Effective equidistribution of shears and applications

A "shear" is a unipotent translate of a cuspidal geodesic ray in the quotient of the hyperbolic plane by a non-uniform discrete subgroup of PSL(2,R), possibly of infinite co-volume. We prove the regularized equidistribution of shears under large translates with effective (that is, power saving) rates. We also give applications to weighted second moments of GL(2) automorphic L-functions, and to counting lattice points on locally affine symmetric spaces.