Even in the rich and varied annals of New York fecklessness, Governor Kathy Hochul’s last-minute decision to block congestion pricing wins a prize for doing harm by doing nothing. New York City should lead the world in urban transformation, as it did when it created a central water-supply system in the 1840s, mapped out an expanding grid of streets, built the subways, fast-tracked the technology of high-rise construction, developed a legal framework to control it, and enshrined historic preservation in law. Congestion pricing should have marked one of those moments when the city acted wisely to shape its own looming future — to start finally liberating itself from a century of obeisance to the internal combustion engine. Instead, it’s given craven politicians one more irresistible chance to blow it.
Like many imperfect but necessary innovations, congestion pricing doesn’t poll well. But it’s a crucial tool that ultimately benefits everyone by making city streets more navigable and safer, while also making it easier both for those who do drive and the non-driving masses to get around.
It’s tempting to shrug in defeat and toss congestion pricing into the immense basket of ideas — good, bad, and who knows — that belong to a coulda-been New York. Westway, Television City, the Governors Island Airport, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the West Side stadium, even follies like the Staten Island Ferris wheel — every never-built has champions who scream that defeating them would doom or diminish the city. But congestion pricing is different, because it is the rare opportunity to unstitch more than 100 years’ worth of vast policy error.
At the turn of the 20th century, New York was the center of American auto culture. Electric-car companies continually brought out luxurious new models. In 1896, Henry H. Bliss stepped off a trolley on the Upper West Side to become the first American to be killed by a car. The father of traffic laws, William Phelps Eno, redesigned Columbus Circle for automobiles. He invented the rotary circle, the stop sign, and the one-way street, and city workers soon began tearing up sidewalks for new traffic lanes. The adoption of this new consumer technology was radical, rapid, popular, and transformative — and, it turns out, practically irreversible. Congestion pricing represents a new attempt to modernize the city and adapt it to the variety of ways that New Yorkers get around. Scrapping it is a step — or rather a screeching U-turn — into the distant past.
It also makes a hash of a protracted public process that had survived the Trump administration’s disdain, numerous lawsuits, endless delays, and assorted changes in political fortune. What emerged from all of that was a system designed to strike a balance, dissuading just enough drivers from entering central Manhattan to loosen gridlock, but letting in enough paying customers to fund improvements in public transportation. That money wasn’t an abstraction, either: It would have been spent on more and faster buses, safer biking, and a range of other life-changing and -saving projects that will now be shelved. (Not to mention the half-billion dollars we spent on cameras and computers.) If all that effort and calibration turns out to have been wasted — if Hochul’s capricious delay devolves into permanent collapse — then why would anyone bother waging such a protracted battle again?
Even after all that warring and tweaking, congestion pricing was never going to be a panacea. Squeezing traffic out of some areas might have temporarily nudged it into others, potentially creating new clusters of pollution. A few — maybe more than a few — drivers would have cheated the tolling mechanism by obscuring their plates. Some businesses would have passed the extra cost of transportation onto their customers. Residents in Queens and New Jersey would have kept griping indefinitely, regardless of any improvement. But those obstacles were reasons for the defenders of congestion pricing to keep striving and streamlining, energized by the recognition that its survival depended on extreme forms of competence. A year ago, as the program steamed toward reality, I worried that the authorities would get its details wrong. Imposing new rules and collecting new revenue without a clear and self-evident strategy for redesigning streets and improving the bus system might, I feared, sabotage all its good intentions. “The program could still wind up mired in unintended consequences, be judged a flop, and get scrapped,” I wrote. “If that happens, New York will have squandered its best shot at remaining a world-class metropolis.” That’s precisely what’s happening now, not because the MTA is botching the job, but because Hochul and a few other politicians panicked.
By now, it should not be necessary to relitigate the advantages of congestion pricing. They have been rejected, rebutted, refined, resubmitted, and reinforced, at least since the Bloomberg administration first introduced the idea in 2007. Other major cities — primarily London, Singapore, and Stockholm — introduced versions of the plan years and decades ago with few regrets. It has been well tested, and it works. And the issue now is not even whether the idea is good or bad. Hochul doesn’t claim to have had an epiphany that the program would be a disaster. Instead, she claims to have simply postponed it —“indefinitely pause” was her phrase — until the timing is more propitious. And, if a few more New Yorkers die under the wheels before that glorious day arrives, well, that’s the cost of doing business.