New York State’s congestion pricing program was once a promising method of charging drivers to use Manhattan’s most crowded streets. The abrupt announcement on Wednesday by Gov. Kathy Hochul to “indefinitely pause” the program may spell its permanent end, and not just for New York. The unfortunate decision may also harm other American cities’ efforts to similarly control traffic.
It didn’t have to be this way. The state and city can salvage something from this failure by heeding the right lesson: stop trying to do the right thing the wrong way.
The concept of congestion pricing, under which car drivers in Manhattan would have to pay $15 (more for truck drivers) to enter the zone south of 60th Street, is sound. It was first proposed by the Lindsay administration more than a half-century ago, and now street space is even scarcer, as the city has repurposed much of it for walkers and cyclists.
Driving into or around dense Manhattan is the least efficient way of getting around. In 2019, New York’s last normal pre-Covid year, just 24 percent of the nearly 3.9 million people who came to core Manhattan each day came via car or truck, according to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council; almost everyone else took mass transit. Car drivers impose a burden on the city, in collision danger, congestion (buses stall behind cars), noise and pollution. Congestion pricing would charge drivers for the inconvenience they cause.
Yet economic principle is not the same as gritty New York reality. The governor’s inept halt to the program offers a civics lesson: New York’s transit advocacy community, which long fought for congestion pricing, could not overlay a sound idea onto a dysfunctional state government whose elected officials flout good-government practices, focusing instead on short-term exigencies and ignoring key details of complex proposals.
There’s also a limit to how much experimentation a city can withstand when residents and commuters feel increasingly fearful and anxious on the public subways and streets that congestion pricing was supposed to improve.
One big obstacle that congestion pricing has always faced is that a majority of the public has never supported it. Granted, lawmakers are supposed to lead, not follow. But former Gov. Andrew Cuomo enacted it in a way that ensured it would never gain broad political support. Five years ago, instead of proposing congestion pricing as a stand-alone bill, he stuffed it into the state budget. By voting for it as just one vague element in the budget and not as a specific, detailed program of its own, lawmakers never had to put themselves on record firmly supporting it.
After Mr. Cuomo left office, congestion pricing had no powerful elected official with a stake in seeing it succeed. Nor did it have more than tepid political support in the city: neither the mayor at the time, Bill de Blasio, nor the current mayor, Eric Adams, fully embraced it.
The 2019 congestion pricing law embedded two further impediments to success. First, congestion pricing was to be a cordon toll: a toll to enter the Manhattan zone. That approach was once sound; London created its zone program in 2003, when it was the only technology available.
Yet over the decades, the moment passed; a cordon toll has become increasingly obsolete. The system can’t differentiate between a van that moves around Manhattan all day making deliveries and a van that travels two blocks from the West Side Highway to a private garage. Any expert proposing a congestion pricing program today would propose a toll based on time spent traveling, or idling, with the congestion zone, and London is now exploring what comes next.
Second, Mr. Cuomo’s motive in enacting congestion pricing wasn’t to reduce congestion, but to raise money for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as its expenses outpaced billions in annual tax revenues. The law included no congestion-reduction mandate, but it did include a revenue-raising mandate. The M.T.A. had to raise $1 billion a year so that it could borrow against that money to raise $15 billion for infrastructure. In London, the point of congestion pricing was to cut driving, not raise large amounts of money; the program there raises only $460 million annually.
The strict $1 billion requirement locked the state into a program that couldn’t be flexible. It could have started off, for example, with a modest toll for cars, say $8, and only during peak hours, say, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Instead, the M.T.A., constrained by its revenue requirement, was forced to devise a 24-hour program, with a lower fee at night. (London’s program operates only from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.) The toll, unavoidable in the late-night hours when mass transit is infrequent and congestion nonexistent, began to look more like a tax than a fee.
Those handicaps to an optimal congestion pricing program didn’t have to be insurmountable. But 2024 New York is not 2019 New York. The city’s slow recovery from Covid-19 lockdowns left little room for error. As of 2022, the last year for which full data are available, the number of people coming to Manhattan each day was 28 percent below 2019 levels. Driving has recovered more quickly than transit ridership, with car journeys now close to or above 2019 levels, and transit journeys less than three-quarters of normal for that year. Congestion pricing thus risks encouraging some drivers to work from home more often or out of Manhattan altogether rather than trying mass transit, reducing Manhattan’s chances for a full economic recovery.
New York’s deteriorated public safety and reduced public order since 2020 further harmed the prospects of congestion pricing. People are reluctant to return partly because they feel unsafe on the trains; New York has suffered 35 subway homicides since 2020, most of them random. Before 2020, it took nearly 17 years for the transit system to amass such a death toll. Disorder is rampant. Similarly, it’s hard to conjure up visions of traffic smoothly flowing on congestion-free streets when the public is terrified of moped and e-bike drivers zipping every which way, crowding pedestrians off sidewalks and regular cyclists from bike lanes.
There were other flaws that revealed themselves as the program began to become real. In August 2022, the M.T.A. released its draft environmental assessment, required by federal law, which showed that congestion pricing, by diverting some traffic around Manhattan, would result in more traffic in the Bronx, including as many as 704 more trucks a day on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, as well as more traffic on Staten Island and in northern New Jersey.
After an outcry from U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, the M.T.A. mitigated the projected impact on that borough, but only partly. The M.T.A. should have responded to New Jersey’s valid concerns by addressing the real issues — New Jersey drivers already pay tunnel tolls, whose substantial surpluses fund parallel transit into New York City — and negotiating a compromise, rather than waiting for New Jersey to file a federal lawsuit.
Governor Hochul could have addressed these issues over the nearly three years that she has been in office. She could have reduced congestion pricing’s $1-billion-a-year revenue requirement, allowing the M.T.A. to levy a less costly, peak-hours-only toll suitable for the post-Covid world. Alternatively, Ms. Hochul could have said back in 2021, 2022 or 2023 that the state would delay the program until New York’s economic recovery matched the rest of the nation’s.
Instead, she allowed the M.T.A. to undertake the yearslong charade of federal environmental review, including hourslong public testimony, and allowed a separate commission to go through a parallel charade last year of setting toll rates. It is understandable that an exhausted public wants to hear nothing of congestion pricing again.
Nevertheless, New York is not going to have a successful car-based recovery from the pandemic. Cars in numbers sufficient to move New Yorkers around do not fit in the city’s physical space (bike lanes or no bike lanes).
Someday, New York will have to charge drivers moving around in the city’s densest areas — and not just in Manhattan. Ms. Hochul can salvage something from her congestion pricing botch by exploring a pilot program to charge drivers by the mile in congested areas, starting with trucks, taxis and other commercial vehicles, whose drivers are already heavily monitored by government regulators. The Eastern Transportation Coalition has conducted voluntary pilots in several states. Asking drivers to volunteer for such pilots to see what works and what doesn’t — and giving them something in return for their participation — is a better way to build support than imposing a program whose overriding, immediate goal is to raise a lot of money.
For nearly a year now, Manhattan has become used to strange metal arms bearing cameras that extend over busy streets, ready to read license plates and E-Z Passes for the congestion pricing system. (They cost more than $500 million, along with related preparation.) The M.T.A. shouldn’t take those toll camera gantries down just yet. The state could use them to charge trucks to enter Manhattan at peak hours, or convert them into speed cameras.
For now, too, the gantries are a useful monument to the principle that we cannot try new things until we get the basics right, from passing a stand-alone bill with explicit lawmaker support, to being flexible about details as the city’s economy evolves. If something doesn’t bend, it breaks — and Ms. Hochul broke congestion pricing instead of bending it.
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