{"value"=>"<p>This subseries documents Campaign activism on many fronts. It contains correspondence, public hearing testimony, notes, reports, posters and banners. The topics with the most material are buses, cars and traffic policy, performance and service, safety and security, the subway, and West Side highway development.</p> <p>Major bus topics include alternative fuel vehicles and private Queens bus lines (taken over by the MTA in the early 2000s after years of discussion). Cars and traffic policy contains discussion of traffic reduction proposals, congestion pricing, the controversy over city parking privileges, and the carpool rule instituted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.</p> <p>Performance and service focuses mainly on quantity of subway service and on the service cuts usually proposed along with fair hikes. Because the issues of fare hikes and service cuts are linked, there is some duplication and supplemental material in this series related to funding issues covered in Series V, particularly regarding the 1995 fare hike-service cut battle. Other service issues discussed include the Campaign's Rider Bill of Rights, the Campaign's 1991 lawsuit over service cuts, and the 1998 Campaign for More Service, spurred by the massive crowding in the subway following the implementation of daily, weekly and monthly pass Metrocards.</p> <p>Safety was a very important issue in the Campaign's first 10 to 15 years, when crime and mechanical breakdowns were a major problem in the subway system. This series covers mechanical safety as well as crime and police issues. Topics in this series include the MTA's closure of newsstands and other concessions in subway stations, crime, the merger of the Transit Police with the NYPD (enacted by Mayor Giuliani in 1995 after many years of discussion), token booth closings, and subway station access.</p> <p>The subway topics cover issues associated with particular subway lines and stations, as well as announcements in the stations and on subway cars. The largest and longest subway-line-related battle the Campaign fought was over the rehabilitation of Brooklyn's elevated Franklin Avenue Shuttle, a line which serves a poor area of the borough. Documentation in the collection shows the effort to fix the ancient and dilapidated line predated the Straphangers Campaign itself by several years. It was finally restored in 1998 when funding for it was included in the 1997-2001 Capital Funding plan after a fight between the State Assembly and the MTA. This series contains documentation of the effort the Brooklyn community itself spearheaded, as well as the extended efforts of the Campaign to prevent the MTA from closing the line completely and fund reconstruction.</p> <p>Another very long battle fought by the Straphangers Campaign (and NYPIRG generally, in cooperation with other citizen and environmental groups) was over West Side highway development. NYPIRG and its allies had fought since 1975 to defeat Westway, the original federally-funded plan to build a superhighway and development project along the Hudson River. The plan was defeated in 1985 by a lawsuit over environmental concerns. At that point the city and state continued their efforts to build a scaled-down version of the project, renamed Rt. 9A, and the associated Hudson Greenway project, which the anti-Westway coalition continued to fight. The Straphangers Campaign fought particularly for an available \"trade-in\" of the Federal funds allocated for Westway in order to have them spent on mass transit instead of a large highway and development project. This effort successfully channeled over a billion dollars into the city's transit network. This series includes much correspondence with the Clean Air Campaign and its leader, Marcy Benstock, who was a major figure in the Westway battle.</p> <p>Other topics covered in this series include advertising and the attempts by the MTA to block Straphangers Campaign ads, airport rail links, free speech in the subways and the fight against overly strict MTA regulation of musicians, post-9/11 rebuilding of the system, the Transit Museum, and the fight over the West Side Stadium proposed by Mayor Bloomberg.</p>"}