• MTA Chairman Dreams of Eventually Extending 7 Line Down the West Side (NY1)
• NY Transit shies away from "revolution" (Reuters)
• Roll the 7 to Chelsea: MTA (New York Post)
• NY MTA Chief Lhota: 'Yes' To Extending 7 Train Extension, 'No' To Free Ferry (WNYC)
• New and Old MTA Chiefs on the Political Toxicity of Congestion Pricing (Capital New York)
• New York City's Complete Streets Are Built to Last (Streetsblog NYC)

The daylong program kicks off with a look at city-building in an age of economic uncertainty, technological innovation and intense global competition. Leading thinkers will tackle such hot topics as the redevelopment of the Javits Center site and Cornell's plans to build a technology campus on Roosevelt Island.

We'll examine the conflicts over street space among cars, pedestrians and cyclists, and hear from developers who have pursued ambitious projects even in tough economic times. (You can read more about both those topics in this week's Spotlight.)

Other Assembly sessions will look at new options in urban energy efficiency and the difficulty of meeting the nation's fast-evolving housing needs. And we'll round out the day with a cocktail reception and an opportunity to meet conference presenters and participants.

In advance of this year's Assembly, we've set up an online town hall where you can weigh in with your thoughts on how you would like to see the New York region change. Join the conversation at ideas.regionalassembly.org.

To see a complete description of panels and events, and to register, visit www.regionalassembly.org. We look forward to seeing you on April 27.

Last Sunday, an estimated 100,000 Los Angeles residents left their cars at home and took to the streets on bike, foot and rollerblades for the annual Ciclavia celebration. Similar to New York's Summer Streets Program, which closes Park Avenue and other thoroughfares each August, the festival aims to introduce people to benefits of bicycling and walking.

The crowd jibed with a city that has been moving away from its image as the mecca of American car culture. The city has installed more than 450 miles of new bike lanes, some as part of the planned 51-mile greenway along the Los Angeles River. To complement them, a new bike-sharing program is scheduled to open in December. At the national American Planning Association conference held in downtown Los Angeles last week, the city's work in this arena was one of the central topics.

That Los Angeles is embracing bike travel and infrastructure shows the extent of changes that are occurring within the U.S., and by reflection around the globe. New York City has been a leader in this area, among large cities in the U.S., for some time. But other cities are following suit. Washington, D.C., has a bike sharing program that has won over skeptics. And it's not just bicycling. It's the idea of "complete streets." New York State recently joined Connecticut, New Jersey and New York City in its adoption of policies to build streets that are safer and more welcoming to all users, by incorporating such features as separated bike lanes, new sidewalks and better road striping and signage.

But change is hard. Elected and appointed officials have to balance competing needs of cars, bicycles and pedestrians. Pilot programs and "lines and signs" improvements are easy to install, but also easy to dismantle under political pressure.

At the Regional Assembly on April 27, the workshop entitled Cars vs. Bicycles vs. Pedestrians: Can They Learn to Live Together? will bring together elected officials, planners, advocates and others to talk about the physical and cultural challenges of rethinking our streets. Moderated by RPA Board member Trent Lethco, the panelists will include "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz and Jon Orcutt from the NYC Department of Transportation as well as two rising political stars: Mayor Dawn Zimmer from Hoboken and Mayor Thomas Roach from White Plains.

All have grappled with the challenges of implementing complete streets policies. Hoboken's Mayor Zimmer, for example, has integrated car share with the city's parking policies, helping residents reduce dependence on private automobiles. Mayor Tom Roach in White Plains has connected the city's Metro North station with a bike lane, the first of an intended network of complete streets for bikers, pedestrians and drivers.

The streets workshop will be just one of the many panels at the Regional Assembly, but for those who care about these essential veins of our cities it promises to be one not to miss.

What makes a project great? Participants at the Regional Assembly this Friday will have an opportunity to explore this question with four major figures in development in the city and region: Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of the Real Estate Development Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (as well as a partner at SHoP Architects); Douglas Durst, chairman of the Durst Organization; Fred Harris, recently appointed as executive vice president for development at the New York City Housing Authority; and Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions.

