Transportation Nation

(Photo CC by Flickr user David Sifry)

(By Shereen Marisol Meraji, Marketplace Money)

Single mom Vanessa Pacheco can't take the No. 27 bus the four miles from her house to her job. She manages a smoothie joint, and because smoothies are a popular breakfast in sunny, health-conscious San Diego, Pacheco has to be to work at 5 a.m. to open the store. The problem is that the 27 doesn't start running until nearly an hour after Pacheco has to be at work.

And Vanessa Pacheco doesn't have a car.

"Yeah, I got in a car accident," she says. "There was a cat in the middle of the road and as soon as I got there, I realized the kids were in the car and they were going to freak out that I killed a cat." Pacheco ended up hitting two cars instead of the cat, totaling hers. Nobody was hurt, which is a good thing because she doesn't have health insurance, and neither do her kids.

Pacheco did, however, have car insurance. But only liability. "If I would have had full coverage I could have at least got $1,000, and that would be a nice down payment on a car. But those are the things they don't tell you when you sign up for insurance."

The United Way of San Diego County is working with two local social service agencies (Community Resource Center and Jewish Family Service) to launch a program that will help working poor parents, like Pacheco, get car loans at low interest rates.

Shaina Gross, vice president of Impact Strategies at the United Way of San Diego, says she recognizes that owning a car is a huge financial responsibility, especially for people living on the edge of poverty. But after spending months interviewing poor and working class people, Gross says she's convinced a car does more good than harm to their bottom line, especially in San Diego where public transportation is spotty.

The program, called Ways to Work, stresses financial literacy, and case workers address client questions about insurance, budgeting and saving for the inevitable ticket and repairs. That's why Shaina Gross says it's so successful. "Forty-one percent of their clients have increased their take-home pay," says Gross. "And 82 percent of the participants were able to move off of public welfare programs." But Gross says it was her interviews with the recently homeless -- living in their cars at a safe parking lot run by a local nonprofit called Dreams for Change -- that really made her understand how essential a car can be.

"That's all we have," says Yolanda Cortez.

Cortez is a single mom with two sons, settling for the night at the Dreams for Change safe parking lot in southeast San Diego. Cortez was laid off from her office assistant job with the San Diego school district more than a year ago, but she had paid off her car when times were good. "There is no one who is gonna say, 'I'll give you a ride, I'll take your kids to school.' There is no support. So, I need my car."

Cortez uses her Acura to get to and from cosmetology school. She says she's confident this rocky patch will be over as soon as she graduates with a trade certificate. "I want the best for my kids," says Cortez, adding, "Hopefully with this experience I create some very, very well trained young men, and they'll have a legend and a story to tell."

Tonight her eight and eleven-year-old boys will go to sleep in the front seats of her Acura while Cortez curls up in the back.

(photo by Alex E. Proimos via flickr)

(Drew Reed -- This Big City) Whether they own a Prius or a Hummer, a Porsche or a Pinto, or anything in between, car owners all over the world can agree on one thing: they don’t want to pay to use the roads they drive on. User fees like toll roads, congestion pricing, or others, are almost always met with scorn. Some of the best know examples of this have been in London and New York, where despite the transit friendly culture the measures have been met with controversy. Not surprisingly, similar proposals made in more car-oriented cities have gone down in flames.

The core rationale for user fees on roadways generally falls into two categories. The first is the idea that, since roads are expensive to build and maintain, the people who directly benefit should help to pay for them. While no form of direct payment for roads is ever going to be immensely popular, this idea is generally well received. People who feel their tolls are being used for something are likely to quietly accept them.

The second rationale for road user fees is that they should be used as a mechanism to promote driving patterns that utilize limited road space and car-related infrastructure in heavily urbanized areas more efficiently. This is often met with outrage. And despite the potential benefits of such measures, some of this outrage is understandable. When people have to pay for something, they like to know what it is they’re paying for. Congestion pricing struggles to convince people it needs to exist. For as much as everyone likes to complain about traffic, they have trouble accepting that they are part of the problem, instead embracing solutions that only apply to everyone else.

This equation changes slightly when applied outside of car-saturated first world countries. A recent congestion pricing project in Santiago, Chile, calls for pay centres placed to cover all vehicle entrances to the business district on the eastern side of the city, and charge a nominal fee to all vehicles entering the district that don’t belong to residents or workers (see this write up [es] for more information).

A similar thought process is being applied on the other side of the Andes, where the government of Buenos Aires, Argentina has proposed higher tolls on the City’s freeway system during rush hour. Although this has been proposed to help raise funds for the freeway system, Buenos Aires’s Chief of Government Mauricio Macri has stated explicitly that the program is also intended to reduce traffic during rush hour [es].

