New York Giants' Plaxico Burress, right, arrives at Manhattan Supreme Court for arraignment with an unidentified man on Monday, Dec. 1, 2008 in New York. Burress accidentally shot himself at a Manhattan nightclub Friday evening and was treated at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He was released Saturday. (AP Photo / December 1, 2008)

There’s something about the Plaxico Burress saga that’s not being told, or maybe can’t be told. I’m not just talking about the beyond-bizarre incident last weekend when the troubled Giants’ receiver had a gun accidentally go off in his pants at a crowded midtown nightclub. That’s just the latest chapter in what has been a slow-developing implosion of this extremely talented young athlete. As we said on PIX News last night, the gun incident came a mere ten months after Burress had caught the touchdown pass that won the Super Bowl for the Giants, an accomplishment that, by all rights, should gained him a measure of immortality in the minds of New York sports fans for generations to come. And, you’d figure, in his own mind.

So Mayor Bloomberg is going to try and knock down the city’s term limits law and run for a third term. Hmmm... Let’s kick this around for a minute.

Bloomberg’s justification for this is that he, being a super successful billionaire businessman, and all, is uniquely skilled to see New York City through the current financial crisis. Well, yes. And no. Yes, he’s certainly worked Wall Street to his clear advantage in the past. A man doesn’t pull down a sweet $10-billion just being lucky. So he knows the mechanics of it all, at least the mechanics as they once were. Read more after the jump.

Since moving my family out of Manhattan to the suburbs last year, I switched from being a subway rider to a Metro North customer. But I still felt a pang of disappointment Tuesday when I heard the MTA is going to propose yet another fare hike for subways and buses. The pang then went ping on the news that subway delays had increased by 24 percent over the past year ending in May. I don’t know who’s responsible for the MTA’s public information strategy, but I would suggest some lag time between poor performance reports and fare hike proposals. It leads one to the conclusion that people are being asked to pay more money for worse service.

Which, of course, is exactly what riders ARE being asked to do, and who can blame a single one of them for being angry about it. First of all, it’s 25-cents more. Sure, that’s not an enormous amount of money, but after a while, these “modest” hikes start nicking straphangers to death. A quarter more this year, a quarter more next year; before long, to paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen, you’re starting to talk real money. In fact, as recently as 1986, it cost exactly $1 to ride the bus or subway. So in just over 20-years, according to my math, that’s a 100-percent increase. Take it up another quarter next year, and you’ve got an increase of….well, of OVER 100-percent in just over two decades.

And what have we gotten for it? As noted above, more trains run behind schedule than ever before. A heavy rainfall can lock up the entire system. Some stations have been improved, but most of them are, to put it kindly, decrepit. My “home” station when I lived in Manhattan, at 96th Street and Central Park West, was simply disgusting. Filthy, leaky, searing hot in the summertime, and freezing in the winter. And that was Central Park West! I’m guessing stations in more moderate income communities have it much worse.

As New Yorkers, we’re fond of saying we live in the greatest city in the world. But our subway system, while the biggest in the world, is far from the greatest. Pick any city with a subway system of any size, and it’s nicer than New York’s. Paris, London, Moscow… MOSCOW, for God’s sake! The city fathers who are always so concerned about New York’s image in the eyes of the world should spend a little more time underground. If nothing more than making it a matter of pride, it should be a top priority to overhaul everything and rebuild a world class public transportation system.

I know, I know.. it’ll cost billions and billions.. tax dollars are down, etc, etc. We’ve heard it for years. Funny, though, how the city can find the money to build not one but two new mega-baseball stadiums, with a complete overhaul of Madison Square Garden on the drawing board, as well. Sports are enormously important to New York and to the city’s reputation. But last time I looked, a lot more people were riding subways and buses each day than heading out to catch that night’s Yankees game.

Finally, a fare hike in this era of $4.50 per gallon gasoline is especially hard to swallow. What have we always heard we should do to wean us off America’s oil addiction? All together now: USE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION! Well, in enormous numbers, New Yorkers do just that. And look at the thanks we’re getting. Dig deeper, straphangers and bus riders. You’ll soon be paying more to use a public transportation system that seems to have no long term plan besides….more fare hikes. If this really is the greatest city in the world, we deserve better.