But Mr. Walder was frustrated by the very challenges Mr. Lhota may be best suited to confront: navigating Albany politics and negotiating with transit workers' unions.
Since its introduction, congestion charging has led to an even more lasting reduction of car trips to the city center, in part because the policy generates revenues for financing new subway extensions and uses these same resources as the basis for negotiating new transit oriented housing in subway extension areas.
As part of that framework, the union agreed to negotiate having transit workers pay more for their health coverage to offset the money the authority would lose by relinquishing its pension proposals.
Perhaps Chicago can cut its disastrously high murder rate — while negotiating a mass transit deal and a teachers' contract, the latter without him and Karen Lewis, the union head, again hurling curses at each other.
Away from the klieg lights of DC and the hoopla of the Sunday shows, state, county and city governments keep plugging away, building schools, funding transit, negotiating contracts, setting environmental policies and more.
He is negotiating with San Diego's transit chief to get more bus lines aimed at High Tech High.
Several labor leaders said they expected the mayor to seek an agreement, like one negotiated by the transit workers in December, that does not contain a raise in the first year, but instead gives a one-time payment.
The transit system is negotiating with the states of Delaware and New York as well.
For weeks, U.S. and Pakistani officials have been negotiating a new set of transit fees that would pave the way for the reopening of routes that NATO convoys used to ferry fuel and nonlethal supplies from the southern port of Karachi to the Afghan border.
After all, the representatives from the transit union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, negotiating the hours away at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Midtown, were not the only ones losing sleep.
