United States Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is pivoting to video in his illegal attempt to kill congestion pricing.
Days after Streetsblog's expertly deployed facts for a video to correct Duffy's misrepresentations of the toll, the secretary's team used government resources to make its own video — doubling down on the Trump administration's mistaken view that the toll is ineffective and a "cash grab" from "hard-working New Yorkers."
Duffy's tweet of the video claimed that New Yorkers are "pissed off" by the $9 toll to drive into lower Manhattan, but the actual 26-second clip features just five low-energy men telling the camera (which Duffy's producer apparently forgot to clean off) that the toll is "very bad for business" and even "destroying the city." (It's not clear what these men do for a living or if they even pay the toll to get to work. Nor are the men identified, so it's not even clear that they don't work for Duffy.)
DOT's grievance video marked a strange move in the eyes of one career federal worker.
"It is highly unusual for a secretary to publicly lobby against a transportation project, much less one that has already been approved," said one Federal Highway Administration bureaucrat not authorized to speak to the media. "My impression of Duffy so far, however, is essentially that he still is performing for a Fox audience."
A former U.S. DOT official who worked on the previous administration's comms team agreed with that diagnosis of the video's critique of state-level policy.
"In general, the role of U.S. DOT has been to provide very broad policy guidance to states and funding for state transportation projects," the former official said.
"The Department generally avoids wading into the specific policies of city or even state governments. Traditionally, this is seen as giving latitude to local decision makers and their constituents to govern themselves without unelected D.C.-based officials being overly prescriptive."
It's also worth noting that the U.S. DOT approved congestion pricing under its Value Pricing Pilot Program late last year. So, in one sense, the video is a self-own.
It's easy to refute the idea that the toll has undermined business or "destroyed" the city since it launched on Jan. 5:
- The MTA said that retail sales are up $900 million compared to the same period last year.
- Restaurant reservations and foot traffic were all higher in January 2025 in lower Manhattan than they were last January — even during a bitterly cold winter.
- Broadway is making more money compared to the same period last year
- And the reduction in crashes south of 60th Street means less money and time gets lost to injuries, deaths and damaged vehicles and structure.
Polling has also shown that the toll is most popular with the people who are, in Duffy's parlance, "pissed off" the most. Some 66 percent of people who regularly drive into lower Manhattan support congestion pricing, according to a recent poll; just 32 percent of those regular drivers opposed it, the toll found.
Nonetheless, Duffy has ordered the MTA to stop charging congestion pricing tolls by March 21 — an illegal move according to Gov. Hochul and the MTA, since his own agency approved congestion pricing under President Biden and said it would reduce congestion, improve air quality, and boost transit.
But President Trump has long argued that the toll will kill New York's economy because fewer people will drive into Manhattan — another easily debunked claim.
"There's a lot of grandstanding in this discourse on congestion pricing and small business," said Ryan Frank, who owns a woodworking studio in Sunset Park and has made work-related trips to lower Manhattan since congestion pricing started. "A fact that I think is missed is that if you're running a business, if I save 20-minutes not waiting in traffic the toll is well worth it for me."
On the plus side, the grainy, out-of-focus video probably didn't gobble up too many taxpayer resources, according to Doug Gordon, a longtime television producer who moonlights as a host of the "War on Cars" podcast.
"It looks pretty cheap to me: one guy with an iPhone camera wandering two blocks in Midtown and an hour or less editing in something as basic as iMovie," said Gordon.
"They definitely didn't spend the $200,000 Kristi Noem spent on her 'We will hunt you down' video," he said. "Not that I'd take money from this administration, but I'd probably charge $10,000 or less to do something like this — and even that would be highway robbery."
As of press time, the video tweeted by a federal cabinet official had fewer views (93,000) than the Streetsblog video contradicting the same cabinet official's misleading argument against the toll (151,000).
