On March 17, federal and state governments announced that NY State transportation commissioner Joseph Boardman would leave Albany to assume leadership of the Federal Railroad Administration.

The New York DOT under Boardman has been marked by an openness to outside input and the beginnings of new policies. It has focused more on freight problems and railroads. That helped the Pataki administration implement railroad tax relief, lowering a high hurdle to railroad investment.

More recently, Commissioner Boardman launched a transformation of the NYSDOT whose results are still uncertain, but point the way to innovations such as joint land use and transportation planning and roadway pricing to ease congestion. They are laid out in Trouble Ahead, a report on the state of transportation in New York produced by a panel and public process initiated by Commissioner Boardman in 2004 (see MTR #484). 

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