A Straphangers" Campaign - NYTimes.com Say this for Rudolph Giuliani: In 1997 he made it free to ride the Staten Island Ferry, a small daily improvement in commuters" lives that, multiplied by millions of rides and many years, surely adds up to something monumental. His decision was influenced as much by politics as by need, but it's an example of what can happen when a New York mayor highlights and fixes a neglected transportation problem (riders in one borough unfairly burdened by train, bus and ferry fares). Few things more directly affect the quality of a day, the stability and prosperity of a life, than the ability to get to work. And few are more vital to the larger economy - of the city and region - than the transportation system that makes it possible. Veins and arteries: every body needs them. The candidates for mayor understand this. Campaigning in the shadow of the often-innovative mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg, they all have transportation ideas, many of them good. Christine Quinn spent much of last week firing off proposals. She rode to work with a Staten Islander for a good hour and a half by bus and subway to highlight her 10-year plan to make every New Yorker's commute an hour or less. She talked about adding ferries on the East River and between Staten Island and mid-Manhattan, and expanding Select Bus Service - express buses in dedicated lanes, like rubber-wheeled trains - in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, so riders could move more easily within those boroughs while avoiding Manhattan. She offered this as a cheaper, faster-to-build alternative to the X Line, a hypothetical triborough train that could be built on existing rights-of-way and connect with at least 20 subway lines. That idea was floated in the 1990s by the Regional Plan Association, and recently revived by Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. Bill de Blasio and William Thompson Jr. have also proposed expanding bus service in the boroughs outside Manhattan, and Mr. de Blasio wants to expand the bike-share program, too. Joseph Lhota, the former head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, wants to put park-and-ride stations at the ends of subway lines, to turn more drivers into straphangers. He has mused about digging a tunnel to Staten Island to bring the R subway over from Brooklyn. Ms. Quinn and Adolfo Carrión Jr. want new rail stations where Metro-North runs through the East Bronx, which is poorly served by mass transit and ripe for development. Mr. Carrión also wants to make parking easier for motorized two-wheelers - make room for more Vespas. We could fill this page with plans like these to improve the reach and quality of the transportation system. The much harder question is how to make such plans real, and keep the existing system in good repair, with little new money to work with and mayoral power circumscribed by the M.T.A., the state-run mega-agency that controls mass transit in the city and suburbs. Some candidates want to give the mayor control of the M.T.A. board and power to appoint the head of New York City Transit, the agency within the M.T.A. that runs the city's subways and buses. The justification is that nearly all of the money the system generates - and nearly all of its ridership - comes from the five boroughs. Neither plan is likely to get past opposition in Albany. The candidates are also talking about restoring the commuter tax - a modest levy on suburbanites who earn their living in the city, use its services and benefit from its transit lines - to help pay for the system's upkeep. That is an excellent idea, but it is also a difficult sell in Albany. So is congestion pricing. That plan, a lost Bloomberg battle that is well worth reviving, would charge drivers for entering Manhattan during peak hours, to save gas and to help clear the air and Midtown streets. The next mayor should gird for new fights along with the old ones - like the long-thwarted goal of adding tolls on the East River bridges, which, in a region replete with costly and necessary highway tolls, persist in being perversely free. Drivers in Queens and Brooklyn may howl at the unfairness of it, but some great transit thinkers - like Samuel Schwartz, engineer and former New York City cabby and deputy transportation commissioner - argue that adding East River tolls and judiciously lowering them elsewhere would make the system much fairer citywide. It will take effort and political skill to turn ideas into reality, from the tiny - Ms. Quinn proposes countdown clocks outside subway stations, which would be quite nice - to the transformational. But few jobs are more important for the next mayor. Mr. Carrión, a former urban planner, is right when he says the mayor of New York should be a national leader on transportation. He promises, if elected, to build and lead a coalition of big-city mayors to demand more federal transit dollars, to challenge the imbalance of spending that favors cars and trucks over rail and buses. All of the mayoral candidates should embrace that challenge, to raise the profile of an urgent local and national issue, just as Mr. Bloomberg has done with gun violence and public health.