Much was made of the idea that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's conference bumped off the plan known as "congestion pricing."
But it was never made clear how many of his 42 votes the house's Republican minority leader had for the plan, or for that matter, the Senate's GOP majority leader, whose 8 Long Island members didn't exactly form a cheerleading squad for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal.
One Assembly member from Long Island said late last week: "I was very much on the fence. There are many pros and cons to this that we really need to continue take a real good look at... On one side issue, yes, the environment and global warming has to be adddressed -- for the enitre nation. On the other hand, on Long Island, if we want encourage to people taking the railroad, we should lower the fare."
But the stalled drive to charge motorists access to Manhattan below 60th St. was not so much an environmental initiative, but a project of the real estate elite which, if it really wanted to reduce congestion, would have agreed to curb the city's over-development craze, argues Paul Moses on Ron Howell's Brooklyn-based blog.
UPDATE: There is also this take in the Voice, which talks about how the GOP Senate came to duck a vote.
Dan Janison