Kathryn Wylde

Yesterday on WNBC's "News Forum," Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City and congestion pricing panel appointee, went head-to-head with anti-pricing Assemblyman Richard Brodsky. While Brodsky once again recited the "tax on the working man" même chapter and verse, he failed, once again, to articulate an alternative plan to raise the money everyone agrees is necessary to shore up mass transit.

From Elizabeth Benjamin at The Daily Politics:

Here are two initial responses to this morning's news that the US DOT will grant New York City $354 million to implement Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan:

This Morning's Forum: Road Pricing Worked in London. Can It Work in New York?

Car-Free lunchtime on Madison Avenue, April 19, 1971. New York City policy-makers haven't seriously considered traffic reduction since the Lindsay Administration. (Image courtesy of Jeff Zupan)

Of the ten largest cities in the United States, New York has far and away the greatest population density: 26,402.9 people per square mile, more than double the second densest big city, Chicago. The chart at right shows how the largest metropolitan areas stack up in terms of core population, overall population and core population density.  This fact alone should force New York City authorities to think differently than the rest of the country on all sorts of matters of public policy. New York is a quantitatively different animal than the other big American metropolitan regions in terms of percentage of people that live in the core, density and size of the core and size of the metropolitan area.

As we reported this morning, Mayor Bloomberg is in California with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to make a major policy announcement on a major, long-term, environmental sustainability initiative. The key components of the Mayor's plan include: