New York City's congestion pricing tolls are one historic step closer to reality, again, after Monday's 12-1 MTA board vote in favor of the state's proposed pricing structure for the program — with only a tight window to finish a federal reevaluation standing in the way of starting the toll on Jan. 5.
Monday's vote was the second-ever time the MTA Board authorized a congestion pricing tolling schedule. The first vote, which passed 11-1, took place in March of this year.
The MTA needs to start to toll before newly-elected congestion pricing foe Donald Trump runs the federal government again and revokes federal approval for the toll.
The MTA also technically still needs to prevail in court, where a New Jersey judge has yet to rule on whether he will kick the environmental assessment back to the MTA for more required work. Three suits from other opponents of the law were knocked down by a judge in the Southern District of New York, but the plaintiffs are carrying on with their effort to stop the toll.
Whatever the future holds, the board put a historic cap, for a second time, on a half century plus five months of attempts to tame lower Manhattan's awful traffic with tolls on auto trips — paving the way for the MTA to charge $9 to drive into the Central Business District below 60th Street between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays, and between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekends.
After 9 p.m., the toll will cost just $2.25, less than the subway or bus fare. State law requires the MTA to raise enough money from the new toll in order to borrow $15 billion for its current five-year capital plan.
As they did in March, board members who voted in favor voiced strong approval of the plan, which took an astounding five years to get to this point after the State Legislature and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo authorized it in the 2019 budget. MTA Deputy Chief for External Relations Juliette Michelson gave Monday's proceedings an air of exhaustion by noting that the agency was voting on the toll all over again after doing so in the spring.
"We are five and a half years after the law was passed, almost four years into a difficult environmental review period, eight months since a final toll structure was approved in March," she said before introducing the resolution authorizing the new toll structure.
The push for pricing dates back even further — making Monday's vote the second culmination of a debate that began back during the administration of Mayor John Lindsay, who talked about tolling the East River Bridges in 1973.
"This has not been an easy journey, but nothing is more powerful than idea whose time has come," said Midori Valdivia, an appointee of Mayor Adams, when the toll was authorized in March.
Valdivia's remark was perhaps the understatement of the decade, until Monday's vote when one board member noted that he was supporting the program with a vote for the third time in less than a year.
"This is the third time we've voted on this," said Neal Zuckerman, who represents Putnam County. "I hope this is the last time I have to make this speech."
How did we get here?
Lindsay's early plan came extremely close to happening before it was kiboshed by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman in 1977, courtesy of an amendment to the federal Clean Air Act — though that first quashing at least came with money to help repair the city's ailing transit system.
Later transportation leaders made attempts to get mayors to embrace the idea. Former City Traffic Commissioner "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz tried to get Mayor Ed Koch to toll the East River Bridges — which to this day remain free to cross — but the plan was hounded out of town. Even under Mayor David Dinkins, adviser Janette Sadik-Khan, who later served as Transportation Commissioner under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, pitched the same tolls only to see the idea dismissed by more powerful political leaders in the city.
Bloomberg didn't immediately back the concept of congestion pricing when he took office in 2002. But the three-term mayor has been closely linked to the policy ever since he proposed congestion pricing in 2007. Transit advocates happily backed Bloomberg on the idea — even pitching him on ways he could bring on reluctant outer borough legislators. The proposal still died that year before even coming up for a vote in Albany.
Advocates for the plan never gave up. By 2015, pricing backers in the Move NY Coalition were shopping a plan that would establish a lower Manhattan toll in exchange for reduced tolls on city bridges that didn't connect directly to lower Manhattan. (Elements of that philosophy live on in the State Legislature's use of some anti-congestion fees to fund bridge toll rebates to Bronx, Staten Island and Queens residents.)
But congestion pricing was finally revived in earnest in 2018 by Cuomo — who joined with transit advocates eager to fight traffic and raise money for a strained transit system to actually get the proposal through in 2019.
Cuomo has since run away from the program — one of his chief accomplishments as governor. In March, Norman Brown, a longtime MTA Board member representing Metro-North workers, lamented the disgraced ex-governor's flip-flop — while predicting Cuomo would someday brag about his role making the toll a reality.
"I have a black belt in cynicism and I wanted to thank ex-Gov. Cuomo at some point for pushing this through," Brown said at the time. "In the short term, his support has gone the other way, but I'm hoping that five years from now, Andrew Cuomo is bragging, 'I put this thing in, I drove a stake in heart of congestion in Midtown Manhattan.'"
The 2019 legislative go-ahead for congestion pricing faced significant headwinds from outside forces. The MTA needed to get federal approval from the federal Department of Transportation — run by vindictive then-President Donald Trump, whose DOT left the tolls in a bureaucratic purgatory for a year by refusing to even tell the MTA which type of environmental review was required to win federal approval.
After Trump (eventually) yielded the White House to Joe Biden, the DOT allowed the MTA to do an environmental assessment, the simpler of the two options. Yet even that study took well over a year to finish — and required the MTA to simulate traffic impacts as far away as the Philadelphia suburbs.
The agency finally won federal approval last summer when the Federal Highway Administration gave its assessment a seal of approval with a "Finding of No Significant Impact." The determination meant the toll's potential effects didn't cross any federal thresholds for negative impacts to things like air quality, traffic or the economy.
