Update: June 5, 2024, 1 p.m.: Hochul has just announced that the launch of the congestion-pricing plan has been put off indefinitely.
Well, she blinked.
You knew that Kathy Hochul was reading the polls on congestion pricing — the plan to charge cars admission to Manhattan’s central business district in order to coax drivers onto public transportation and raise a billion dollars to improve the same — when she deferred a final decision about it until December 2022. She had generally come out for the plan, but she also pushed a firm decision out for months on end, conveniently scheduling it for a few weeks after her reelection. That was, it seemed to congestion-pricing supporters, shrewd and perhaps necessary. She knew congestion pricing is unpopular in the suburbs and outer-boroughs (and somewhat marginally so even in affluent Manhattan) and that she’d probably lose some votes for doing the right thing. Which it inarguably is: Twenty years of a similar policy in London has cleaned the air, got traffic moving, beefed up the Underground and the bus system, and generally improved city life. The arguments against it, apart from a few niche exceptions, boil down to little more than “I don’t wanna pay!” A decade-plus in the making, the whole system is poised to go live on June 30, and the cameras are already up.
It was a pretty brave choice for any politician — do the necessary noble thing, take a hit for it — and last night, we learned that Hochul may have lost her nerve. The New York Times reported that she wants to defer and possibly cancel the whole plan right on the eve of its activation, replacing the expected revenue with an as-yet-unrevealed business tax. (It could, one guesses, be framed like the hotel tax, in which visitors pay a couple of bucks for the city services they briefly use, or the failed attempt to tax Broadway tickets some years back.) Mostly, it seems, Hochul is trying to protect the vote margins of Democrats in the House and the State Legislature, notably (per Politico) Hakeem Jeffries. From the Times:
But even as Ms. Hochul believes that congestion pricing is good environmental policy, she has concerns that the timing was less than ideal, according to a person familiar with her thinking. The governor feared that it might deter commuters from returning to the central business district, which has yet to fully recover from the pandemic.
She can’t change this policy unilaterally, of course. It was passed by both houses of the State Legislature, which would have to agree on a replacement — and do it fast, because the session ends this week. It is plausible (though hardly a sure thing) that this Times story is a strategic leak — that person familiar with the governor’s thinking is perhaps someone whose name rhymes with “Schmathy Schmokul” — to test how revoking the plan would go over. It could also be the first revelation of a backroom agreement that’s already been made. If it’s the former, congestion pricing may go ahead without her, and Hochul can distance herself from it by saying, “I did what I could.” And if it’s the latter, we as a city are screwed.