It’s astonishing to look back at this year in transportation advocacy and realize just how much we have to be thankful for:

Congestion pricing is on the table. Around this time last year, the Tri-State Campaign released a poll which found that 73% of New Yorkers believed that congestion pricing would be effective in reducing traffic in Manhattan’s central business district, though most were unfamiliar with the concept. A Partnership for New York City report revealed that congestion costs the NYC metropolitan region $13 billion a year. Mayor Bloomberg, though, said that congestion pricing was too politically infeasible to pursue. We’re glad he changed his mind.

Improved transparency and public process from the MTA. The MTA’s Nov. 17 “interactive workshop” – which allowed citizens to sit down in small group discussions – was unprecedented, and public feedback from the workshop and hearings helped the agency decide to scale back its planned fare increase. The MTA brought in outside experts to investigate the agency’s failures during the August 8 storm, in what was a far better process than the 2004 flood report which the Straphangers Campaign called a “whitewash.” Small touches like putting a list of broken escalators and elevators online don’t hurt either.

Transit ridership is soaring. NJ Transit announced record ridership on its trains and buses for fiscal year 2007. NYC’s subway system had its best year in more than five decades. Connecticut bus and train ridership continued to rise. Westchester’s Bee-Line Bus is on pace for a historic year after adopting MetroCard. Ridership is even growing on Amtrak!

The funding for big transit projects is there. In previous years, a dearth of major transportation projects had caused some historical revisionists to pine for the days of Robert Moses. But that’s changing. This week, the USDOT announced that it would contribute $1.3 billion towards the construction of the Second Avenue Subway’s first phase, eleven months after committing $2.6 billion for the LIRR East Side Access project. Construction on both projects is underway. In addition, the Port Authority recently announced it would up its contribution to the Trans-Hudson Express/Access to the Region’s Core rail tunnel from $2 billion to $3 billion; New Jersey has committed another $1 billion to ARC.

The beginning of reform in Connecticut. Most of ConnDOT’s budget still goes to building and expanding highways, but mass transit has become a higher priority than during the Rowland era. Gov. Rell’s ConnDOT Reform Commission is charged with moving the agency “beyond highways.” The legislature created “fix-it-first” and transit-oriented development programs, though the former doesn’t do enough to shift ConnDOT away from expansion and towards maintenance, and the latter is worded so broadly it could potentially fund non-TOD projects. But it’s clear where Connecticut wants to go, even if its leaders are still figuring out how to get there.

NYC’s Ninth Avenue bike lane. What it is is the Cadillac of bike lanes. What it represents is an NYCDOT that embraces new ideas, and potentially an entirely new philosophy of apportioning street space.

The Tappan Zee Bridge/I-287 corridor project team finally got an office. Emblematic of the TZB project’s torturously slow pace was the fact that project team leader Michael Anderson had to commute from his office in Poughkeepsie to Albany, New York, and places throughout Westchester and Rockland in order to hold meetings. Now that that’s changed, maybe the pace will, too.

Of course, we can think of some things that would make us more thankful. But more on that tomorrow…