What was the reaction to these proposals? The Chilean proposal has yet to get beyond simply being a nifty set of photoshopped Google maps, and if it goes any further the reaction is likely to be along the lines of what transit specialist Louis de Grange predicts [es]:

Though congestion pricing may well be, in specific cases, a useful tool to manage traffic, to think that it is the solution for Santiago’s congestion problem is probably erroneous. In fact there are various cases in which it simply isn’t convenient to implement such a system, since the social benefits that it generates are less noticeable than the costs of implementing and managing it. Moreover, congestion pricing does not eliminate congestion; it only reduces it, hopefully to a socially optimal level.

In Argentina, plans for the new toll structure quickly turned into something of a political football (or perhaps, fútbol, since this is Argentina). The proposal was attacked by supporters of Marci’s chief political opponent, President Cristina Kirchner, who complained it was an unnecessary burden on middle class users of the freeway system, neglecting to consider how to encourage middle class users to use the transit system. Macri, quick to tout his business background, doubled down on the “government should act like a business” aspect of the plan. Lost in the debate was any attempt to find a solution that was anything more than a plank in either side’s political platform.

What is the main difference between the debate over congestion pricing in countries like England or the US versus countries like Chile or Argentina? Quite simply, congestion pricing in Chile or Argentina is shunned because people feel that they should be driving much more than they currently are. Driving is, of course, a symbol of progress, and anything that gets in the way of this keeps countries from clawing their way upward on the world stage and hurts politicians’ re-election chances. This doesn’t happen as much in England or the US since it would be difficult for people to drive any more than they already do. In these countries, congestion pricing measures are opposed because people see free access to highways as the norm, and any attempt to encourage use of other forms of transit or even a more strategic use of the same mode of transit is seen as a strike against the middle class or worse, an attempt to “make us act poor”.

The unfortunate part of this is that in South American countries, where the 1920s era dream of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” was never acted on with the same immense government spending as in the more industrialized countries, there is a greater opportunity for sustainable urban reform since car-based infrastructure, political blocs, and social patterns aren’t as well established. Unfortunately, trends in these countries seem to be going in the opposite direction.

Time will tell if congestion pricing in some form will take hold in Latin American countries. Until then, they can take heart in the fact that they’ve been able to challenge the first world in an area where until now it’s always had a monopoly: complaining about tolls.

Drew Reed is an online media producer and community activist specializing in sustainable transportation. He lives in Buenos Aires.

This post originally appeared in This Big City.

Some cyclists use this shortcut after work, when it is dark and difficult to see the path. An adult bike is positioned next to the sinkhole to show scale. (Photo by Emily DeMarco/PublicSource)

Listen to the audio version of this story here.

(Emily DeMarco, PublicSource) In Pittsburgh’s late summer, Charles Carthorn and his son, Chuckie, rode their bikes over a favorite shortcut, a path sandwiched between the former Reizenstein Middle School and The Ellis School.

“We commute here by bike every day to football practice,” said Charles Carthorn, 42. “And this is our little shortcut.”

But he worried that 12-year-old Chuckie might be tempted to jump over a five-foot wide sinkhole on the path that looks as if it would gobble up about one-third of an adult bike.

“When he sees something like this, he wants to jump it,” Carthorn said of his son, who has been racing bikes for nearly half of his life. “I want to see him try it,” he said with a laugh, “but I don’t want him to do it because it looks kind of dangerous.”

The surrounding streets, however, are an even greater gamble for cyclists.

Two fatal bike accidents recently occurred on Penn Avenue, less than two miles from Mellon Park where Chuckie plays football. One cyclist was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Point Breeze, on Penn Avenue near the East End Food Co-op. The second was struck by an SUV just a few days later, on a stretch of Penn Avenue near the border of Wilkinsburg.

As public officials urged cyclists to use side streets in light of the fatalities, the Carthorns’ shortcut -- known in the cycling community as the Great Northeast Passage -- may have become more important than ever.

Technically, their shortcut isn’t a real street. It’s a paper street.

Paper streets are like unfinished thoughts: Streets that were drawn on a map for a neighborhood, but were never adopted by the city. So no one really knows who’s responsible for the paper street. Is it the city? The nearby property owners?

According to Stanley Lederman, a lawyer for municipalities including Allegheny County, paper streets usually become the responsibility of the neighboring property owners.

“The paper street basically has a life of 21 years, under the current case law,” Lederman said.

If a city makes no improvements to the street, such as adding curbs or streetlights, after 21 years, it is sliced down the center by an imaginary dotted line. Properties on each side of the line automatically are responsible for the paper street.

And there’s the meat of the problem. The neighboring property owners don’t know they own a slice of the paper street.

Who owns the street?

The Pittsburgh Public Schools owns the now-empty Reizenstein building on one side of this particular paper street that has become a shortcut for bikers and runners. On the other side sits The Ellis School, a private all-girls academy.

Representatives of the schools indicated they do not own the paper street.

It’s not unusual for neighboring property owners to be unaware of their responsibility, said Robert Kaczorowski, the director of public works for Pittsburgh. They think a paper street should be taken care of by the city, he said.

Kaczorowski said his crews filled in the sinkhole in March 2012. And just hours after PublicSource interviewed Kaczorowski, his crews filled it in again.

