Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images
An MTA bus drives under a gantry supporting license plate and E-ZPass readers set up across Central Park West at the 60th Street intersection as New York City prepares to implement congestion pricing, March 3, 2024.
“Other cities are paying attention. How is it going to work here? We’re going to show them how you do this.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had stepped up to the microphone at a June 27, 2023, news conference to tee up the Federal Highway Administration’s finding of “no significant impact” after completing its environmental review of New York City’s congestion pricing program.
And so, show them she did almost a year to that day. Except that the Democrat showcased a master class in poor executive decision-making, in a prerecorded, ten-minute June 5, 2024, video no less, to “indefinitely pause” congestion pricing before its much-anticipated June 30 debut.
It appears that Hochul must have been apprehensive about the program for some time. In April, a Siena College poll revealed that many New Yorkers opposed the fees. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi had already criticized Hochul for contributing to Democratic House losses in 2022, for different reasons related to her near-disaster election campaign.
The governor seems to have concluded that her route to political salvation lay in keeping wealthy suburbanites who want to drive into the city and pay exorbitant parking fees happy. She had already joined House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand last year in a campaign to reverse the 2022 legislative miscues. So to keep, and potentially recapture, Democratic seats lost in the House and the State Assembly, Hochul effectively devised a plan for the “8 percent,” the drivers who carped about the prospect of paying $15 to drive in from Long Island, Westchester County, and other outlying locales.
Whether that gamble will keep her in Albany is unclear, when the votes she really needs are in the five boroughs. Being compared to former New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who put the kibosh on the ARC tunnel—the predecessor to the Gateway rail tunnel that would have been open by now instead of just breaking ground—is no way to launch a 2026 re-election bid.
With eight lawsuits filed by congestion pricing opponents, and supporters of the original plan lining up fresh challenges to Hochul’s decision, it’s impossible to downplay the wonder of it all: an avoidable crisis that had so many flashing lights and exit ramps before the cliff that it defies understanding how she missed them and what her path to redemption could possibly be.
Congestion pricing had been designed as the critical revenue generator for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), providing an estimated $1 billion each year. The plan aimed to contribute $15 billion of the $50 billion required for the latest five-year capital program. It also would have improved air quality and health outcomes for millions of people. New York City ranks third in the country for traffic congestion (behind Chicago and Boston), 13th for ozone pollution, and 15th for asthma sufferers.
Congestion pricing had been designed as the critical revenue generator for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, providing an estimated $1 billion each year.
The snap decision resembled another late-in-the-game deal that she sprang on state lawmakers, involving a multimillion-dollar state contribution to a new Buffalo Bills football stadium in 2022. This time, frustrated state lawmakers recessed themselves out the door without so much as a nod to viable replacement revenue generators for the MTA. They nixed Hochul’s trial balloon to raise $1 billion through an increase in a business-related “payroll mobility tax,” coming one year after having increased the same tax by $1.1 billion. Tapping into the state’s rainy-day fund did not pass go. A bond plan dependent on congestion pricing revenues also fizzled out.
Potential gambling license fees and revenues might save the day for projects like the now-stalled second phase of the Second Avenue subway through East Harlem (which requires New York to match federal monies). But casino proposals are nowhere near approval and have generated their own controversies.
Hochul leaves New York in limbo just as a heat dome approaches the East Coast to kick off the summer, a period when MTA problems usually multiply exponentially; New Yorkers have not forgotten the “Summer of Hell”—eight weeks of delays, derailments, track fires, air-conditioning malfunctions, overcrowding, and more in 2017.
“One of the really amateurish aspects of her [June 10] announcement is to say, ‘Oh, there’s just a lack of imagination,’” says David Bragdon, a New York–based independent adviser to American and European transit agencies, referring to Hochul’s statement about funding for the MTA. “As if people have not spent 30 years having blue-ribbon committees looking at all types of financial solutions for the MTA. For the governor to just blithely say that people just need to be imaginative, it’s as if she doesn’t understand any of the history or context.”