Throughout the process, as opponents have sought to characterize the toll as punishment and burden for everyday New Yorkers, transit advocacy organizations whipped support. The MTA's most recent round of public hearings on the toll saw congestion pricing supporters outnumber opponents by an almost 2:1 margin.
In March, one of those advocacy organizations, Riders Alliance, celebrated the vote with a tweet calling congestion pricing "a monumental shift that will be felt by millions of New Yorkers."
Eight months ago Board members themselves also stated the plain fact that New York's working poor rely on the public transit system — not cars — to get to lower Manhattan.
"My organization, the Community Service Society, has been fighting for the needs of the working poor 180 years," said David Jones, a city representative on the MTA Board. "We did two reports, in 2017 and 2022, finding that less than 2 percent of the working poor used cars to get into the Central Business District. That's 5,000 people. This plan is vital for working people, whether they're home attendants, working in hospitals, cleaners, to get to work, and they're the important citizens of New York City."
What happened after that
The MTA was set to begin collecting tolls on June 30. Then on June 5, Gov. Hochul released a 10-minute pre-recorded video in which she said she was "pausing" congestion pricing in which she undercut all of her previous support for congestion pricing. The gridlock governor decided that actually the toll was bad for the economy and bad for working people, and she had to stand up for the little guy who just so happened to be voting in some big Congressional elections in November.
Hochul attempted to put the toll to sleep forever with a half-baked plan to send state money to the MTA, but a legislative revolt in the capital destroyed the plan before it ever saw the light of day. The governor hid from the media for two days, finally took questions after the legislative session ended, and explained that she paused congestion pricing because people at diners asked her to.
From that point on, the governor subjected New Yorkers and transit riders to six months of uncertainty and increasingly grim headlines about the impacts of the pause. The MTA put $16 billion of capital work on the shelf and the MTA Board voted to accept Hochul's pause even though losing congestion pricing threatened to add one billion dollars onto future MTA deficits.
The agency also revealed a new capital plan that's starting in 2025, and all discussion about it was haunted by the missing $15 billion from congestion pricing. Hochul, who had taken to describing her gubernatorial powers like Louis XIV, also added to the uncertainty by refusing to say whether she supported the plan. The governor also made vague allusions to big plans to replace the money and the congestion relief that congestion pricing was supposed to bring, but never shared what those big plans were. In the city, bus speeds crashed to pre-pandemic lows and morale at the MTA took a nosedive as well.
Congestion pricing advocates also launched a pair of legal broadsides at Hochul with two lawsuits arguing she didn't have a legal right to pause congestion pricing and that by doing so she also violated state environmental laws. Hochul's lawyer eventually admitted in court that her own transportation secretary found out about the congestion pricing pause through Hochul's June 5 video, which a judge found so outrageous he refused to grant the governor's request to dismiss the case.
Hochul's poll numbers never shot up thanks to the pause, and whatever electoral advantage she was seeking for Democrats didn't materialize in swing district Congressional races. The governor also showed off some rare political ability, managing to draw a sharp rebuke from Families for Safe Streets immediately after signing a bill to expand the red light camera program, because she also used the press conference to downplay congestion pricing's safety benefits.
And then suddenly, after Trump won the presidential election, Hochul made the determination to bring back congestion pricing at a reduced toll, which she celebrated at a delusional and self-congratulatory press conference.
The MTA has plans to turn on the toll cameras on January 5. But Monday's vote doesn't end the process leading up to flipping the switch. Per the terms of federal approval, federal officials will have to reevaluate the tolling structure now that it's been approved by the MTA Board to make sure the traffic and air quality impacts don't fall outside what was approved in the EA.
'We'll see you in court'
The anti-toll lawsuits don't aim to overturn the law that established congestion pricing, but rather to kick the can down the road by requiring the MTA perform an environmental impact statement, a more in-depth study of the impacts of the toll. There's also no telling how many more lawsuits will be filed between now and Jan. 5.
In March, MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber expressed confidence that the MTA would prevail, referring to reams of data the MTA assembled for its environmental assessment, which experts have compared in depth and breadth to typically more thorough environmental impact statements.
"We did this 4,000-page environmental assessment, a scale of an environmental review process that had never been completed before to my knowledge — not just the the number of pages, but the modeling and the analysis, studying every intersection almost all the way to Philadelphia, and doing a public outreach process that had more than 50 public meetings and 25,000 comments in the last hearing phase," said Lieber.
"Under federal environmental law, an undertaking of that scale is fully compliant and more than exceeds the standards for a proper federal environmental review. And we're confident that we're going in the right direction."
Eight months later, in November, Lieber remained confident that the MTA would prevail in the New Jersey lawsuit.
"The decision that has been issued was very clear. The MTA and the federal agencies who were defendants in the lawsuit in New York State, won an across the board victory. Judge Liman in the Southern District of New York said the MTA and the feds did everything by the book. So we're anticipating that Judge [Leo] Gordon will be looking at some of the same issues, and we're optimistic that he's going to look at it the same way," he said.
Still, one of the city's most preeminent congestion pricing advocates will be holding his breath until Jan. 5.
"I doubt if I’ll be popping the champagne on Jan. 5," said Schwartz. "Something always thwarts congestion pricing!"