Dan Gilman, chief of staff for Councilman Bill Peduto, a Democrat who represents the district, commended Kaczorowski “for taking quick action.” But, he said, there’s a problem if it takes a reporter or city council office to get the problem fixed.

“The bottom line is it’s dangerous to the public,” Gilman said.

The sinkhole was reported to Pittsburgh officials at least once before.

In December 2010, Todd Derr, 40, reported the sinkhole to Pittsburgh’s 311 non-emergency call center. Derr, a software engineer in Google’s Bakery Square offices, said the sinkhole has been a topic of discussion on the Bike Pittsburgh message board. But he “never saw any sign of repair or attempted repair,” he wrote in an e-mail.

The 311 department wrote in an email that Derr’s complaint was referred to the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA).

Today, the sinkhole is filled with crumbled bits of roadway that look like a pile of chocolate cookie crumbs.

But that’s just a temporary fix.

(photo by Emily DeMarco/PublicSource)

A safer path?

Tom Leech, the superintendent of sewer operations for the PWSA, has worked on public infrastructure for 28 years.

Leech said a damaged private sewer is causing the sinkhole. PWSA’s sewers are all in good condition, which was recently confirmed by an inspection of their sewers in the area.

It’s likely the sinkhole will reappear. The damaged private sewer, which runs right under the sinkhole, is like a straw that will keep sucking bits of the dirt from the sinkhole.

Leech guessed the owner of the damaged sewer could be facing $3,000 to $10,000 in repairs.

“It’s possible [the sinkhole] could wash out and reappear,” he said, “But that’s actually the owner’s responsibility to maintain it and keep it safe.”

PWSA sent a letter on September 12 to The Ellis School to notify them that their damaged sewer is causing the sinkhole.

The damaged sewer will be removed in 2013, said Kitty Julian, director of communications for The Ellis School. School officials plan to expand the sports field and reroute bus traffic. They hope to work with their new neighbor, Walnut Capital, a private developer that plans to develop the property where the now-empty Reizenstein School sits.

Walnut Capital told PublicSource the bike and pedestrian path is a "high priority."

"We'd be delighted if there was also a pedestrian and bike pathway as well," Julian said.

Charles Carthorn said he hopes the shortcut will remain open to cyclists.

“I’m glad it’s here. I just wish it could be a little better kept,” he said. “Just so it will be safe.”

This story republished courtesy of PublicSource, a nonprofit investigative news group in Western Pennsylvania. For more photos -- as well as more maps -- visit their website. Contact Emily DeMarco at 412.315.0262 or edemarco@publicsource.org

We've gotten questions about how we crunched New York City subway turnstile data for the opening of the Barclays Center. WNYC's senior editor for data news explains all in this post for the station's data news blog, which we've reprinted below.

(John Keefe - New York, NY, WNYC) Saturday morning we did something fun: We counted the number of people who took the subway to the opening-night Jay-Z concert at Brooklyn's new Barclays Center the night before.

Or at least got pretty close.

Traffic and transit were closely watched for the new arena, as the 19,000 or so concertgoers would have just 541 parking spaces. So we decided to grab data from subway turnstiles to measure the crowds leaving the Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center station for the show.

How we did it

Turning around the data overnight took a little planning. Here's how we pulled it off:

Every Saturday morning, the MTA posts turnstile data for the previous week. Fortunately for us, the last reading is 8 p.m. Friday, the scheduled start time for the concert.

The data files contain the entry and exit counter readings for each turnstile in the system as a sort of "odometer" reading. The data is a little tricky to use, though it does have a regular structure.

So Steve Melendez, our Data News Team programmer, wrote some Python code that grabs the data files and puts the individual readings into a SQLite database. He then sorted the readings by station (using this chart), and calculated how many exit clicks were logged for the Atlantic Avenue station from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

We suspected there would be a jump in the time period before the concert. So earlier in the week, we ran the numbers for each Friday for much of the year and calculated those averages (I ended up using just September, because they were higher, post-summer vacation readings). Then, Saturday morning, Steven got up really early and ran the program again, including the newly posted numbers.

He sent me the latest values, and I added them to the chart in a taxi on the way to the station. At 8:35 a.m., I was on the air talking about how it appears about a third of the concert-goers took the subway.

It could be more than that. Some people could have left the system at another station. And if anyone left through an emergency exit, or if they showed up after 8 p.m., they wouldn't be in our turnstile data.

But it's a place to start, and we'll be watching how these numbers change for future concerts and for Brooklyn Nets games.

(New York, NY -- Johanna Mayer, WNYC) The heavy rail transit system connecting New York City with Northern New Jersey is getting more expensive. The price of a ride on the PATH train will rise by quarter, making it the same as the NYC subway with which it connects. Soon though, the PATH system will cost more than it's big brother transit network as the agency that runs it, the Port Authority, seeks to stave off financial troubles brought on, in part, by the cost of rebuilding the World Trade Center.

The second in a series of fare hikes that were passed in 2011 comes into effect Monday morning. Fares will increase every year until 2015, when the price will reach $2.75 per ride.