MTA’s state of good repair is circling sewer drains. Riders will miss out on numerous improvements. Upgrades to critical systems like tracks, bridges, lighting, public-address systems, signals, stations, air-conditioning, and more will not go forward. Also on hold are electric buses and new rail cars. More than half of disabled people in New York use public transportation (only about 5 percent do nationwide, according to the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York). Long-delayed improvements to ramps and elevators, as well as new elevators and escalators, are on hold. The MTA has been mandated to achieve 95 percent accessibility in its subways and buses by 2050; they’re nowhere near that now. For her part, Hochul said monies have been set aside to “backstop” these upgrades. However, MTA chief executive Janno Lieber did not radiate optimism about the capital program when he said earlier this week that his goal was “to make sure the system doesn’t fall apart.”
The focus on revenues has obscured environmental issues. “For the MTA, it is also about reducing air pollution and reducing traffic—there’s no other solution that does both of those things,” says Bragdon, a former head of the TransitCenter, a New York research and advocacy foundation. “It’s not just about generating revenue.”
Hochul touted a number of her climate initiatives in her video announcement but failed to say anything about the challenges facing transportation. The effects of wildfire smoke episodes on residents’ health that the city experienced last year will only intensify if traffic congestion is not addressed. Delaying capital projects doesn’t solve the need to raise low-lying rail beds that carry MTA’s Metro-North line along the Hudson River, which are subject to flooding.
Traffic, of course, will continue to be a special kind of New York hell. It has some of the slowest bus speeds in the country. “Today travel in the Midtown core averages less than 5 miles per hour, a 3% drop from the previous low in 2019,” a June report from the Regional Plan Association, a think tank, found. “Compared with London, San Francisco, and Buffalo, rush hour travel speeds in New York City (not just the congestion zone) are 58%, 33%, and 150% slower.”
“We have tons of people coming in from low-income environmental justice communities in northern Manhattan and the Bronx by bus to perform essential service work,” says Danny Pearlstein, policy director for the Riders Alliance, a membership organization of New York City subway and bus riders. “We’re not dignifying them, we’re not honoring them by speeding up their commutes if we’re prioritizing diner customers from New Jersey, as the governor waxed about on Friday night.” (At a June 7 press conference after the infamous indefinite pause video, the governor had invoked hypothetical business owners who feared that New Jersey customers would stop coming to New York diners.)
The congestion plan was already under assault from opponents in the courts. But it’s also been suggested that Hochul is obligated to advance congestion pricing under legislation signed under her predecessor Gov. Andrew Cuomo. On Wednesday, supporters made their move: New York City Comptroller Brad Lander announced that a new coalition was poised to explore lawsuits on civil, climate, environmental, Americans with Disabilities Act, and potentially other grounds.
Philip Mark Plotch, a principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, notes that Hochul was not without options. “She could have said, ‘We’re going to phase this in and we’re going to start with trucks because we just want to test the technology,’” says Plotch. “Or she could have just said we’re just going to start it from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. and just at the very peak periods and see how it works there.” A more serious examination of alternatives might have limited some of the suburban furor expressed most vociferously by New Jersey Democrats like Gov. Phil Murphy and Rep. Josh Gottheimer. (For his part, the representative has suggested that the monies for the Buffalo stadium could have been allocated to the MTA.)
Stockholm has often been mentioned as a congestion pricing success story, but what’s often missing from those mentions is that city and its transportation officials also devised a plan to deal with public opposition early on. In 2006, they responded with a seven-month pilot program. The city limited the congestion pricing to the city center, built park-and-ride lots, and added nearly 200 new buses, nearly 20 new routes, and increased existing service.
Would some version of a pilot program or smaller catchment area or other design have made congestion pricing more palatable? It’s not outrageous to think so. “By November, people would have been saying, ‘Wow, this is really a success. The air is cleaner, there is less traffic. There are fewer traffic deaths,’” says Bragdon. “And it actually could have been a political asset to her if she’d let it go forward.”
