New York City has long been known for having some of the nation’s worst traffic and its longest commute times, but an innovative policy that may take effect within the next year could cut down on both.
Congestion pricing, in which private vehicles entering Downtown and Midtown Manhattan during business hours will be obliged to pay a fee, is in the final stages of review by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), with final approval expected this spring. The initial plan was passed by the New York state Legislature in 2019 as a way to raise funds for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the subways, city buses and suburban commuter rail lines. During the Trump administration, the Department of Transportation refused to approve the congestion pricing plan, but with a more mass transit-friendly president in the White House, the plan is moving forward.
Advocates of the congestion pricing plan say that if it is successfully implemented — as it already has been in global cities such as London and Singapore — it could show the way for American cities to reduce traffic, improve mass transit and reduce pollution.
Under the current plan, TransCore, the vendor chosen by the MTA, “will have up to 310 days to finish design, development, and testing and begin tolling operations,” meaning that the proposed tolling system could be up and running by the end of the year.
Addressing New York’s ever-worsening traffic problem, however, may not be so simple. Objections to the plan have been raised by suburban New Yorkers, neighboring state politicians and even some New Yorkers who initially supported raising tolls during peak hours.
Under state law, New York City lacked the authority to implement road pricing on its own, and the state needed federal approval because some of the highways where tolls will be placed connect to the federal Interstate Highway System. While suburban politicians and interest groups such as taxi drivers look unlikely to successfully block implementation in the state capital or Washington, D.C., they are trying — and they may yet try to convince the courts that their rights have been violated.
New York City is by far the most transit-dependent U.S. city: 58% of commuters use public transit, compared to 5% nationally. But the nation’s oldest subway system is aging poorly, with outdated signaling systems and never-ending repair work causing less reliable and slower service. And more than 30 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, only one-quarter of subway stations in the system are wheelchair-accessible. The agency has a $54.8 billion plan to update signaling, add elevators to 70 stations and make other infrastructure improvements, but it needs the congestion pricing revenue to pay for it — especially since the pandemic caused subway ridership to plummet, from which it has only partially recovered.
Transportation analyst Charles Komanoff has modeled how congestion pricing will alter how many cars and trucks enter the lower half of Manhattan. He estimates that congestion pricing will reduce New York’s carbon dioxide emissions by 1 million metric tons per year — the equivalent to taking 216,000 cars off the road entirely. That’s because some car trips will be skipped to avoid paying the toll and the tolling revenue will be used to improve mass transit service, he said, which would, in turn, induce more commuters to take transit instead of their car.
Alon Levy, a fellow in the Transportation and Land Use program of the NYU Marron Institute, has calculated that if every subway and bus arrived at six-minute intervals — a slight increase in transit service that…