“Income is already limited, and then they just dip into your pocket a little deeper,” said John Cooper, who is an every-day rider of the PATH.

Kyle Barry, who takes both the PATH and the NYC subway to work, was understanding about the fare hike. “I have no problem with the increase as long as it means, maybe, trains run more often,” he said.

Riders can use the same Metrocard to ride the PATH as the NYC subway. Last year, Port Authority Chairman David Samson justified the hikes by saying they were a result of the economy, rebuilding the World Trade Center, and investing in infrastructure for the future. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a multi-state agency that oversees bridges and tunnels in the NY metropolitan area, as well as sites like the World Trade Center

The Port Authority, facing fiscal troubles, also voted to raise tolls on several bridges and tunnels in 2011. Then, earlier this week, Moody's downgraded the Port Authority's credit rating citing the high cost of World Trade Center rebuilding. That could potentially increase borrowing costs for the agency, and make capital improvements, for properties like the PATH, more expensive.

For the riders who use the PATH to cross theHudson River from New Jersey, even a 50 cent increase still means the service is a steal compared to other alternatives like driving. Nicholas Stango, who rides the PATH every day said “I mean, it’s fine. The PATH, if they need more money and, like, they’re going to use it to make the PATH better, then I’m ok with it.”

For the history of the PATH train and a nice vintage pic, head over to this PA NY/NJ site.

(New York, NY -- Ilya Marritz, WNYC)  Senator Charles Schumer  (D-NY) warned on Friday that it will get more and more difficult to construct two Amtrak rail tunnels linking New Jersey and midtown Manhattan, unless the forces of government and the private sector quickly align.

"There is a major issue that has to be resolved right now or else the project may end up in the graveyard, as it did with ARC,"  Schumer said, referring to a previous rail tunnel plan that was killed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in 2010.

The reason? A new mixed-use neighborhood is being built on Manhattan's west side, on a platform directly above the site where the rail tunnels would emerge from below the Hudson.

"Amtrak's engineers have determined that the only place they can bring these new tunnels into Manhattan is under Hudson Yards, along a Long Island Railroad right of way," Schumer told real estate developers at a breakfast gathering organized by the New York Building Congress.

Schumer said the Related Companies, which are building the Hudson Yards neighborhood, are prepared to cooperate with Amtrak and the federal government. But Related plans to begin construction by the end of this year, making the Amtrak project especially urgent, the senior U.S. Senator from New York said.

"We will need contracts, design plans, and construction dollars to flow over the next six to twelve months to make this a reality. We need action, we need it fast," Schumer said.

The Senator said his next step will be to work to get agreements inked between the parties, so tunnel construction can begin before the end of 2013.

Schumer will also lobby for federal dollars to build the tunnels, known as the Gateway project. He estimates Gateway will require $20 million in 2013, and $100 million in 2014 for preliminary work.

(New York, NY -- WNYC) Eight months after a 12-year-old girl was killed crossing a street, safety upgrades have been completed at 14 locations along a notoriously dangerous street on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan unveiled the revamped street on Thursday. The pedestrian crossings have been overhauled and car travel lanes have been re-engineered. Although the impetus for the redesign was the January 2012 death of Dashane Santana, over 700 people have been injured near that stretch of Delancey Street between 2006 and 2009.

Teresa Pedroza, Santana’s grandmother, said that while she's glad the street work has been completed, more could be done. “There are at least a good five or six schools in the immediate area,” Pedroza said. “You have at least eight lanes of traffic and there should be a crossing guard for these kids, especially when it’s time to come out of school.”

Sadik-Khan agreed that the redesign isn't enough -- but she wants more than a crossing guard. "We’re working hard to get speed camera legislation passed in Albany which will go a long way to help us address the problem of speeding and fatalities," she said, "which are a quarter of the traffic fatalities on New York City streets."

A recent city report revealed traffic fatalities are up 23 percent in New York City over a recent twelve-month period, although overall total traffic fatalities are down about 20 percent since 2003. The recent tick upward in New York mirrors a national trend. The federal government projects that traffic fatalities were up 9 percent in the first six months of this year.

Although no immediate reason was given for the increase, Sadik-Khan reiterated drivers need to obey the law. “The problem that we have on New York City streets is that people are speeding, they are running red lights, they are drinking while driving," she said. "These are all significant problems that we need to address.”

Operators of Los Angles' new Expo light rail line enjoy the new gig, April 2012. (Photo courtesy of LA Metro Transportation Library and Archive)

(This article by Greg Hanscom originally appeared in Grist.org)

Infrastructure issues may have turned partisan these past four years while bridges crumble, waiting for repair, but transit-advocates have hope: This election may bring in big bucks for buses and subways, direct from voters.

More than a dozen transit-related initiatives will appear on local ballots in November, including a mammoth funding plan in Los Angeles. Elsewhere, a measure in Orange County, N.C., would add a half cent to the sales tax to fund transit. A third measure, in Memphis, Tenn., would increase the cost of a gallon of gas by a penny, raising an estimated $3 to $6 million each year for the Memphis Area Transit Authority.

