AMNY Subway Tracker

Second Avenue Sagas does some original sleuthing and gives an update on all the construction at Columbus Circle.

-- Chuck Bennett

The Sun has an interesting speculative piece that Assemblyman Richard Brodsky may be angling to become the next Assembly speaker.

Straphangers should care because Brodsky really appears to be on their side. As chairman of the authority oversight committee, Brodsky has been a thorn in the MTA’s side. He’s grilled Kalikow, under oath, on numerous occasions. And his hearing have made big news – like finding out the MTA valued its West Side Hards at $923 million.

He supports mass transit and investment in the system.

That said, the only one person in the article who is really predicting Brodksy will make the move to unseat current Speaker Shelly Silver was former Assemblyman Ryan Karben, who lets just say, may not be the best source of insider Albany baseball.

-- Chuck Bennett

This whole No. 7 mess is like a bunch of folks at the restaurant fighting over the bill, who ordered what, and who is treating whom.

On Friday, Bloomberg held fast that the city won’t pay for the inevitable cost overruns of the $2.1 billion expansion of the No. 7 train west and south.

Last week at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council's annual meeting, Doctoroff said he worried that the MTA wouldn’t be able to pay for the Second Avenue subway, according to NY Sun.

It will be the third groundbreaking for the same project. It sounds like the Freedom Tower," Mr. Doctoroff told a gathering of about 400 transportation professionals at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council's annual meeting yesterday, referring to the ground zero memorial that has celebrated multiple groundbreakings but has seen little work thereafter. "We've seen how these things play out before."

The Second Avenue line, known as the city's greatest transportation project never built, is a planned two-track subway line that will run along Manhattan's East Side to the financial district from 125th street. Construction on such a line stopped in 1975, when funds for the project ran dry.

"We can't afford that mistake again," Mr. Doctoroff said. He stressed that even the expected federal funding for the project "does not mean a commitment to completing the job."

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat who heads an MTA oversight committee, said Mr. Doctoroff may have spoken with the city's own financial interests in mind. "The city's reluctance to fully fund the no. 7 line is always lurking in the background of these kinds of conversations," he said.

Councilman Tony Avella introduced a bill this week to curtail construction work on weekends. God bless him for that.

Basically, he's worried that too many developers can get waivers for after hours construction in the city's new noise code.

He called the exemptions: "a loophole large enough to drive a fleet of buses through – it completely negates the general prohibition concerning after hours and weekend construction."

Let's see if this gets any traction and see if it has any potential for screwing up the MTA's expansion plan projects, like the soon to be very messy Second Avenue.

-- Chuck Bennett

Read his release after the jump

Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. will issue a report faulting the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for consistently deferring critical infrastructure work across the City, jeopardizing the safety and security of riders.

That's this afternoon. Right now, I imagine, MTA press shop and NYC Transit press show are arguing back and forth over who gets to formulate the response.

-- Chuck Bennett

Writing in Gotham Gazette, Bruce Schaller, a Visiting Scholar at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University, has an analysis of three gubernatorial candidates transportation plans. Aspiring Governor Eliot Spitzer, of course, gets the most attention.

-- Chuck Bennett amNY.com