She can't back out this time.
The Hochul administration on Friday signed — finally — an agreement with the federal government authorizing congestion pricing, ending a nearly six-month holdout and finally clearing the way for the first central business district toll in America.
Following Gov. Hochul's announcement last week that the congestion pricing toll would begin at $9 and rise to $15 by 2031, the Federal Highway Administration took another look at the program to ensure it didn't alter the environmental assessment that the agency approved last June.
"FHWA concludes that the Re-Evaluation 2 confirms that the phase-in of the adopted toll structure and impacts associated with it was analyzed and mitigated accordingly," the feds wrote in a letter to New York State, New York City and the MTA. "Thus, FHWA finds that no additional environmental analysis is warranted. The conclusions in the Final Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact remains valid."
Famously, the MTA was supposed to start a $15 toll on June 30, but Hochul "paused" the implementation. Now that the gridlock governor has shed her nickname, the FHWA found that the toll, with its phased-in price increases, will still accomplish the goals congestion pricing has to accomplish, albeit at a slightly slower pace.
According to the new FHWA re-evaluation, from 2025 to 2027, when the peak $9 toll is in place, there will be a 6.4-percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled in the CBD, and a 13.4-percent reduction in vehicles entering the zone.
Those reductions will rise to a 7.6-percent drop in VMTs and 15.5-percent reduction in vehicles when the toll is $12 (between 2028 and 2030). And when the toll rises to $15 in 2031, the traffic reduction will be the same as the FHWA found this June, an 8.9-percent reduction in VMT and a 17.3-percent drop in vehicles.
The $9 toll will raise $0.5 billion, the $12 toll will raise $0.7 billion and the $15 toll will raise $0.9 billion, as was also previously estimated in June. The $9 toll will raise only about half the revenue of the $15 toll, but the federal government signed off because the MTA made the case that the steady stream of revenue will still fund the $15 billion in bonds it will issue for the 2020-2024 capital plan. According to the MTA, even a phased-in toll would keep the agency on the same timeline for those projects.
And the feds agreed.
"MTA’s CFO has determined that the expected revenues to be collected under the 'Phase-In Approach' would still achieve the objective of funding $15 billion in capital projects," the FHWA wrote.
The re-evaluation and the actual signature on federal government's Value Pricing Pilot Program agreement are the final pieces of federal involvement in the congestion pricing saga. Hochul's refusal to sign the VPPP was the subject of two lawsuits and much opprobrium, but the documents issued on Friday mark another big movement on the historic road to actually instituting congestion pricing.
"Today is the moment we've been waiting for, when we cleared the final bureaucratic hurdle to implement congestion pricing," said MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber at a press conference on Friday.
Lieber chose to look forward rather than backwards at the strange contortions the MTA had to do to make it to this moment.
"I hope New Yorkers, whatever their opinion, can recognize that this is a significant moment when we are saying that we can do things to address the big challenges that we as a city and as a region face. Congestion pricing says that we're not just going to keep putting our head in the sand about the impact of congestion. We're not going to pretend that we don't have a limited amount of room on our streets, that we're going to do something about the problems that congestion is creating, and with it, improve our transit," he said.
Advocates for congestion pricing also chose to look forward, noting that the toll could improve the lives of commuters from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and even Pennsylvania.
"While a relative few pay a new toll, 20 million Americans in four states will save time, money, and aggravation," said Riders Alliance Executive Director Betsy Plum. "Once it starts, congestion pricing will again demonstrate that, together, we can address our common challenges and improve people's lives."
There are of course still legal hurdles for the MTA to clear before congestion pricing can begin, for real this time, on Jan. 5. The MTA and New Jersey are still waiting on a ruling from Judge Leo Gordon on the Garden State's effort to toss out the congestion pricing environmental assessment in favor of a time-consuming full environmental impact statement.
In New York, there will be a hearing on Dec. 20 on a request for a restraining order blocking the implementation of the toll, along with a hearing on whether any aspects of congestion pricing violate the Constitution — the U.S. one, that is. (Case law has clearly established that tolls are constitutional.)
Lieber said he was confident that the MTA would prevail in court, where the agency won a significant victory earlier this year in which Judge Lewis Liman determined that the scaled-down environmental assessment for congestion pricing was kosher.
"We're comfortable that we followed all the rules," Lieber said. "You look at Judge Liman's opinion about the environmental assessment process, that's four year, 4,000-page study that we did. He gave us a clean bill of health on what we had done. But obviously there's other litigation, and we're confident, but they'll have to run their course as well."