The big kahuna of proposals is in Los Angeles, where four years ago voters approved Measure R, a sales tax increase that is expected to raise $40 billion over 30 years for transit, highway, and bus projects. Measure J, which will appear on the ballot this year, would extend the transportation tax another 30 years.

The city's transit system is still wanting for cash. Even as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has vocally championed new light rail lines and bike lanes, L.A. County’s Metro has slashed bus service to some of the city’s most down-and-out neighborhoods.

Atlanta faced a similar crossroads, and a similar vote in July that would have raised $8 billion for rail and other transportation projects. It went down in flames.

Atlanta’s transit agency has been cutting bus service due to budget shortfalls. But unlike in L.A., light rail hasn’t fared much better.

However, Atlanta seems to be an exception to the rule. Transit funding is winning wide approval in other cities around the country this year, as in recent years — and will likely see a few more big wins on ballot budget initiatives in November, including in L.A. If all goes as expected, Angelenos will get the world-class transit system that Mayor Villaraigosa dreams about — and sooner than you might think.

“The overwhelming majority of measures are successful,” says Jason Jordan, director of the Center for Transportation Excellence, a D.C.-based nonprofit that tracks transit-related ballot initiatives. “We were expecting to see approval rates decline back in ’08, with the economic downturn. But rates have actually been improving year over year.”

According to the center’s tally, transit is batting almost 90 percent at the ballot box nationally this year. Voters in Baton Rouge, La., approved a property tax measure in April that will more than double the annual budget for the local bus service. In May, residents of Parkersburg, W.Va., voted to extend a property tax that funds the local transit service. And Michiganders renewed a slew of taxes to fund transit in August.

“It used to be that you might go to the ballot in order to raise matching funds for federal dollars,” Jordan says. “Now, places have to make themselves competitive for federal funds by showing they’ve got skin in the game.”

Putting a long-term transit tax in place would allow L.A.’s Metro to borrow the money now and pay it off over the coming decades (there’s a good explanation here), meaning that Angelenos could be living in traintopia in the not too distant future. Under California law, the measure will require a supermajority of at least two-thirds support to pass, but that didn’t stop Measure R from passing in 2008.

So what happened in Atlanta — and could the same forces take down transit initiatives elsewhere? Here it is, mapped:

Pretty clear, right? More than two-thirds of voters in the urban core supported the measure. But the further you went from the city center, the more the opposition won over. By the time you got to the suburbs, people it was a landslide of opposition.

Jordan says that in many ways, Atlanta’s initiative was destined to fail, both because of historic forces at work in the region, (listen to TN's documentary about Race and Mass Transit for the story of Atlanta's transit history) and because the state legislature imposed restrictions on the measure that made it unwieldy. The vote also coincided with the state primaries, in which the most contested races were among Republicans in the exurbs — not people who are inclined to tax themselves for better trains and buses.

For evidence that transit votes don’t always devolve into a simple city-vs.-suburb showdown, Jordan points to St. Louis, where a ballot initiative failed in 2008, but passed on a second attempt, two years later. Here are the maps:

(Images by the Center for Transportation Excellence via Grist)

Looks neat, but to me, the message remains the same: Folks in the ‘burbs don’t care much for  transit initiatives. The difference in the second St. Louis election was that fewer of them turned out to vote — and a strong grassroots campaign succeeded in getting pro-transit folks to support the measure. In campaign parlance, the initiative’s backers got their supporters out “without mobilizing their opponents.”

In L.A., where transit is winning my supermajorities, the story seems to be different. Mayor Villaraigosa has a long way to go in his effort to build a truly functional and just public transportation system for his city, but he has succeeded in creating a plan that a broad swath of society can get behind, one likely to pass the test of election day.

Greg Hanscom is a senior editor at Grist. He tweets about cities, bikes, transportation, policy, and sustainability at @ghanscom.

(Caitlyn Kim, New York, NY -- WNYC) The Taxi and Limousine Commission approved the city's next generation of yellow cabs Thursday morning.

The Nissan NV200 -- New York's "Taxi of Tomorrow" - on display at the 2012 New York Auto Show (photo by Kate Hinds

The Nissan NV will hit New York City streets next fall. Among the features of the new taxi, which retails for about $29,000, are an interior skylight, a charging dock for passengers' electronics, and air bags.

Any taxi vehicle purchased before next fall can remain on the streets until it has to be retired due to wear and tear, which usually takes about five years. By 2018, the Nissan model is expected to be the only taxi in the city.

That means hybrid taxis will be one of the 16 car models phased out. The Nissan only gets approximately 25 miles per gallon.

The hybrid, while environmentally attractive, did have its detractors. Passengers complained of a lack of leg room, while cabbies said it was less reliable than the old Crown Vic model.

New Yorkers got a chance to look at the NV at the car show in April, and many praised the new features and the expanded leg room. But the boxy shape of the taxi didn’t please many.

