Personal Lens for Congestion Pricing
Terry H. Schwadron
Jan. 10, 2025
New York City’s controversial congestion pricing program launched this week, but, so far, it is both hard to measure and its fate beyond this month remains uncertain.
Post-holiday traffic may not be the best gauge for any immediate effects, but it was still slow-going on Manhattan streets below 60th Street and the only reported problem of note was that the E-Z Pass system website was flooded by new registrants seeking to avoid surcharges on driving into New York City for yet higher fees they might get in the mail. Authorities have yet to calculate the effects, but tunnel traffic into Manhattan was moving more freely and anecdotally, daytime speed on downtown streets remained at about 12 miles per hour, and evening traffic was down.
The idea of the program is to dilute traffic, possibly reducing some air pollutants, and routing collected fees into mass transit improvements. Such idealistic goals, however, come at the literal cost of out-of-borough residents who must pay up to go to work in Manhattan, shop, take in a show, or see a downtown guy about a deal.
The only immediate practical effect, however, was pollution of the air waves with the sudden cacophony of opinion — few of which will change the outcome of a highly political obstacle course that led us to this point. If anything, the public display that it is next to impossible to get agreement on policy — no matter how well-intended or high-minded — whose only benefit might be for others at the cost of self.
The congestion pricing program may have been sold as part of an environmental solution, but it’s been received as an unfair tax, unevenly distributed by the very liberals who normally insist on more progressive means of raising public money. It is a user tax — and hitting commuters who already are paying for bridges and tunnels and for parking.
The question of whether the program could be a model for other cities is almost hard to find among the personal complaints about what Change might cost for Me. In the same week we line up to salute Jimmy Carter for a life of public service, we are reminded that the prime directive of current politics is about Me and mine.
Lots of Skepticism
Much like a traffic jam marked by constant starts and stops, this program is a lightning rod for criticism that likely could culminate in a promised presidential decision from an incoming Donald Trump. He wants to interfere to just stop it while it is still, um, revving up.
It’s not clear exactly what Trump would do. All we know is that if liberals are for it, he’s against it. Just because London and Singapore think these programs work, they don’t know that Trump Tower is just below the fee’s boundary. Trump, who thinks being president also makes him the guy in charge of New York City, believes it’s a bad look for the city that will get in the way of business. Of course, the last time Trump took the subway was, well, never. That’s what limos are for, and now presidential motorcades.
Apparently, Trump might be able to overrule the million previous federal approvals for the project, or he might use a ruse like demanding additional environmental reviews — something he has opposed for his own and most developers’ projects — or simply re-assign the money for the project to mass deportations and await a court challenge. But it did make his lengthy Day One promise list to kill off congestion pricing.
Complaints are arising from the city police, firefighter and emergency technician corps who must drive in to assigned stations in central Manhattan from outer boroughs, from truckers whose hours will be massively shifted to off-peak hours to lower costs, to anyone from New Jersey who finds nitpicking easier than taking the bus or commuter rail across the river.
Advocates for improved mass transit note that the city and state have yet to come up with alternative tax programs that will allow for constant upgrade of an aging subway system that still manages to whisk three million people a day to and from work, doctors’ appointments, dance concerts and a walk through the Lower East Side.
Me First
The love affair with the individual car and its ever-honking horn is stronger than any public interest in damping pollution and noise, and in making it possible for traffic, including buses and emergency vehicles, to move reliably and efficiently through streets where double parking remains popular, and garbage removal is an Olympic-worthy event.
Until now, it’s been easier to brave the traffic than to brave the subway, where scary stories about the increase of isolated acts of anti-social behavior or even violence have yet to crack a statistical norm. Yes, an increase from three deaths in a year to 11 is bad, but the chances of it being you among the millions of daily riders have not changed.
We’re hearing about the guy who is parking just a block above the line, paying an extra $4 for his stay to avoid the $9 charge for crossing 60th Street, and from the firefighter who warns that mass transit might not get him to work in time to answer your emergency call effectively. We’re hearing a lot about how Government at all levels is not doing anything to help rising costs that plague us all. My subway card costs more this year too.
From afar, it’s proving to be an interesting social balancing experiment — air pollution and traffic dilution against resistance to personal fees. Or put another way, this is about policy interests that benefit many, but that set a personal price for abridging them. You can do this through taxes, which we all want to cut, or through user fees, like charging admission at national parks.
We once said we cared about public education, about opening access to libraries and parks, about adding medical and public safety services, about meat and agricultural inspections, about expanding veterans’ services. Now our public conversation is laden with magic formulas to cut Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, to privatize prisons and national parks, and with assurances from our leaders that it is perfectly feasible to eliminate a third of our government or shut it altogether.
We want it all, we just don’t want to pay for it apparently.
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