North America’s biggest transit system is out $1 billion per year after New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul suspended New York City’s congestion pricing plan just weeks before it was due to take effect, in what the New York Times calls a “stunning 11th-hour shift”.
“After careful consideration I have come to the difficult decision that implementing the planned congestion pricing system risks too many unintended consequences,” Hochul said June 5. “I have directed the MTA [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] to indefinitely pause the program.”
Heatmap News calls the decision “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States” and “one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.”
The congestion pricing plan, which was due to take effect June 30, would have charged drivers up to US$15 to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street, the New York Times writes.
“The governor is concerned about the economic recovery in Manhattan and the cost of living,” a Hochul spokesperson told media. “New Yorkers are struggling. It’s not the right time to do it.”
But Third Act co-founder Bill McKibben decried the decision as “one of the most aggressive anti-environmental actions ever undertaken by a Democratic governor.”
In a post headlined “Kathy Hochul’s Climate Betrayal,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer says rolling back New York’s congestion pricing plan does more damage than other recent, high-profile national decisions in the U.S., like the intensely controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Willow oil megaproject in Alaska.
“There is nothing good to be said for this decision. It is bad politics, bad economics, bad governance, and bad for the climate,” Meyer writes. “It is so bad because it will set back the development of climate-friendly cities and rapid transit infrastructure in the United States for years if not decades. And it will deter other American cities from implementing the kind of time-saving, pollution-averting, anti-gridlock measure that the country desperately needs.”
Bloomberg News says the decision will have MTA riders, who make more than two billion trips on the system per year, bracing for subway “hell”, as the lost toll revenue puts badly-needed repairs at risk by deepening a $51.5-billion hole in the transit agency’s multi-year capital plan. MTA was already hunting for $25 billion in new state and city revenue between 2025 and 2029, the news agency says.
“New York City’s transit network is at a turning point,” Bloomberg writes. “It needs billions of dollars to rehabilitate rail lines and signalling systems, and fortify stations and tracks from heavy rainfalls and flooding. That work, along with expansion projects and adding more elevators to stations, could bring more riders back and help boost the MTA’s farebox revenue collections.”
“We have paralyzing levels of traffic in midtown and downtown—slowing emergency response times, harming our climate fight,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said on social media. “We have desperate funding needs in our subways—stations in need of renovations, outdated signaling, etc. How are we going to fix these things now??”
“All sectors should contribute to improving transit, including drivers,” said Andrew Rein, president of the independent Citizens Budget Commission. “Furthermore, it is a regional system that underpins the state’s economic engine. Sharing the cost of investment is the best strategy for the environment and the economy.”
By pausing a congestion trial before it even began in “America’s biggest, densest, and most transit-friendly city,” Hochul “has essentially frozen our ability to experiment with congestion pricing anywhere else in the country,” Heatmap’s Meyer adds. “ By shuttering the policy in New York, she has poisoned pro-climate urban politics everywhere. Now people will say: You saw what happened when New York tried to do congestion pricing. Do you really want to try that here?”
That’s a problem in no small part because “New York was bushwhacking a trail for everyone else to follow: If congestion policy was a success there, then other American cities could experiment with it in some form.”
Smart Cities Dive says the Riders Alliance transit advocacy group was calling on members to assemble outside Hochul’s Manhattan office, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) stepped up behind them. “It’s evident that congestion pricing will significantly benefit the vast majority of commuters who rely on the MTA, rather than a small, vocal minority of drivers who don’t qualify for exemptions or discounts,” he said on social media.
But New York taxi drivers objected to the $1.25 surcharge their passengers would have paid on trips from or within the congestion pricing zone. “We need to address congestion in the Central Business District, but another surcharge on struggling yellow taxi drivers was never the right solution,” said New York Taxi Workers Alliance Executive Director Bhairavi Desai told Smart Cities Dive in an email. “We should be taxing the rich, not the poor to pay for the MTA’s budget shortfalls.”
New Jersey Democrats also weighed in in favour of Hochul’s decision.
Heatmap has more on how Hochul made the decision and why Meyer sees it as bad politics.
