State Transit Unit Accused Of Inertia

The Metropolitan Rapid Transit Commission was sharply criticized yesterday by City Planning Commissioner Goodhue Livingston Jr. for "dragging its feet." Mr. Livingston indicated that the transit agency, set up by the Legislature in 1952, had been stymied by Governor Dewey. He accused the Governor of "lack of boldness and vision in the field of metropolitan transportation."

The transit commission was established as a temporary state unit to cooperate with a similar New Jersey commission in studying the entire mass transportation problems of the region. Originally it had been directed to report to the Governor and the Legislature at the end of 1952. The law setting up the agency was extended twice, and Mr. Livingston said it would be necessary to extend it again to cover 1954 because the group had failed to act.

In a letter to Charles H. Tuttle, chairman of the New York agency, Mr. Livingston called for a "clear-cut public explanation for the delay" and said he had been informed that the New Jersey commission had been rebuffed in efforts to get the cooperation of the New York unit to start the project.

Mr. Livingston also charged that the acts setting up the New York and New Jersey commissions were drawn loosely, indicating that neither the Governors nor the Legislatures are seriously interested but are making political gestures to calm the rising tide of citizens' protests over the prevailing abominable traveling conditions."

M. J. Madigan, vice chairman of the New York group, acknowledged that no staff had been hired and said that Mr. Tuttle, who is on vacation, intended to ask the Legislature for additional funds to make a real study of the situation. The New York agency received only $10,000, while the New Jersey commission got $20,000, which, Mr. Livingston held, was not ample for the task.

Other members of the New York Commission implied that the study had been postponed because the unit did not want to get embroiled in the controversy over the higher city transit fare; they said the commissions of the two states would get started seriously after Labor Day.

Mr. Livingston asserted that "New York's delaying tactics indicate that the whole matter may be a political smoke screen." He praised Governor Dewey's "well-earned reputation for efficiency," but said that in the field of metropolitan transportation, the Governor had come up with a faulty plan for the reorganization of the Long Island Rail Road and had set up an "old hat" and badly thought-out type of Transit Authority for this city.