THE PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSIONS ACT the most strenuous opposition by the Com mission itself, the Legislature of 1905 was induced to pass amendments which allowed separation of contracts, cut down the pos sible length of franchises, gave the local Board of Estimate authority to approve or reject the plans of the Commission, and provided that future vacancies should be filled by the mayor. It still remained a state commission with such broad jurisdiction that the moment that the population of Buffalo reached one million this Com mission could have begun handling its transit franchises. The Public Service Act does no more, therefore, than substitute one state commission for another with this dif ference, that the new commissioners must be residents of New York City. For some time one of the Rapid Transit Commis sioners was a resident of Connecticut and another of New Jersey. The cry, there fore, that the substitution of the Public Service Commission for the Rapid Transit Commission was a violation of the sacred principle of home rule seems somewhat absurd. Rightly or wrongly the public has become convinced that the Rapid Transit Com mission is too subservient to the interests that control the present transit monopoly in New York City, and it has noted that its chairman is president of one of the great insurance companies that holds millions of dollars' worth of bonds in public service corporations. The public has seen a sub way given for seventy-five years to Belmont who on every difference that has arisen has rubbed the fur the wrong way. With immense profit in the construction and later in the operation, the subway has been consolidated with the elevated lines, and finally the public has seen a complete merg ing of control of subway, elevated and sur face into the Interborough-Metropolitan Com pany with over one hundred million dollars of water injected. Meantime no energy has been displayed in construction of additional or independent lines by the Rapid Transit
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Commission. Brooklyn has watched with the greatest impatience the real estate development of New Jersey through the building of private tunnels from New Jersey under the Hudson River, and has not been able to obtain for itself even a public subway nor any relief to the scanda lous crushing at the Brooklyn Bridge which was overcrowded years and years ago. These and many other facts combined to create a condition of undeveloped transit within New York City that must be solved, and solved very rapidly. Yet the solu tion seems to lie largely in the personnel of the Commission. The Public Service Com missions Act, so far as authority for the future extension of transit in New York City is concerned, merely wipes out of office, as has been said, the Rapid Transit Commission and provides that the Public Service Commission of the First District, in addition to the powers and duties herein after described, shall perform all the duties described in the Rapid Transit Act. The city will therefore obtain a new Commis sion, appointed by Governor Hughes and pledged to action, in the place of a Commis sion, most of whose members, if they were Supreme Court justices, would have been retired under the age limit. Another Commission abolished is the State Railroad Commission, formerly of three members, increased to five in 1905 in order to change the Republican factional control, never anything more than a politi cal board, without the confidence of the public, and, even had it the will, without power to enforce its recommendations. The third Commission, Gas and Elec tricity, was created in 1905 as a result of the Stevens legislative investigation of the lighting situation in New York City, the inves tigation in which Governor Hughes became known to the public. Broader powers were granted than the Legislature had theretofore delegated, yet so slowly did the Commission act on the matter of fixing the price for gas that the Legislature of 1906