Nissan won the 10-year, $1 billion contract to provide the exclusive taxi for the city in May 2011.

(Photo by Cindy Rodriguez)

New Yorkers are confronted with all manner of subway solicitations, from ad campaigns (like Dr. Zizmor's decades-long rainbow-fueled quest for perfect skin) to world-class musicians. But it's the daily decision to spare some change or ignore the pleas that presents the biggest ethical challenge.

WNYC's Cindy Rodriguez took to the trains to find out how many New Yorkers deal with this ethical puzzle.

Several social service providers say whether to give to panhandlers is a personal decision, and there is no right or wrong.  Joel Berg, who runs the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, said it’s probably the question he gets asked the most.

“I would say definitely if it’s a supposed organization asking for money, that is illegal and that is almost always a scam,” Berg said. “But individual people asking for money, it’s really up to your conscience in each situation.”

The MTA said it frequently receives complaints about panhandling from customers. And while times are trying, the MTA notes there are other ways to help. “Poverty and hunger are vexing, stubborn problems and we urge our customers to give generously to their favorite and most trusted social service charity,” MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said in a written statement.

Follow Rodriguez on a few rides to see what the other side of the tin can is like for those who beg for a living. One man she meets earns $100 in two hours--then stops so as not to wear out his welcome. He says he begs only when his disability runs out. Another panhandler reports earning just $60 in a day and living off that.

There's a boisterous set of comments at the WNYC website already, so head on over there and listen to the radio story -- then join the conversation.

(photo by Mark Simpson)

The space shuttle Endeavour has taken off on its final flight across the country, where it's heading to Los Angeles. WMFE's Mark Simpson was on hand at dawn to photograph its departure from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. (You can see more of Mark's pictures in the days leading up to Wednesday's departure here, and read more about today's launch here.)

Here it is, bolted on top of a 747, prior to takeoff.

(photo by Mark Simpson)

The countdown clock -- now dark.

(photo by Mark Simpson)

Before the shuttle lands in Los Angeles on Friday, it will make a stop in Houston -- home to Mission Control.

(photo by Mark Simpson)

(photo by Mark Simpson)

The space shuttle Endeavour is waiting at the Kennedy Space Center for its final flight to Los Angeles, where it will be transported at a stately pace through the city to its final home at the California Science Center.

WMFE's Mark Simpson has been visiting the Space Center and photographing the preparations.

(photo by Mark Simpson)

The Endeavour will be flown on the back of a modified 747, known as the shuttle carrier. It was lifted onto the back of the 747 this weekend and bolted into place.

(photo by Mark Simpson)

The structure around the shuttle is called the mate/demate device.

(photo by Mark Simpson)

(photo by Mark Simpson)

(photo by Mark Simpson)

Here's a close-up of the attachment:

(photo by Mark Simpson)

If the weather cooperates, the Endeavour will leave Florida Wednesday morning. We'll have more pictures after the launch.

Can't get enough of the space shuttle program? We were there when the Atlantis made the final flight of the space shuttle program. Here's the last flight of the Discovery. The Enterprise came to New York -- and WNYC crowdsourced photos of it flying over the city. We saw it sitting on the tarmac at JFK. TN even saw it sailing up the Hudson. Now it's on permanent exhibit at the Intrepid. And some parts of the program are being repurposed: NASA's giant crawler got a tune-up for its post-shuttle life.

A man looks at the MTA subway map on his iPhone (photo by bjallen via flickr)

Motorists in Midtown may find their cars at a standstill Tuesday as the UN General Assembly kicks into high gear and President Obama heads to Jay Z's 40/40 club near Madison Square Park for a celebrity-studded fundraiser.

While world leaders who tend to cause the biggest traffic jams — like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — won’t be in town until next week, lesser-known dignitaries also bring on checkpoints, street closures and the inevitable gridlock.

The bottlenecks and detours are a headache for the drivers and cabbies plying Manhattan's roadways.

But they're also the perfect opportunity to explore how the MTA and the city's Department of Transportation are — or are not — using technology to help New Yorkers get around more efficiently.

This week on New Tech City, we tackle the intersection of transportation and tech.

Host Manoush Zomorodi talks to Transportation Nation's Alex Goldmark about the latest technology helping New Yorkers navigate the city by car, taxi, subway and bus, as well as what's missing from the city's plan to ease congestion on the roads and rails.

Then, around 5.3 million people ride New York City's 22 subway lines every day, but no one gets uninterrupted cell service below ground.

Reporter Tracey Samuelson investigates just how long it will be until underground subway stations and the tracks between them get outfitted with Wi-Fi.

Plus, we'll introduce you to the perfect smartphone app for that New York stereotype: the neurotic subway commuter.

This touring style of campaigning didn’t take place until the U.S. had developed a comprehensive railroad system in the latter 19th century. Before then, candidates courted the mostly white male, property-owning electorate through newspapers. In the earliest presidential elections, it was considered unseemly for politicians to tout themselves in public. No longer.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In the age of super PACs and mega donors, candidates routinely charter flights across the country to get to and from big fundraisers -- but the bus is the standard bearer. Romney campaign buses have worn slogans such as "Conservative, Businessman, Leader" and "Every Town Counts." The Romney campaign bus, above, with its candidate in Tarlton, OH, at times does not even have the former governor on it, and will instead transport local politicians to rallies, or go on missions to taunt Obama supporters.

