We were a solid hundred at 60th Street and Lexington Avenue early this morning, greeting the turn of Saturday into Sunday to count down the start, finally, of congestion pricing in New York City. Ketcham was there. So were Naparstek, Orcutt, Sproule Love and Jacob W, among a dozen or two people I knew well enough to embrace. (More about them later.)
But mostly they were strangers. Guys who had journeyed in the sub-freezing cold from Bay Ridge, Cobble Hill, Alphabet City, Harlem and who knows where else to mark the moment when drivers, for the first time, began to be charged for a small portion of the costs they impose on the community.
That I didn’t know them individually was wonderful. Moved by the same beliefs that for decades had motivated me to work to bring congestion pricing to New York City — essentially, New York has too many cars, and charging them for the space they take up and the damages they cause is how we’ll reduce their numbers, not to mention create a robust funding source for modernizing transit — notified by word of mouth and a fragment on Twitter or Bluesky, their presence signified their participation in a movement that I had helped kindle and, in recent years, had helped steer as a blogger, journalist, mathematician and organizer.
That they were strangers meant that the movement had blossomed from a handful of economists and policy nerds. We had grown big enough to prevail over our national pro-motorist ideology that casts any restraint on driving as a betrayal while simultaneous marginalizing alternatives such as the bus, trains, subways, bikes, feet or sharing a ride with another — and for half-a-century had beaten back recurring attempts to charge a fee to drive into the Manhattan core.
It didn’t hit me then, but as I awoke later this morning, I thought of us as kin to the fictional baseball worshippers in W.P. Kinsella’s fantasy “The Thrill of the Grass,” who brought sod and wheelbarrows and turf-cutters into their city’s MLB stadium on the eve of the resumption of baseball games after a prolonged lockout and wordlessly pushed through rusted gates onto the field where they tore up the astroturf and replaced it with an entire ballfield’s worth of green grass. In Kinsella’s story, no notice had gone out, the devout fans had simply obeyed a shared urge that compelled them to come to their ballpark to restore its grandeur. Just so did we go last night to one of the gates to Manhattan’s new “congestion relief zone” in our common hope of making New York City grander, fairer, better and more prosperous.
As thrilled as I was that the MTA was cleared, finally, to “flip the switch,” as the Riders Alliance had demanded since Gov. Hochul’s infamous June 5 congestion pricing “pause,” I was at least as thrilled to be a congregant among fellow tolling adherents whom I’d never seen before. These weren’t official advocates or beat journalists, they were regular New Yorkers who shared my convictions about congestion pricing and whose advocacy had brought the program to life.
But there were also a handful or two who had been with me on my personal congestion pricing journey:
Aaron Naparstek, founding editor of Streetsblog, irrepressible creator of that indispensable news site that since 2006 has served as both beating heart and bulletin board of NYC’s livable-streets movement, and has given me a forum for column after column on congestion pricing — this one is #90! — to extol the policy’s virtues and dismantle countless cavils and kvetches.
Jon Orcutt, my compatriot at Transportation Alternatives back in the late 1980s and early ’90s when I was its (volunteer) president and recruited Jon as our first part-time staffer, soon executive director, and whom I later watched — impressed as hell but not surprised — as he became Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s senior policy director and engineered Mike Bloomberg’s bike-share system while helping to craft Sadik-Khan’s artful pushbacks against the haters of bike lanes, public plazas and other efforts to democratize the city’s streets. Jon was at my house on Friday and, with me and Chelsea S. and Eric C., painted signs, mostly thanking “drivers who pay,” that we handed out to the gang last night.
Sproule Love, longtime pal, fellow Harvard grad (25 years apart), committed cyclist and congestion pricing believer, fellow commiserator at the low points along the way, and vocal proponent of the long-sought protected bike lane on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem, where he lives with his family. The New York Times quoted Sproule to good effect in its Sunday coverage, identifying him holding one of Jon’s and my signs: “New Yorkers Love Drivers Who Pay.”
Jacob W., 22-year-old EMT and my cousin’s eldest kid, a free spirit who in 2022 created my short-lived GoodTrafficNYC website in which we hammered US DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg for delaying FHWA approval of congestion pricing. Jacob and his high-school classmate Ryan K., now a staffer at Boston’s transit agency, sandwiched their trip to 60th and Lex last night between a treacherous nine-mile hike in the Catskills yesterday afternoon and Jacob’s 7 a.m. EMT shift in New Paltz. Ah, youth!
And, finally, Christopher Ketcham, journalist and son of the late Brian Ketcham (May 19, 1939 – August 21, 2024), whom I eulogized here last summer, a largely forgotten congestion pricing hero despite his foundational work in John Lindsay’s mayoralty. But for Hochul’s June 5 “pause,” Brian would have lived to see the first fruit of his handiwork. Chris and I have been best buds for a quarter-century, collaborating on pieces for The Intercept and the Carbon Tax Center and together bemoaning the loss of the natural world while girding each other to still fight on. If in my later life I’ve grown as a writer, it’s thanks to Chris’s mentorship.
Last night, when Streetsblog editor Gersh Kuntzman put his phone on “record” and asked me to say what I was feeling, I blurted out something likening my elation to how I felt when, at age 25, I learned to ride a bicycle (April 28, 1973, to be exact). I said that becoming a city cyclist flipped my relationship to New York City, where I’d been living for five years, from oppression to mastery. Now, I told Kuntzman, I hoped that flipping on the congestion toll would jumpstart a parallel switch for millions of New Yorkers, resetting their fraught relationship to automobiles.
That sentiment was true enough. But what I really felt, even if I couldn’t put it into words, was gratitude to the hundred of my fellow New Yorkers who showed up last night in the bitter cold and on short notice, and to the thousands who brought this moment to reality.
Kinsella, the author, famously coined the mantra, “If you build it, they will come,” that undergirds his “Field of Dreams” novella (later made famous by Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones). Congestion pricing doesn’t quite build anything, which is what makes its advent on Sunday morning even more miraculous. It’s a silent, digital, fiscal rejiggering of the unequal, tendentious relationship of the car to the community. A big shift is afoot. Ours, now, to build on and keep.
Here's Streetsblog's video of the scene depicted in Komanoff's column:
