In response to The MTA’s plans for yet another round of fare hikes next July and in 2011, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli will begin an audit of the MTA’s finances, according to The Post. The examination of the transit agency’s new budget proposal, which includes the fare increases, is slated to be completed in September and will determine whether more investigations are needed.

The MTA claims that it needs more revenue to counter a coming $900 million budget deficit resulting from “rising fuel costs and shrinking income from real-estate taxes,” as well as yearly debt repayment costs that run into the billions of dollars.

If this claim of being out of cash sounds familiar, it’s because the MTA has done it before. An audit by the state and city back in 2003 found that the MTA mischaracterized its finances (the MTA disputes this) to the tune of $600 million to try and make the case for a fare increase.

From Beijing to Madrid, cutting-edge designs and innovations are transforming the ways we experience the world’s airports and air travel. How is New York’s airport system, which remains the busiest in the country, responding to pressing economic and design demands while serving a growing number of passengers? Is an overhaul of the city’s airports feasible?

David Plavin, consultant and former president, Airports Council International-North America, will discuss the challenges and creative potential for New York’s aviation system with leading airport experts including Richard Smyth, V.P., Jet Blue, who is in charge of the new JFK Jet Blue terminal that incorporates the landmark Eero Saarinen building; Charles Van Cook, P.E., V.P., PB World, who plans airports all over the world; William DeCota, Dir. of Aviation, Port Authority; and Jeff Zupan, Senior Fellow for Transportation, Regional Plan Association. Co-sponsored by the NY Building Congress, and the RPA.

New York Infrastructure: Are New York’s Airports Obsolete?
30 July 2008, 6:30 P.M.
Museum of the City of New York
1220 5th Avenue at 103rd Street
New York, NY 10029
(212) 534-1672, ext. 3395
www.mcny.org

Reservations Required
$9 General admission
$5 Museum members, seniors, and students

LaGuardia Airport terminal redevelopment rendering, 1957.

…A time to break down, and a time to build up. This past week it was reported that yet another Bay Ridge religious institution on 4th Avenue is planning to sell its property for new development. The congregation of Bay Ridge Baptist Church at 4th Avenue and 67th Street has decided put its church building and land on the market, and is advertising the location as a prime condo development site.

Bay Ridge Baptist Church is the fourth house of worship on 4th Avenue that is planning to sell its land for likely condo development in recent months. Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church at 80th Street, the Bay Ridge Jewish Center at 81st Street, and the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, AKA the Green Church at Ovington Avenue (70th Street) all have plans to sell their properties to developers. Read the latest on the much contested Green Church sale here.

Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene.

In an effort to prevent the type of building site inspection failures that led to the two tragic deaths in the Deutsche Bank building fire last year, city officials are trying to modernize the way inspection data is stored and shared between agencies. The city is hooking a new $5.5 million IBM computer system into the Fire Department, the Department of Buildings, and the Department of Environmental Protection that will serve as a unified database that will eventually contain inspection data for every building in the city.

The database, called the Business Intelligence System, will replace an out-of date and unreliable paper-filing system, and allow the three agencies charged with inspecting buildings and construction sites to combine their efforts and more easily retrieve vital data.

Select Bus service was launched on June 29th on a limited cross-Bronx route in which passengers pay at vending machines before they board (and retain a payment receipt) to help minimize delays on the express service. It’s taken some time for riders to get used to the process, and the MTA is still attempting to educate people about how to properly pay. However, yesterday it was announced that the MTA will stop giving warnings to those who board without paying beforehand and will soon be giving out tickets to those without a receipt. Tickets for not having proof of payment are $100 and enforcement is slated to begin later this week or early next week.

Pictured above is not High Line version 1.0, but a bold solution to a growing congestion problem on Broadway circa 1873. When Alfred Speer, a wine merchant and inventor from Passaic opened a store on Broadway near City Hall, he found pedestrians, delivery carts, and omnibus traffic all chaotically jockeying for position on the crowded thoroughfare. Although streetcar companies were allowed to lay rails north of 14th Street, pressure from local property owners and the omnibus operators, who held a monopoly on mass transit downtown, kept more efficient mass transit methods out.

As the ideas for elevated trains and Alfred Beach’s underground pneumatic subway were just developing and being tested (construction on the current subway system was still thirty years away), Speer devised the concept of an elevated moving sidewalk to help ease congestion. As described in Rebecca Read Shanor’s book The City That Never Was, in 1871 Speer patented the Endless Traveling or Railway Sidewalk (pictured above), which would make a loop up and down Broadway and free up space on the street for local traffic and deliveries. He planned to have the moving sidewalk run from dawn until 1:00 A.M., pulled along by a constantly moving cable at a brisk 12 miles per hour. In order for passengers to reach the large moving inner section, a series of smaller cable cars moving around an outer ring would stop at stations, pick up passengers and their five-cent fares, and accelerate to the inner ring speed and deposit them.

Heated smoking rooms for men and ladies’ drawing rooms for women located on the inner ring would provide shelter during rain and warmth during the winter. The steam powered cable system would provide a quiet and clean alternative to the locomotives in use for elevated rail lines, which spewed smoke, ash, and grease into the air and onto the street below.

Speer got as far as proposing his system to the New York State legislature (1873 price tag: $3,722,400) and even won approval from lawmakers. However, New York Governor John Dix objected to the fact that the elevated line intruded on street-level sidewalks. After Speer altered the plans and again won approval from the legislature, Dix again rejected the plan because the elevated loop system would have to cross Broadway twice. By 1874 it was clear that Speer’s vision would not be accepted by the governor in any form, and the hopes for the project were quashed. Speer would again try to sell his idea for an elevated sidewalk in the developing New Jersey towns along the Hudson River bank, and even formed the American Rapid Transit Company to sell stock, but the plan eventually fizzled. Today, New Yorkers are left with the moving sidewalk’s vertical cousin the escalator, and are also most likely to use the nineteen century sidewalk’s descendant hurrying through an airport to catch that great twentieth century innovation, the jet airliner.

There’s a new call to expose exactly what is going on with the redevelopment at the World Trade Center site. It seems that Anthony Shorri, former executive director of the Port Authority, may have violated federal securities rules when he touted overly-optimistic construction timelines and budgets for WTC redevelopment and in effect misled investors who purchased Port Authority bonds. Shorri’s successor, Christopher Ward, recently announced that the project is significantly behind schedule in almost all areas and over budget.

In a letter obtained yesterday, George Marlin, a former Port Authority executive director, asks the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for an investigation and asserts, “Given the recently disclosed fiasco led by the Port Authority, the question of whether there was fraud, waste and abuse on a mammoth scale must be addressed by an independent party.” This call for an investigation comes a day after a Republican state senator from Long Island called for a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the matter.

In other reassuring news, it seems that the new head of the Port Authority feels that running the agency charged with reconstruction at the WTC site is not really a full-time job. He’s decided to split his time between the Authority and another paid position on the board of the New York Independent System Operator (the nonprofit that manages the state’s power grid). Oh, and speaking of reassuring, the Port Authority just hired as an engineering adviser a former MTA executive who was fined $10,000 for taking bribes from a contractor doing business with the transit agency–and guess what–the same contractor who did the bribing is also working with the Port Authority on the new transit hub project.

Take a trip down the interior of a Brooklyn sewer line with the guys from S. Dahan Sewer Specialists. Check out all of their sewer videos here.