Chakrabarti will draw on his experiences as director of City Planning's Manhattan office and as Related Cos. executive responsible for Moynihan Station and for planning and design of Hudson Yards to discuss overcoming environmental and political obstacles to get ambitious projects built. His work at City Planning enabled development of the vibrant West Chelsea neighborhood that got the extraordinary High Line park built and reintegrated the World Trade Center site into the Lower Manhattan grid. Now he is looking forward to the future of Midtown East, stretching between Fifth and Third avenues and 40th and 57th streets. And it isn't just a New York question. As director of Columbia's Center for Urban Real Estate, Chakrabarti advocates for design-intelligent urban development to address global issues.

An environmental advocate, Durst fought his way through many bureaucratic thickets to build the nation's first sustainable skyscraper, 4 Times Square, and the first LEED Platinum high-rise office tower, the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park. He then broke more new ground by enticing Conde Nast set to set up shop at One World Trade Center, which — when previously known as the Freedom Tower — had been on track to becoming a depot for government offices. With a fashionable lead tenant, 1WTC is now seen as worthy of being New York City's tallest building. Durst is also the force behind Bjarke Ingels' thrilling green-roofed, skyscraper-perimeter-block-combo residential building about to break ground on Manhattan's West 57th Street.

Fred Harris recently brought his experience building more than 5,000 housing units at AvalonBay Communities to the New York City Housing Authority the nation's largest provider of affordable housing. He is responsible for planning the transformation of NYCHA's huge inventory of vacant land and available development rights into housing for a new generation of the city's work force — while preserving and upgrading existing public housing for current tenants. Harris will discuss the political, economic and social challenges of building public housing in the 21st century.

Common Ground founder Rosanne Haggerty is known for converting rundown hotels creating into supportive housing for the formerly homeless. With Community Solutions, she has gone national, designing new programs to prevent homelessness and integrate housing and services for vulnerable people. Community Solutions currently has twinned projects under way in Brownsville and Hartford — both combine physical and social interventions in a coherent way to build healthy communities in the most deprived and degraded areas of their cities.

It has become routine to ask why we can no longer seem to build the great projects, private and public, of the past — Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, Rockefeller Center. Yet great projects are being built, serving public and private, rich and poor, businesses and residents. This year's Regional Assembly offers the chance to hear from creators of some of the best of them.

Political science professors tell us that the governor of New Jersey is one of the most powerful in the nation, with line-item vetoes, strong appointment powers and other perks that consolidate state functions. Until the office of lieutenant governor was established three years ago, the only other statewide offices were the two U.S. senators.

But New Jersey voters are fickle, and the crown of state rarely sits easily on the heads of our governors. The last two elected to office have been one-term executives. The last time a sitting governor had an easy re-election campaign was Tom Kean — back in 1985. During bicentennial celebrations in 1976, Gov. Brendan Byrne was famously asked what he thought of the fact that New Jersey's governor in 1776 was Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son.

"I think it was much easier being governor," Byrne replied, "if you started out as a bastard from the very beginning."

At Regional Plan Association, we have long admired one particular governor of New Jersey who has demonstrated extraordinary leadership in public service. That's why RPA's Lifetime Leadership Award will be presented at the Regional Assembly on April 27 to James Florio, who has served New Jersey and the region as governor, congressman, environmentalist, advocate, attorney and statesman.

Living in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s, you knew who Jim Florio was. A Brooklyn native, boxer and naval officer from South Jersey, he became the state's champion in Congress. Problems that other Washington politicians shied away from — cleaning up contaminated sites or protecting the Pinelands against rampant development — became his signature issues. His colleagues in Congress say that without him, there never would have been a Superfund law, which has identified 209 severely contaminated sites in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut and created a path to cleaning them up.

