Skelos' letter said the MTA transit program and the NY State Dept. of Transportation's highway capital program should be considered together. Skelos was cited in Newsday on Dec. 22 saying the Senate wants "rough parity" in the 5-year transit and road budgets. The NY State highway budget will be released as part of Governor Pataki's executive budget in January.

But there are compelling reasons to do away with transit-highway spending parity.

- An Outmoded Political Formula -

Foremost, the state's overall transportation budget should reflect needs and priorities rather than crude formulas. While politics certainly enter into MTA budgeting, the MTA's $17.5 billion proposal clearly spells out why that level of funding is required to continue progress toward a transit system state of good repair and begin work on the Long Island Railroad-Grand Central connection. On the other hand, the NY Senate simply asserts that the state should spend an equivalent amount on roads. The Senate's position is not accompanied by any needs analysis or list of projects.

It may be theoretically possible for the NY State DOT and the local governments that receive DOT local aid to spend $17 billion or more over the next five years. However, it's worth keeping in mind that the present $12.5 billion NY Dept. of Transportation capital program represents record levels of NY State highway spending. Within that program, DOT has made strong progress in a variety of infrastructure maintenance areas, with money left over to begin building the Utica-Rome Expressway and widen the Long Island Expressway, the Taconic Parkway, the Sunrise Highway and other roads around the state.

Second, it's by no means clear that NY State can or will pay for two significantly expanded transportation capital programs. Meeting the revenue needs of the MTA's $17.5 billion capital program will require some new funding commitment by NY State government. Dramatically hiking the State DOT budget at the same time will raise even tougher revenue questions for Albany. Is a smaller transit program the price of transit-highway parity? A strong coalition of business, environmental and other organizations have already called for a larger transit program - $18.2 billion - than the MTA has proposed ($1 billion of the MTA program is for its highway bridges and tunnels. Thus its transit proposal amounts to $16.5 billion).

The fact that New York is finally coming around to the first transit expansion projects in generations, after decades of road construction, is a strong reason that the overall state transportation capital program should put transit first. Moreover, a consensus is building around the world and around the country that adding road capacity to address traffic congestion is a self-defeating proposition

A highway lobby coalition is very active in spotlighting what it says is a crisis in NY road and bridge maintenance. The road industry never suggests devoting additional funds to maintenance from within the highway budget. It simply uses rhetoric about maintenance to call for more public spending on every conceivable type of highway project.

In fact, NY State DOT has made significant progress since 1994 in reducing poor pavement conditions and bridge deficiency rates throughout the state. A modestly higher State DOT budget that minimizes unpopular highway expansion projects in favor of fixing highway infrastructure could produce big increases in the DOT's pavement and bridge programs, as well as build on positive developments like Governor Pataki's increase in state investment in rail freight last year.

Road expansion projects NYS DOT has already slated for its next five year program include a network of highway expansion projects in Brookhaven, Long Island, including state routes 347, 25 and 112, together with several county projects, completing the Long Island Expressway expansion in Nassau County and eastern Queens and transforming Route 120 into the the Kensico Expressway in lower Westchester. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign estimates that, downstate, DOT will invest over $800 million in highway expansion during 2000-2004.

Other big road construction or expansion projects on the DOT horizon (after 2004) include widening a network of Long Island parkways, including the Northern State and the Meadowbrook, widening the Staten Island Expressway, upgrading Route 17 to an interstate across the state's southern tier and blazing an east-west interstate across the northern Adirondacks.