Congestion Pricing Fans Rally for Continued Tolling, Against Trump Threats to MTA Money

A small contingent of congestion-pricing supporters, led by City Comptroller Brad Lander and Congressman Jerry Nadler, gathered in a nook of Municipal Hall Plaza on March 20 to express their continued support of the controversial revenue-raising plan whose existence is being threatened by President Trump.

At the time the rally was held, 10 a.m., New York State faced a March 21 deadline to turn off congestion pricing, a threat that Gov. Kathy Hochul promised to defy.

Later in the day, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy issued a threatening 30-day “reprieve” to Hochul, after which the feds will move to shut congestion pricing down, just as the governor herself did when she “paused” the program weeks before its start in June 2024—only to restart it, election day in the rear window, that December. And just before the March 21 deadline to shut down the tolling system, the feds blinked and extended it for 30 more days.

Exactly what deals are being mooted or are even possible between the Trump administration and Hochul are unknown. Similarly, the legal outlook on congestion pricing’s future remains cloudy, though thus far the state has prevailed.

So, if little new ground was covered by that morning’s speakers, their wheel-spinning wasn’t without value. Brad Lander made a surprise Pablo Neruda reference celebrating spring, and there was ample to take in on the ground where the event was held, which was the southeastern section of the Plaza, adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge exit ramps to Park Row and Centre Street that carry toll-paying cars—no exceptions!—into Manhattan.

There are fresh spring plantings here, benches for sitting, and stone tables with chessboard designs to climb upon and better survey the crowd, which numbered only around four dozen, press and participants included.

For those who don’t know Municipal Hall, this section of the plaza also features a Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall subway station entrance and two large octagonal-shaped kiosks that were home to various food and beverage purveyors in the 2010s.

The failure of anyone present to acknowledge these two abandoned kiosks as having some at least symbolic meaning—why aren’t they open?—is reflective of an event that was a de facto campaign stop for Lander, the struggling mayoral candidate, and a platform for two vociferous congestion proponents, Transportation Alternatives (TA) and the Rider’s Alliance.

While the latter group maintains a focused pro-mass transit stance, TA’s mission is broader and more controversial. Indeed, despite some of its members wearing short-billed TA bicycle caps at the rally, many bicyclists themselves don’t consider the group allies at all.

Rather, with their strident vilification of cars, their promotion of myriad motorized “micromobility” vehicles (scooters, e-bikes, etc.), along with their consistent opposition to proposals about more strictly regulating such vehicles, TA has earned the enmity of many pedal bicyclists and pedestrians alike.

That Brad Lander would align himself with TA is unsurprising. TA is an energetic, well-organized lobbying group with whom he has some common cause, and Lander, a would-be moderate trying to shed his past Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) -leaning skin, needs allies, even if TA’s broader agenda is anything but moderate.

It’s telling that nobody at today’s rally mentioned one of congestion pricing’s great boosters, former “progressive” governor turned recent moderate mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo—just as it’s also telling that none of today’s speakers mentioned the diverse opponents of congestion pricing.

Though they present the issue as NYC versus “the suburbs” or “Jersey” or “Trump,” congestion pricing has also been opposed by labor groups (United Federation of Teachers, FDNY unions) and Chinatown and Lower East Side community activists, including Youth Against Displacement and Council Member Christopher Marte, who view congestion pricing as both a regressive tax on small business and an engine for future displacement.

Whoever may prove right or wrong, congestion pricing supporters’ willful suppression of diverse opposition voices doesn’t bolster one’s faith in either its advocates or the MTA.

Ironically, this skepticism toward the MTA was highlighted by two recent news stories.

First came the news—in a story broken in print by Straus News’ own Keith J. Kelly— that the MTA had replaced a venerable wooden bench in the West 4th Street subway station with an experimental metal rail called a “lean bench.”

While the “lean bench” has since been widely derided as an insult to tired fare payers and their children especially, it’s still there—just one of many erstwhile “upgrades” congestion pricing is meant to pay for.

The second incident concerns the ongoing kerfuffle over subway crime statistics. Even Congressman Nadler, the congestion pricing rally’s most substantive figure, cited “statistics” saying crime is down as a reason to reject any federal meddling with congestion pricing.

Unfortunately, this call to “statistics” was undercut by a New York Post from a day earlier about an NYPD captain in Queens who had just been removed from his position for faking statistics in Transit District 20.

Though NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch reportedly took the allegations seriously—thus the captain’s swift transfer—frequent subway riders could hardly be surprised.