Hochul Drops Broad Hints that Congestion Pricing Could Make Comeback Later this Year

Congestion pricing lives.

Governor Hochul announced an “indefinite pause” last June, blindsiding the MTA as it was about to put the tolls into effect to raise billions for construction and deter motorists from driving into Manhattan below 60th street.

But now Hochul is recalibrating. What she had announced as indefinite she now characterizes as a “temporary pause.” She said she is discussing “options” and hopes to have a new plan by the end of the year “because the legislature has to act on it.”

The key issue for her appears to be how much motorists pay to drive into the congestion zone and, related, who gets exempted. “Fifteen dollars was too much,” Hochul said during the Democratic convention, explaining her thinking at the time she blocked the plan. In London, which has had congestion pricing for twenty-one years, “they started at five pounds and worked their way up,” Hochul noted. Five pounds in 2003, adjusted for inflation and converted into dollars would be $11.42 today.

Hochul did not offer her own thought on a fair price, a subject an MTA mobility committee spent months pondering. The committee decided on a simple system with one clear price for prime hours and very few exemptions. But Hochul seems to have reopened the whole discussion. The New York Post said she was considering exempting cops, firefighters and other public employees, whose unions had strongly protested the MTA’s original plan.

A proponent of congestion pricing, State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, said he did not believe a new law would be needed.“There is a law in place!” Said Hoylman-Sigal, whose District starts on the Upper West Side north of the pricing zone and runs straight into it down to Greenwich Village, “There’s a good chance the law won’t need to be changed, since when passing congestion pricing as part of the 2019 budget the State Legislature outsourced the amount of the charge to the Traffic Review Mobility Board (TRMB). Presumably, the TRMB would have to meet again to consider any changes and exemptions to the current $15 charge.”

The law did set an overall goal for revenue of $1 billion to support the MTA which could then borrow over $15 billion more. It was not clear yet whether Hochul was planning to lower that goal, and if so if she would supplement the expected revenue from other state coffers.

“No members of the legislature have been consulted yet on any of the specifics of the Governor’s plan, to my knowledge,” Hoylman Sigal said, “although shortly after the Governor announced the pause, I met with her privately to discuss my concerns–especially how difficult it will be for Albany to come up with $16.5 billion to make up the shortfall in revenue for the MTA.”

Hoylman-Sigal said he was “firmly in the ‘mend it, don’t end it camp” concerning the future of congestion pricing.“ If the charge needs to be lowered to make congestion pricing more palatable by reducing the sticker shock in the short run, by all means, let’s do it,” he said. “We shouldn’t sacrifice the overall goals of the program– cleaner air, better transit, safer streets, faster travel times for business and commuters, and reducing emissions — by quibbling over the amount of the charge.”

Going back to the legislature would give opponents, both Republicans and suburban Democrats, a major opportunity to derail the plan, which would be the first congestion pricing system in the United States.

“There has already been so much time and resources devoted to getting congestionpricing off the ground– a decade of studies, dozens of public meetings, sustained advocacy by transit and climate groups, over $500 million in sunk costs for cameras, federal approvals, and a very tough vote that Albany has already taken,” Hoylman-Sigal said. “To re-litigate the pluses and minuses of congestion pricing seems a bit like Groundhog Day to me.”

In the meantime, New Jersey is pressing forward with its federal lawsuit asking that the congestion pricing plan be blocked on grounds that a better environmental impact statement was needed. Both New York State and the MTA have rejected the claim. New Jersey, led by New York attorney Randy Mastro, has said that it still wants the judge to rule, despite the pause. The MTA referred all questions to Hochul.

Other transit experts, however, said the pause could have a silver lining if officials use this moment to strengthen the case for congestion pricing. Most of the debate, for example, has focused on how desperately the MTA needs the toll revenue to borrow against to fund its capital plans. That’s true. But cutting traffic congestion in the most congested place in the United States is a crucial goal, too. Robert Paaswell, a City College engineering professor and former head of the Chicago Transit Authority, notes that commerce grew dramatically in London’s core as congestion declined as a result of the tolls.

“Why is it all about MTA funding and not (as was so pronounced in London) improved access to the core with increased economic activity,” Paaswell asked. Paaswell and the Transport Workers Union were also among those who urged the MTA to do everything it could to improve service before the pricing system took effect, as an incentive to commuters to switch from their cars. That turned out to be a difficult challenge for a crumbling system that needed the congestion tolls to make exactly the improvements that would encourage the switch to mass transit.

Paaswell urged the state to do more basic customer research to better understand the behavior of commuters and what would or would not encourage them to switch from their cars. By reopening the discussion of congestion pricing before the November election, Hochul does seem to have undercut the accusation that she blocked the plan last June to increase the chances of Democrats running for the House of Representatives in four suburban swing districts around New York City.

The Democrats lost those districts in 2022 and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker Emerita, has blamed Hochul, who openly acknowledges that she gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night thinking how to win back those seats and put Democrats back in charge in The House. Indeed, at the time she reversed congestion pricing there seemed a high possibility that Joe Biden would lose to Donald Trump, the Republicans would take back the Senate and The House would be the only Democratic redoubt in Washington, if they could recover it.

Given that, there were certainly those who would have sided with Hochul that capturing the House was an even more urgent goal than reducing traffic in Manhattan. But she denied then, and denied again the other day, that this was any part of her motive. The delay, however, may have created another political challenge. Donald Trump has vowed to block congestion pricing if he is returned to office. He stalled it for several years when he was last in the White House, so his threat is credible. Which makes Hochul’s vow to elect Kamala Harris a key piece of her apparently revived commitment to imposing congestion pricing.