Despite Albany Stall, City Seeks Traffic Plan Bids

After lawmakers in Albany tabled Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan, the city is moving ahead on soliciting bids for a system of cameras around the city, a contract that would likely be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In order to bill drivers entering Manhattan south of 86th Street during peak hours, a network of cameras surrounding the proposed toll zone would be needed to photograph license plates. In London, the contract for administering a similar system was worth about $460 million for the first five years of operation, a spokeswoman for one of London's software providers, MajescoMastek, said.

The city is planning to ask companies interested in bidding on the camera technology contract to throw their hats in the ring beginning next week, the city's transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, said yesterday during a trip to Washington, D.C.

Some of the state Assembly's most vocal opponents of Mr. Bloomberg's congestion pricing bill said they were not surprised that the city was beginning a bidding process even as the Assembly remains divided on the proposal.

"This is similar to how he conducted himself on the Jets stadium," Assemblyman Richard Brodsky of Westchester said, referring to plans to build a stadium over the West Side rail yards. Mr. Bloomberg "was out there with a bid, and he's entitled to, but the state Legislature is not going to be blackmailed into doing a bad thing because there's money at stake," Mr. Brodsky said.

In Washington, Ms. Sadik-Khan met with the U.S. secretary of transportation, Mary Peters, to assure her that the state support needed to secure more than $500 million of federal funds for transportation investments is on its way. The state Assembly is expected to revisit the bill at a special session in July.

In a 30-minute presentation, Ms. Sadik-Khan, accompanied by top officials from Governor Spitzer's administration and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, asked for $537 million of federal funding, which Ms. Peters is expected to dole out in early August if state lawmakers approve the plan.

About $200 million would be spent on expanding bus service throughout the city; another large portion of the money would be used to subsidize a new ferry line between the Rockaways and Manhattan. The rest would be used to implement a three-year congestion pricing pilot program in Manhattan.

New York City is competing with eight other semi-finalists for $1 billion in federal funds.