Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo can’t seem to agree on how to pay for desperately needed subway repairs, with the former favoring a millionaire’s tax and the latter opting for congestion pricing. However, two New York University professors think they have a better idea: why not make commercial real estate pay up?
Civil and urban engineering professor Giancarlo Falcocchio along with urban informatics professor Constantine Kontokosta have outlined what they call a “transit maintenance district” in Manhattan where they believe building owners heavily benefit from subway service, reports Crain’s.

Paul Karas has been appointed Commissioner of the NYS Department of Transportation to continue Governor Cuomo's $100 billion investment plan to modernize aging infrastructure across the state. Before joining the Cuomo Administration, Mr. Karas served for four years as Vice President and Manager of RS&H, Inc., a transportation and buildings infrastructure consulting firm.
Prior to that, he served as President and Founder of Karas Associates Co., an infrastructure development consultancy. Mr. Karas has extensive experience working at the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey, where he served as director of the $3.2 billion John F. Kennedy International Airport Redevelopment Program, and he previously served as the Commissioner of Public Works for the City of Chicago for three years. In 2004, Mr. Karas was appointed by the Illinois legislature to the Northeastern Illinois Regional Transportation Task Force, and in 1997, he was appointed by the U.S. House of Representatives to the Blue-Ribbon Advisory Committee for developing solutions to funding and operating concerns regarding Amtrak.
Mr. Karas received his Bachelor of Arts in Civil Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, and a Master's degree from the University of Michigan.
The NYSDMV will begin using the new CDL skills test in additional locations during the week of November 27, 2017. Please see this document for information on the sites that will implement during the week of 11/27, as well as a list of the sites already using the new test.
If you have any questions, please contact Kyle Hairston at kyle.hairston@dmv.ny.gov.

Sacramento Regional Transit restored its website Tuesday following a weekend cyberattack and began meeting with federal security experts on ways to reduce the chance of future breaches.
SacRT officials said the agency has recovered 80 percent of the destroyed internal systems data so far via back-up devices, with more retrieval expected in the coming days.


From the “Office of Extraordinary Innovation” at LA Metro comes the announcement the agency would be throwing its hat in the “microtransit” ring. It is currently soliciting proposals for an Uber Pool- or Chariot-like on-demand transit service designed to fill gaps in service coverage.
Cue the breathless claims that the pilot will “generate the most efficient possible trips for Metro riders” or that “trips will be cheaper for the rider” or that it will “put the customer experience at the forefront.”

Annually updated research from the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota ranks 49 of the 50 largest (by population) metropolitan areas in the United States for connecting workers with jobs via transit.
The new rankings, part of the Access Across America national pooled-fund study that began in 2013, focus on accessibility, a measure that examines both land use and transportation systems. Accessibility measures how many destinations, such as jobs, can be reached in a given time.


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