New York has become the first U.S. city to embrace congestion pricing to reduce vehicle traffic and pollution in its busy urban core.
The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Wednesday capped a years-long, often fraught review process by authorizing plans to charge drivers a $15 daytime toll to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, which is expected to generate billions of dollars to improve the region’s mass transit.
“New York has more traffic than any place in the United States,” said MTA Chair and Chief Executive Janno Lieber ahead of the vote. “And now we’re doing something about it.”
The approval sets up New York to join the likes of London, Stockholm and Milan in tolling drivers.
Under state law approved in 2019, congestion pricing is designed to collect $1 billion in annual tolls that the MTA will bond to $15 billion toward infrastructure upgrades for the city’s subway, buses and commuter rail.
But congestion pricing faces the threat of several lawsuits. Garden State lawmakers furious with the fees are seeking to block the tolls in federal court. That lawsuit and other challenges filed by New York detractors could delay or even derail the tolling program. MTA officials have said they are confident the tolls will move forward.
With the approved fees, drivers traveling into Manhattan through already-tolled crossings — the Holland, Lincoln, Brooklyn-Battery or Queens-Midtown tunnels — will receive a $5 discount, reducing the fee to $10 during the day.
It will also be cheaper for motorists to drive at night. There is a 75% discount between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. on weekdays, and 9 p.m. Friday through 5 p.m. Sunday, dropping the toll to $3.75. During those overnight hours, however, the $5 tunnel credit won’t apply. The credit also does not apply to motorists crossing the George Washington Bridge, which is north of the congestion pricing zone.
Commercial trucks will be charged between $24 and $36, depending on their size, in a fee structure transit officials say is designed to encourage commercial drivers to shift their operations to overnight when the fees are cheaper.
Crucially, the MTA says it reserves the right to raise the tolls up to 25% on days the city described as “gridlock alert days,” which tend to be days of bumper-to-bumper traffic during the holiday season and when the United Nations General Assembly is in session.
“We’re at long, long, long, long last leading the nation,” said Meera Joshi, a newly-appointed MTA board member and the city’s deputy mayor of operations, during the vote. “For city centers to survive and thrive, traffic congestion must be managed — it dirties our air, adds hours to travel time, depletes the income of professional drivers, and drains our economy. Everyone loses. With today’s vote, we stem the tide.”
Joshi and Mayor Eric Adams had called on the MTA to exempt yellow cabs, but the industry will instead see steeply reduced fees tacked on to trips. For cabbies, the MTA will add a $1.25 surcharge to the fares of yellow and green cabs, while a charge of $2.50 will be added to trips through rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft. Those fees will be passed onto passengers.
Much of the recent debate around congestion pricing has focused on groups jockeying for last-minute exemptions. The final tolls include very few exemptions, and that’s by design, the mobility board said; the more groups who are exempt from the tolls, the higher the base fee would be because the authority is bound by state law to raise $1 billion annually.
The congestion pricing plan has long included exemptions for city emergency vehicles. Low-income drivers who earn less than $50,000 annually can apply for half-priced daytime tolls. But the half-priced fees will only kick in after motorists take 10 trips into the congestion zone each month.
In recent days transit officials said they had tweaked the tolls first proposed in November by the mobility board, which was responsible for recommending an initial toll structure to the MTA board.
The MTA ultimately added a few more exemptions: Yellow school buses, privately operated commuter buses, including Greyhound, Mega Bus and the Hampton Jitney, and expanded the exemptions for city vehicles on official business.
The city’s Department of Citywide Administration Services says it now anticipates that roughly half of the 8,000 non-essential vehicles in the city’s fleet of 30,000 vehicles won’t need to pay congestion fees. That includes garbage trucks, street sweepers, water, sewer and street repair vehicles, parks forestry trucks and others. Additionally, buildings inspector, child services investigator and social service outreach team vehicles will be exempt, according to DCAS.
In recent weeks, the Adams administration has pushed for broader exemptions for city vehicles.
“Congestion pricing is here, and we are glad that this plan will be delivered for working-class New Yorkers,” said Liz Garcia, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.
Juliette Michaelson, the MTA’s deputy chief of policy and external relations, emphasized during the Wednesday vote that the exemptions apply to city functions where vehicles are necessary.
“We’re not talking about commissioners’ vehicles; we’re not talking about elected official vehicles,” said Michaelson. “Those vehicles are specifically and categorically not exempt.”
The tolls must get one last nod from federal regulators, which is expected to come through in the coming weeks.
Caroline Spivack , 2024-03-27 17:08:55
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