(Photo by White House Photographer Pete Souza)

President Obama, pictured here leaving Ireland in 2011, has to use Air Force One to travel by air, whether it’s official state business or part of his campaign trail. The president is supposed to reimburse taxpayers when the plane is being used for travel to fundraising events or stump speeches. One watchdog organization estimates that it costs over $180,000 an hour to operate Air Force One.

(Puck magazine, collected by Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91482121/)

The grassroots-style campaign for president became tradition by the time of Reconstruction, but, arguably, the first candidate to turn it into a national phenomenon was the populist Democratic nominee of 1896, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan conducted a six-week "whistle-stop" tour leading up to the election, usually giving 20 to 30 speeches a day.

Photo via Truman Presidential Library. (link: http://bit.ly/RkfR55)

Before Air Force One, there was U.S. Car No. 1. The Ferdinand Magellan was specially armored to carry President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II. Harry Truman used the Magellan for his famous whistle-stop campaign during the 1948 election. One of the most famous moments of campaign history: Truman stood on the Magellan's observation platform, newspaper triumphantly hoisted high, holding the famously incorrect headline, “Dewey defeats Truman.”

(Photo by News bureau of United Air Lines-United Air Lines)

President Eisenhower was considered all but a lock for re-election in 1956, but at the Republican convention that year, a delegate wrote in “Joe Smith" for Vice President to protest the unanimity of the GOP nominations. Here, Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson meets a Chicago supporter named Joe Smith before embarking on a tour of speeches with his campaign plane, the Joe Smith Express.

(Photo by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images)

With more campaign cash to go around, focus on the presidential primaries has grown over time. Coach buses allow candidates to travel to many destinations in one state, and have room for the media to come along for the ride. John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” had a welcoming reputation among the press corps during his 2000 primary run.

Photo via Reagan Presidential Library

The Eisenhower administration retired the The Ferdinand Magellan due to lack of use in 1958. But it made a comeback in 1984 when President Reagan used it for one-day trip in Ohio. Campaigns have since brought back the nostalgic whistle-stop style, including President Obama in 2008 when the Illinois Senator campaigned on a restored Pullman car. McCain, who opposed Amtrak funding, carried on whistle-stopless.

FDR loved traveling by rail. He even had his own entryway to Grand Central Terminal in NYC, where a car specially designed for him* still sits, entombed and dusty, below the active station as we reported in our story on the lost subways of NYC. See pic here.

*An earlier version of this sentence incorrectly referred to this car as the Ferdinand Magellan.

(photo by Kate Hinds)

Just 13 hours before the commemoration of the September 11th attacks was to begin, Mayor Bloomberg and the governors of New York and New Jersey announced they had resolved their disagreement over who owed whom what for building of the museum on the World Trade Center site.

The authority owns the site and is managing construction of the museum for a private foundation. In December, it stopped work because it said it was owed tens of millions of dollars on the project. This agreement will restart the project -- but it won't help the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey recoup all of its losses. But, says WNYC reporter Bob Hennelly, it outlines steps to prevent even deeper losses in the future.

Listen to WNYC's conversation about the 9/11 memorial and the Port Authority below.

(photo by Kevin Kovaleski/DDOTDC via flickr)

(Armando Trull and Matt Bush -- Washington DC, WAMU) Maryland's Montgomery County is considering a $2.1 million plan to expand Capital Bikeshare to more than 48 locations, including Takoma Park, Silver Spring, Bethesda, Friendship Heights and the NIH/Medical Center Metro station. Funding for the 350 bikes and their respective stations will be a combination of money from state grants, the county and the private sector.

A D.C. cab at night. (Photo CC by Flickr user Daquella Manera)

(Armando Trull -- WAMU) Paying your Washington, D.C. taxicab fare using a credit card may be priceless, but those plastic transactions are still being denied while a judge sorts out a lawsuit. An upgrade to taxicab meters in D.C. has been put on hold over alleged irregularities in the bidding process.

The $35 million contract to install new electronic card readers on the entire fleet of D.C. cabs has been challenged by two of the companies that were finalists, but then lost out on the bid after being barred from the final phase of the process.

The concern by city officials now is that if the judge's decision happens after Oct. 15, it won't be sufficient time to outfit all of the cabs in the District with the new meters prior to January's presidential inauguration.

Vacant car dealership, 2008 (photo by Todd Lappin via flickr)

(Paul Kiel, ProPublica) Quick, how many billions in the red are taxpayers on the bailout of GM? AIG? Fannie and Freddie? Is it true that the government has reaped a profit from bailing out the banks?

