Bike lanes, congestion pricing, electric vehicles, mass transit and more are all targets in a letter sent to some members of Congress by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy last week.<\/p>\n
The letter is a wish list of priorities the Trump administration would like to see in a transportation funding bill renewed by Congress every five years.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s Trump\u2019s request to allow the feds to siphon local property taxes for rebuilding Penn Station and rename it after him that has gotten much of the attention.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny bill that renames Penn Station for Trump is dead in the United States Senate,\u201d Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said. \u201cI will block it.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are other requests that could hurt New York and other cities. Schumer says it\u2019s really not up to the transportation secretary.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s Congress\u2019s job to spend the money, to spend money, to take the dollars that taxpayers send us and use it for good things that are required by law,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Secretary Duffy wants to essentially eliminate funding for green transportation infrastructure, like electric vehicle charging stations.<\/p>\n
Among other requests, he\u2019d also like to change the congestion pricing program to prevent toll money from funding transit and prevent other cities from tolling an area rather than a road, condition transit funding on reducing transit crime, and eliminate funding for bike lanes.<\/p>\n
City Department of Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn says the city can still build bike lanes.<\/p>\n
\u201cFederal funding is not a major share of it,\u201d Flynn said. \u201cSo I don\u2019t foresee it having a major impact on us. But we\u2019ll always work with our partners, federal or otherwise, to make it easier and safer for New Yorkers to get around,\u201d Flynn said.<\/p>\n
Secretary Duffy has tried to go after the MTA over crime. Yet, according to a recently published federal database that lumps the subway, Staten Island Railway and NJ Transit train service together, crime rates are at 0.15 per 1 million passengers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bike lanes, congestion pricing, electric vehicles, mass transit and more are all targets in a letter sent to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[25,1084,9,24,12,108,63,298,134,136,135,27,296,142,200],"class_list":["post-308624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-app-top-stories","tag-app-traffic-transit","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-ny-state-of-politics-blog","tag-nyc","tag-samantha-liebman","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news","tag-top-stories","tag-traffic-and-transit","tag-transit","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}