Lower East Side, an area very heavily dependent upon transit, and yet, his most notorious accomplishment over the last two years is the murder of congestion pricing when the MTA started warning about a looming debt crisis.

Unsurprisingly, then, Silver is at it again. This time, he has stripped a proposal to allow the MTA to implement camera enforcement of dedicated bus lanes from the state executive budget proposal. Gov. David Paterson recently proposed camera enforcement in his executive budget proposal two weeks ago, and the move was not without controversy. After all, the cameras for BRT enforcement purposes were originally shot down by David Gantt in 2008. Still, with the governor leading the charge, transit advocates had some hope this year.

The governor’s original proposal was, in the words of Streetsblog’s Noah Kazis, a “real game-changer” for bus riders. The bill would have allowed for camera enforcement on all 50 of the city’s bus lane miles and would have allowed for stationary cameras or those mounted on buses. Cars would receive summonses of up to $125 if they violated the bus lane laws.

The State Senate became the first of the state’s august legislative bodies to whittle away the camera proposals yesterday when they offered up a watered-down version of bus lane enforcement. Cameras, said the Senate, could be used only on existing bus lanes. The new SBS routes planned for the Upper East Side would not have been able to take advantage of these badly-needed cameras.

Advocates were unhappy. “Select Bus Service is the most important and promising project for bus riders in years,” Lindsey Lusher Shute of Transportation Alternatives said to Streetsblog. “The New York State Senate needs to revise their bus camera language and give SBS their full support. We expect the Assembly to do the same.”

The Assembly didn’t do the same; rather, the Assembly stripped the provision from the bill entire. Reports Ben Fried and Noah Kazis:

Chances to improve service on New York City’s dedicated bus lanes appeared to narrow yesterday, when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and his Democratic conference rejected bus lane enforcement cameras in the chamber’s draft budget. Camera enforcement is one of the linchpins in the city’s strategy to put the “rapid” in Bus Rapid Transit. Without it, bus riders will remain stymied by traffic, even on Select Bus Service routes…

“Right now, bus lanes are routinely violated by many vehicles, resulting in chronic delays for hundreds of thousands of bus riders,” said Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign. “Using enforcement cameras in city bus lanes could turn that around, making bus service more reliable and helping to reduce congestion.”

Two years ago, bus cams died in the Assembly transportation committee, chaired by Rochester representative David Gantt. This time around, they were stripped out in the Assembly’s opaque budget process. One advocate in Albany told Streetsblog that rank-and-file Assembly members were unaware that the bus cam provisions had been slashed from the budget resolution as late as yesterday afternoon, hours before the resolution was unveiled and voted on.

Gantt has no veto power in the Assembly budget process, which the Speaker himself exerts enormous influence over. The budget resolution only had to clear a vote in the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Upper Manhattan representative Denny Farrell, before the Speaker brought it to the full floor last night. “It’s our view that Silver maintains pretty tight control over the budget process,” said Laura Seago, a research associate at the Brennan Center for Justice and co-author of the 2009 report on Albany dysfunction, “Still Broken.”

I’m holding out hope that, during reconciliation, the Senate’s version with the watered-down camera provisions will pass. Otherwise, New Yorkers will be left stranded yet again by Sheldon Silver. When I find myself sitting in traffic stuck on a bus that can’t navigate its bus lane and can’t enforce dedicated lanes, I’ll think of Sheldon Silver and again remember how he doesn’t support transit initiatives in his own home town.