As a politician, Florio has always been persistent and bold. Elected governor on his third try in 1989, he then took the difficult step of raising taxes to close an enormous budget gap. This probably cost him a second term, but it also addressed the difficult issue of providing adequate education to the state's urban residents. He also signed an executive order creating the Highlands Trust Advisory Board, which together with his leadership on the Pinelands has helped protect almost one million acres of land and water.

After leaving Trenton, he continued to serve. He chaired the Pinelands Commission from 2002 to 2005, and he teaches public policy to students at Rutgers University's Bloustein School. Since 1998, Gov. Florio has served as vice chairman and co-chair of RPA's New Jersey Committee, leading our efforts to redevelop our cities and communities, build sensible mass transit, address the threat of climate change and preserve our natural landscapes.

As the late Sen. Ted Kennedy said when awarding him the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award in 1993, "Jim Florio's career in public life is a textbook example of the saying that one person with courage makes a majority."

No one has ever doubted Jim Florio's courage. Please join us on April 27 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City to thank Gov. Florio for a lifetime of achievements in public service.

It will be at least five years before the first buildings are completed for Cornell University's applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. Yet the project has already been heralded as a huge economic boon for New York City and perhaps the most important legacy of the Bloomberg administration.

It is easy to see why, since the ambitious venture strikes many chords at once. In an era when robust growth in the financial sector is far from guaranteed, the focus on commercial applications of new technology aims to diversify the city's economic base. In a region with a wealth of world-class universities, the introduction of a first-tier engineering school fills one of the few gaps in the New York area's academic portfolio. In a global economy where competitiveness is increasingly linked to innovation, the partnership should help attract faculty, students and entrepreneurs that will enrich the region's pool of intellectual talent. And in a city where any large real estate project generally spurs opposition, the prospect of a large new campus on Roosevelt Island has thus far generated little controversy.

The alliance of New York City, Cornell and Cornell partner Technion-Israel Institute of Technology also captures a wider trend in which cities and regions are increasingly looking to higher education to drive economic growth, and confronting a diverse set of challenges to more fully integrate these institutions into the fabric of existing neighborhoods. Both the potential and complexities of strategies that link economic growth to colleges and universities can be found outside the Roosevelt Island project and across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

On Long Island, a central strategy of the Island's Regional Economic Development Council is to overcome the geographic dispersal of its assets and create stronger physical and institutional links among research institutions — Stony Brook and Hofstra universities, Brookhaven and Cold Spring Harbor Labs — as well as private entrepreneurs and venture capital.

In Newark, N.J., the city has staked much of its hopes for revitalization around bringing higher visibility and leveraging greater economic benefits from one of the city's underappreciated assets, its concentration of successful colleges--New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, the University of Medicine and Dentistry and Essex County College.

City leaders in Stamford, Conn., are hoping to develop the local branch of University of Connecticut into an urban residential campus after observing the city of New Haven and Yale's successful revitalization of New Haven. If UConn won't expand, some say, Stamford will look to another university to put a stake in the ground downtown. Meanwhile, New Haven is orienting much of its downtown revitalization around a partnership with Yale

If the future of cities and higher education appear increasingly linked, the potential for conflict remains a strong countervailing force, as evidenced by the opposition leveled at both Columbia and New York University when they proposed substantial expansions of their constrained urban campuses. The tax-exempt status of most private institutions and negotiations over payments in lieu of taxes are perennial sources of tensions between colleges and their host communities. The housing and service needs of students and faculty can be at odds with neighborhood priorities, and the internal conflict between the education mission of colleges and universities and the goal of commercializing research can spill over into the public arena. There is also the ongoing issue of rising tuition rates and student loan debt, coupled with often diminishing state aid to state schools.

These and other issues will be explored at RPA's 22nd annual Regional Assembly on April 27 at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. A panel, "Universities and the Future of Cities," will include New Haven Mayor John DeStefano; Lance Collins, dean of Cornell's School of Engineering; Maxine Griffith, executive vice president for government and community relations at Columbia University; Seth Pinsky, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation; and Relina Bulchandani, global lead of connected real estate at Cisco Systems Inc. For further information, go to www.regionalassembly.org.