All views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board, the Macaulay Messenger, or CUNY Macaulay Honors College.
Less than three weeks before congestion pricing was supposed to go into effect, Governor Hochul paused the tolling program indefinitely. Headlines and news articles referred to the shocking move as a “stunning 11th-hour shift,” “shock [to] Manhattan,” and “abrupt reversal.” The indefinite pause leaves a 15 billion-dollar gap in the MTA’s capital budget, forcing it to put a wide array of upgrades to a centuries-old transit system on pause.
Congestion pricing, in its simplest form, is a toll on vehicles entering Manhattan below 60th Street, an area termed the “Central Business District.” The policy has been in the works for nearly a decade and has always been politically fraught. Hochul’s justification for her about-face was that the policy would hurt working-class New Yorkers. I’ve heard similar refrains in personal and work circles that echo the idea that only wealthy people who live in Manhattan and commute via train are the ones who stand to benefit. Mayor Adams made a similar comment about bus lanes, suggesting they were a form of gentrification. However, the belief that public transit is for the yuppie class crumples under evidence — although this is anecdata, we can see this in our daily lives: how many CUNY students, a population arguably emblematic of the working class New Yorker, are driving to school?
I do believe that some objections to congestion pricing are well-intentioned. Indeed, although car owners generally skew wealthier than public transit users, a recent study by the Community Service Society shows that 42% of people from outer boroughs who drive to work in Manhattan earn low or moderate incomes.
However, killing congestion pricing with no contingency plan has left a multibillion-dollar hole in the MTA’s capital budget, creating a “crippling financial mess.” The tolls were projected to generate $1 billion in revenue, which would have then been bonded to produce $15 billion in total for the MTA. There is no longer money to replace older trains and buses and broken signals, meaning more money — hundreds of millions of dollars — will be spent on maintenance. An additional $1.5 billion in matching federal funding for the 2nd Avenue subway extension is also at risk. The pause just didn’t impact capital projects: a study by Reinvent Albany showed that without the influx of construction, 100,000 jobs are at stake, which also impacts downstream revenues for businesses that these workers would have patronized.
Apprehensions about congestion pricing do not change the fact that it is an ambitious policy based on a simple idea: driving creates pollution, and pollution is a negative externality that drivers should pay for. It would have been a step towards prioritizing public transportation and people over cars. It would have reduced car trips into the congestion zone by as much as 17%. It would have reduced fine particulate pollution, which disproportionately impacts low-income communities. It would have kept us a competitive city on the international playing field, following, decades later, in the footsteps of cities such as London, Stockholm, and Singapore. These programs were similarly politically unpopular at the outset, but as the effectiveness of the policy materialized, became more widely accepted.
New York had an opportunity to be a leader in prioritizing mass transit and massively fumbled. The discussions about imagined alternatives to congestion pricing and patching the $15 billion dollar hole in the MTA’s budget are almost laughably bad: catching fare-beaters (unbondable, since they’re not a consistent source of revenue), levying a business tax (although the pause was ostensibly because congestion pricing would have “hurt businesses”), a lower tax imposed on every driver entering Manhattan (the point of a high tax is to change behavior, and it’s not like the MTA randomly drew the boundaries of the Central Business District).
Perhaps what is most frustrating about these discussions is that they seem to forget we already have a policy to improve public transit that has been extensively researched for over a decade. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of environmental and economic impact assessments and reports on how the toll would benefit low-income transit riders, lead to modal shift, reduce emissions, and improve air quality. We’ve already spent half a billion dollars on installing the infrastructure. And yet, the policy was reversed because the governor had some conversations with diners.
If you care even a little bit about transit — and as New Yorkers, we all should — then there is an undeniable air of hopelessness about the Governor’s decision; especially when compounded with news like 2023 being the deadliest year for NYC cyclists, the Adams’ administration abandonment of the Flatbush Avenue bus lane redesign, and missed legal benchmarks for new bus and bike lanes. What is the point of knowing what is important if we do little to make it happen?
The last-minute pause of congestion pricing was enacted with little foresight and little regard for what good policy is supposed to be: evidence-based solutions to problems. In any 101 class, we learn that any policy will always have winners and losers. With her decision, the Governor decided that all of us who rely on public transit will be losers.