It should be easy to find answers to such questions. But while it's a snap to find rosy administration claims about the bailout, finding hard numbers is much more difficult. That's why, since the bailouts began in 2008, we've maintained a frequently updated site to provide them. Now we've retooled our database to make it even easier to find these sorts of answers.

So you can effortlessly discover that it's $27 billion for GM, $23 billion for AIG, $91 billion for Fannie, $51 billion for Freddie, and yes, the bank investments have so far returned a profit of $19 billion.

We also make it easy for you to see which investments have resulted in losses (39 so far in total) and to sort bailout recipients by how far in the red or black they are. As always, our scorecard page adds it all up and shows where both bailouts — the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as TARP ($55 billion in the red) and Fannie and Freddie (negative $142 billion) — stand right now.

Ultimately, the bailout of GM seems likely to result in the TARP's single biggest loss. But since the government still holds about a third of the company's stock (currently worth about $10 billion), we don't include it on our list of losers yet. It's possible the government will sell the stock for more than it's currently worth, recouping more of its investment.

For now, the reigning bust is the $2.3 billion investment in the bank CIT, which landed in bankruptcy less than a year after its bailout. Second on the list is Chrysler, which resulted in a $1.3 billion loss.

"The government's financial stability programs are expected to cost far less than many had once feared during the crisis, and we're continuing to make significant progress recovering taxpayer investments," said a Treasury spokesman.

Over time, that list of losing investments is likely to grow far beyond 39, because many of the smaller banks that have yet to repay the government are struggling. Although more than 300 banks have exited TARP (often repaying with money from another government bank program), nearly 400 remain. Of those, 162 are behind on their dividend payments to the Treasury Department. According to the GAO, the banks that are languishing in TARP tend to be weaker than those that have left, and at least 130 appear on a secret "problem bank" list kept by regulators.

The TARP's main bank program was supposed to be reserved for healthy banks, but among the losing investments are banks that were troubled even when they first received the money. Central Pacific Financial, a Hawaii bank, got its $135 million in early 2009 despite regulators having just ordered it to raise additional capital. As we reported then, the approval came two weeks after staff for Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, who had helped establish the bank and owned a large amount of the bank's stock, inquired about the bank's application for funds. Both regulators and Treasury denied that the inquiry affected their decision. Taxpayers ultimately lost $61 million from the investment.

Also notable among the failed investments is South Financial Group. The bank received a $347 million government investment in 2008 about a month after its former CEO, Mack Whittle, retired with a $18 million golden parachute. Taxpayers ultimately lost $200 million while the CEO kept his package. Contacted by ProPublica, Whittle said, "I founded [South Financial Group] in 1986 and take offense that anyone would imply that retirement benefits were not warranted." He added that the benefits had been negotiated long before he announced his retirement in the summer of 2008 and that he'd retired by the time the bank applied for TARP funds.

Of course, the government has already turned a profit on its bank investments overall, because the biggest bailouts — particularly Citigroup and Bank of America (each received $45 billion) — resulted in large profits. None of the banks remaining in TARP have net outstanding amounts over one billion dollars.

The Treasury wants to get rid of those remaining bank investments as soon as it can — even when that means selling stakes in apparently healthy banks for a discount, as ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger reported last month.

What defines a profit? So far, the Treasury has allowed many banks to exit TARP after receiving most, but not all, of the amount owed. But in cases where the Treasury received enough other revenue (e.g. through dividend payments) from the bank to result in a net gain, we label that investment as a profit. So far, that's been the case for 26 banks.

The final cost of the TARP, the Fannie, or the Freddie bailout isn't possible to know.

For the TARP, it depends on the biggest remaining investments: AIG and the remains of the auto bailout, GM and GMAC (now called Ally Financial). The net outstanding amount of those three companies together is about $61 billion. At this point, it seems likely that Treasury will ultimately recoup its bailout of AIG. The auto companies, on the other hand, seem likely to result in a loss approaching $20 billion, according to both Treasury Department and Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Another big factor is the TARP's housing programs, its mortgage modification program chief among them. Although Treasury set aside more than $40 billion for its various initiatives, less than $5 billion has been spent so far, a testament to the limited reach of the programs. Since those are subsidies, none of that money will be repaid, and any spending ups TARP's tab. Earlier this year, the CBO estimated that ultimately $16 billion would be spent.

Of course, all of these numbers benefit from being put in a broader context. The Obama administration argues that the TARP should be credited with blunting the force of the financial crisis and saving "more than one million American jobs." Critics like former TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky say the program may have stemmed the damage from the crisis, but it did so by largely preserving the broken too-big-to-fail system that caused the crisis. It's also worth mentioning that the Federal Reserve played an enormous role in supporting the biggest banks and allowing them to exit TARP.

The fate of the Fannie and Freddie bailouts is even harder to figure, although the Treasury recently announced that all of the companies' profits from now on will be handed over to Uncle Sam each quarter. Their tabs should decrease, but how quickly and for how long they'll be allowed to exist is unclear.

For now, our site provides a snapshot of the two bailouts as they actually stand. We've been at it since 2008, and we'll continue to update it frequently.