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| Re: Daily News Demagogic Fare Hike Piece (538280) | |||
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Re: Daily News Demagogic Fare Hike Piece |
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Posted by Marc A. Rivlin on Fri Dec 21 18:54:28 2007, in response to Re: Daily News Demagogic Fare Hike Piece, posted by Russ on Fri Dec 21 07:01:40 2007. Paying for a high percentage of operations out of the farebox is bad policy, in my opinion, especially when the expense budget includes all of the Pataki/Conway/Kalikow debt service. There are external benefits of public transit that are not captured by the rider, public goods of reduced congestion and and pollution and added economic activity. Therefore, I believe that society, through government, should subsidize transit and I don't think we do it sufficiently in New York. And, the fact is we subsidize cars and trucks by building roads and highways, mostly untolled except for fuel taxes. We subsidize air travel. I just think we don't subsidize transit enough and I'm happy to use the Daily News to try to leverage some more money out the of the City and State.I think it's great that Sander wants Albany to ante up for the capital program. But, that won't do anything about the billions of debt that we have to pay back on MTA bonds in the past decade or so. In 1997, debt service cost the MTA $170 million. When I last researched this, for the 2004-05 budget cycle, the MTA was expecting to pay $1.7 billion in debt service in 2007, this after refinancing debt when interest rates his 40 year lows. And, I believe we paid for I-86 with a mix of federal and state money and, IIRC, possibly from a transportation bond act, so I think the state paid. I cold be wrong, but I do know that the taxpayers of the state of New York are paying for considerable state highway capital construction costs that were not from toll-backed bonds. But, delay the fare increase until July without new money? That's just bad policy since we will need a higher fare increase just to end up even in the end. |
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