In Brief:
- New York began charging drivers $9 to enter Lower Manhattan at peak hours in January.
- The toll is helping to reduce traffic, speed up travel times, and raise money for public transit.
- The Trump administration has vowed to end the program.
Christine Berthet has lived in New York City for 45 years, but this spring, she’s enjoying an experience she’s never had before: Birdsong, up close, on the balcony of her Manhattan apartment.
Berthet lives near the corner of 9th Avenue and 37th Street, right by an entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, one of the few ways to get into or out of Manhattan by car. For decades, drivers have queued up at choke points around the city, including Berthet’s corner, for twice-a-day rush hour commutes.
New Yorkers expect a certain degree of noise and chaos. But it’s been increasingly obvious to Berthet, who has spent years watching the traffic jams swell and dissipate, that “it’s simply too many cars.
“People were just furiously honking all the time. The frustration was over the top. Everybody was furious,” Berthet says.
In January, New York City began charging drivers $9 to enter Lower Manhattan during peak hours. The program, known as congestion pricing, was meant to serve a range of goals at the same time: reducing gridlock, speeding up commute times, improving air quality and raising money for public transit. As the co-founder of a neighborhood pedestrian group, Berthet has pushed for things like intersection improvements, better traffic enforcement, protected bike lanes, and improved transit service. The first few months of congestion pricing have been “shockingly amazing,” Berthet says.
“We have never seen so many birds, and I have concluded that this is because the air quality is better,” she says.
Congestion pricing must be one of the most fought-over policy proposals in the history of New York. First proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning economist in the 1950s, the program was championed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg starting in 2007 and signed into law by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019.
Last year, just before it was supposed to take effect, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared an indefinite pause. Hochul cited a burden on working-class New Yorkers to explain the pause, though it was clear that the move was motivated by concerns about Democrats’ chances in the 2024 election.
After the election was over, Hochul allowed the program to begin, with a reduced toll, down from the originally planned $15 for peak hours.
But the fight is far from over: President Donald Trump declared the program “dead” after vowing to revoke federal approvals given during the Biden presidency. The administration initially set a deadline of March 21 to end the program, but later extended it.
“There are people everywhere who were hesitant about this,” says Juliette Michaelson, deputy chief of policy for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the program and collects the revenue. “This is a new approach. It hasn’t been done in the U.S. This is a country that has a history of being very pro-driving, even in a city like New York. I think this notion that people should pay for the privilege of using what is effectively a very scarce resource in a very crowded city was a little difficult for people to imagine.”
Positive Early Results
But early results suggest the program is working as it was intended. In the first four months after the toll cameras were turned on, 8 million fewer vehicles have entered Lower Manhattan than during the same period the year before. Entries were down 12 percent in April compared to the prior April, according to the MTA.
It may sound like a modest reduction, but it’s been enough to reduce bus delays and speed up average travel times by about 15 percent. Foot traffic is increasing. Complaints about excessive honking have plummeted. The tolling program is on track to generate $500 million in revenue for the MTA in its first year — money that will be put into a range of capital improvements, including new elevators and accessibility upgrades at subway stations.
Anecdotally, Michaelson says, she’s hearing lots of positive reviews from former skeptics saying, “I thought I would hate it, but it’s great.”
Not Everyone's a Fan
Of course, there are still haters, mainly in the New York suburbs and outer boroughs. New York state Sen. Jack Martins, a Republican representing parts of Long Island, is backing a bill to repeal the law that authorized congestion pricing. Jake Blumencranz, a Long Island Republican in the New York Assembly, has joined a lawsuit challenging the program. (Neither Martins nor Blumencranz responded to interview requests.) And, of course, there’s the president’s vow to end the program.
The MTA and the U.S. Department of Transportation are hashing it out in court. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy accused Hochul of “open disrespect towards the federal government” after she vowed to keep the program going. The MTA has said the law is on its side.
“We have always been absolutely confident that congestion pricing could not be taken down unilaterally by the federal government, that they are not entitled to terminate the program,” MTA CEO Janno Lieber said in a recent radio interview.
Meanwhile, opinion polls suggest more people are starting to support congestion pricing in New York — a phenomenon that has occurred in other global cities that have implemented similar programs. Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director for the Riders Alliance, a transit advocacy group, says he feels more confident by the day in the longevity of congestion pricing, which has at times, including very recently, seemed like an idea that would never see the light of day.
“I think that the program is here to stay because it’s doing exactly what it’s meant to do, and it’s changing people’s minds,” Pearlstein says. “This has gone, for a public program by a government in the mid-2020s, as well as it possibly could have.”
