Charles Guerin/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
Congestion pricing signage is seen in Manhattan on January 6, 2025.
Since February, New York has been on the receiving end of blunt missives from Washington about the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s first-in-the-nation congestion pricing program. In an April 21 letter, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that “the State of New York risks serious consequences if it continues to fail to comply with Federal law.” New York, Duffy said, would forfeit an alphabet soup of regulatory authorizations and approvals, as well as federal highway dollars, if it did not respond to a USDOT order by May 21 and shut down the three-month-old congestion pricing program by May 28. He also pointed out that the state had ignored a Federal Highway Administration notification to end the program by March 21—which had been extended to April 20.
There were other perplexing pronouncements in the letter. Duffy contended that the Biden administration encouraged spending on transit over highways. In fact, even under Biden’s infrastructure plan, state departments of transportation prefer to spend federal dollars on highway projects over transit. Duffy also warned that DOT would hold back on National Environmental Policy Act approvals (safety projects excepted), even though NEPA requires a federal agency to undertake specific actions and can’t be used as a tool to compel compliance.
Another claim, that tolls can’t be used for transit, is dubious, as states do flex toll revenues to transit projects. Ten days before Duffy’s letter was signed, sealed, and delivered to Hochul, several Justice Department attorneys in the Southern District of New York came to a similar conclusion on that point in an April 11 letter sent to a senior USDOT attorney. Congress had allowed “states and localities to enter into cooperative agreements with FHWA in connection with value pricing pilots and explicitly exempted them from the general prohibition on the use of tolls on federal-aid highways” (emphasis added).
But that wasn’t the only point where they differed with Duffy. It was just one of an absolutely astonishing set of conclusions that ground the administration’s case into very, very fine dust. They would have remained ensconced in the deepest reaches of cyberspace if not for the fact that some unfortunate individual made the analysis to the official—and public—record before someone, too late, snatched it back.
The city’s brutal traffic jams have subsided, the air quality has improved, and business activity in Manhattan’s Central Business District has picked up.
It was inevitable that there would to be hell to pay. Late Thursday afternoon, the Justice Department took the three assistant U.S. district attorneys responsible for the letter off the congestion pricing case and reassigned it to attorneys in Washington.
With the federal government’s own lawyers admitting that the MTA’s case is solid, the letter ended up being pretty much a de facto vindication for the authority; it had not contravened regulations or unleashed conditions that put lives and property in peril. What the congestion pricing program has done is stun the fence-sitters and confound its many critics. It took 60 years, but the city’s brutal traffic jams have subsided, the air quality has improved, and business activity in Manhattan’s Central Business District has picked up.
One high-profile convert is none other than Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), she of the infamous pre-election congestion pricing “pause.” In a video posted to social media accounts, the governor took less than 30 seconds to toss Duffy’s latest list of threats across her desk—and there is a 99.9 percent chance that she is still guffawing somewhere over the latest revelations.
In crafting some very creative rationales upon which to base its opposition to the allegedly “illegal” program, USDOT had already likely handed the MTA more evidence to backstop their pending lawsuit, as the feds continue to stomp all over federalism principles to compel state compliance with executive branch goals. But New York is determined to keep the program, and it has copious amounts of evidence of success on its side.
IN 2024, NEW YORK WAS AT THE TOP of the international congestion charts. Its drivers spent 102 hours in traffic, second only to Istanbul. To dent that sorry statistic, the congestion pricing program basically asks car drivers to decide if it is worth $9 (buses and trucks pay more) to drive into Midtown and Lower Manhattan at peak times. William Vickrey, a Nobel Prize–winning Columbia economist, first proposed a congestion pricing template in 1959. Decades after pioneers like London, Singapore, and Stockholm had implemented theirs, New York’s program finally got the go-ahead in 2019 and the city implemented it in early January.
Many New Yorkers have voted with their feet, bikes, rideshares, cabs, or fare cards for buses and subways, using other options to get around. Delays in the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the major thoroughfares into the city, have declined, and area bridge traffic has dissipated. Millions fewer cars has led to air quality improvements and sharp decreases in injuries caused by traffic accidents.
An early-February poll by the Partnership for New York City, an advocacy group for the city’s largest employers and business leaders, confirmed faster commutes and general public satisfaction with the program. Even many drivers who pay the fee are pleased. Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed want President Trump to keep the program in place.
Although comprehensive studies have yet to be done, some surveys by business and trade publications indicate that the “word of mouth is extremely good,” says John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, a state government accountability watchdog group. “Smaller businesses that might have 10 or 20 trucks going in to do plumbing or electrical work or whatever: They have saved tons and tons of time. You can tell in part by who’s not complaining, who actually supports it.”
The good news for the MTA’s bottom line is that revenues are matching projections. The money will go straight into the coffers of the MTA for signals and other state-of-good-repair upgrades, mobility improvements for people with disabilities, and additional options for transit deserts.
That makes the move to shut down congestion pricing even more bizarre: The program actually saves the federal government money. The MTA coming up with its own user-fee funding stream means it relies less on the city, Albany, or Washington (which provides a comparatively small share of federal funding for its current capital plan) for state-of-good-repair or other projects.
The MTA filed its suit against the Trump administration in February, alleging that its “efforts” to terminate a program implemented by the Biden administration are “unlawful.” It isn’t out of the ordinary for federal agencies to check in or instruct states to perform certain actions, or even alert them that their actions may be at odds with certain regulations. But what is strange is that USDOT has declared the program “illegal,” and has attempted to reverse previous congressional and executive approvals at the same time as the pending federal court case on the same questions, now further undercut by the April 11 letter disclosure. (In March, Duffy also pointed to more possible MTA funding problems if the authority failed to satisfy a request for evidence about its tactics and expenditures to fight crime in the system.)
The MTA complaint also points out other weaknesses in the federal case, including Duffy’s stated support for projects that help people get home to their families faster. “If we don’t have our systems that are delayed and we don’t sit in traffic, we get to spend an extra 15 minutes, maybe an extra 45 minutes a day with the ones that we love as opposed to listening to music or a podcast,” he told an American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials transportation conference in February.
Despite these drawbacks, the administration is unlikely to give up. The Justice Department attorneys also provided another course of action. “The FHWA [could] end the [program] for the Secretary’s stated reasons, but would do so as a matter of changed agency priorities rather than arguing the CBDTP was not statutorily authorized [to do so].”
Other federal cases brought by New Jersey and New York residents and other interests seeking to end congestion pricing have, for the most part, failed to persuade judges. MTA intends to keep the cameras, which it controls, on “until a court orders otherwise.”
As the legal gears grind, the political stakes for the 2026 governor’s race get higher, faster. One of Duffy’s often-repeated claims is that the congestion pricing program disadvantages “low- and medium-income” New Yorkers, even though it is a well-established fact that these New Yorkers take public transit since the cost of owning, insuring, and maintaining a vehicle in New York (much less parking one in Manhattan) is extortionate. Low-income drivers can also take advantage of discounts and tax credits that the program provides.
“I think the game here is to keep congestion pricing in the pot simmering so that you help the Republican candidate in the next year’s election,” says Kaehny of the New York governor’s race. “Also remember that Congress—the House—is very, very close, and the battleground districts in New York are all districts where congestion pricing is a big issue.”
The longer that congestion pricing is in place, the more New Yorkers will wonder how they survived without it. But the program also helps Hochul’s challengers seed resentment among residents of the outer boroughs and purplish suburbs who detest it, and may be willing to take their anger out on Democrats—an echo of the very scenario that prompted Hochul to pause the program last spring.
