Congestion Pricing’s Promises Never Reached East Harlem

The heat drew the retirees and teenagers out of the apartment towers that line Second Avenue near 106th Street in East Harlem and onto the shaded benches in a courtyard below. It’s a bit of respite that sits just feet from where, for two decades, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has promised to build a new subway station as part of a subway expansion that’s been promised on and off for 80 years. The now “indefinitely paused” congestion toll was supposed to provide the local portion of the funding — which the MTA says means the $6.6 billion, three-stop expansion is now paused, too.

Much of this was news to Caballero, who at 59 is considerably younger than that 80-year set of promises, and was lukewarm at best on the toll. He describes the traffic headed downtown as horrible, but wasn’t sold on the idea of charging drivers south of 60th Street and wasn’t aware the money would support the subway expansion. “Fifteen bucks, for a lot of folks, is a lot of money,” he said on that steamy Thursday. The MTA — and toll boosters — had not made their case, at least here. “Okay, I’m paying this money: What are the benefits? What are the improvements?” Caballero asked. “Is the subway going to get better? Is the subway going to be cleaner? Are we going to get another line?”

I heard versions of his opposition to the toll along the length of the proposed Q-line expansion, eastward from the proposed new terminus at 125th-Lexington Ave then hanging a right onto Second Avenue, where two more new stations would go at 116th and 106th Streets. Gwen Williams, who lives in the massive Taino Towers — which span the whole block between Second and Third Avenues between 122nd and 123rd Streets — wants the toll because she’s sick and tired of the M125 crosstown bus getting stuck in traffic behind double-parked cars. But she said she understood why the governor pulled the plug. “I think that she didn’t have a choice — she’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” That said, she added: “But we have too many cars coming into the city.”

Down Second Avenue, near the 116th Street stop, Thomas White, a former resident now living in Sheepshead Bay, was here to visit his daughter. The extension of the Q train would give him a one-seat ride from deep Brooklyn — a project that he supports, while opposing the congestion charge, in part, because local streets haven’t ever been tolled. “You shouldn’t have to pay to drive past 60th Street. That’s not a bridge or a highway,” the 63-year-old said. “That’s crazy. That’s ridiculous.” Doing so is, admittedly, a literally foreign concept: The idea for congestion pricing was sourced from London and Stockholm.

A Slingshot Strategies poll exclusively obtained by New York shows that the campaign in support of congestion pricing was entirely drowned out by its opponents — and by the end, the failure to communicate was nearly total across every aspect of the program. The survey of roughly 1,400 registered New York City Democrats (in theory, the group most likely to favor the program) found that 50 percent backed Governor Hochul’s decision to suspend the program, while 32 percent opposed it. Only 16 percent told pollsters they thought the charge would have a “positive impact” on their commute or travel within the city, while 44 percent said it would have a “negative impact.” More remarkably (and a 4,000-plus-page environmental review to the contrary), pluralities of registered New York City Democrats even doubted the program would be “effective” at reducing traffic congestion (a 35-47 split) and pollution (36-49). The one thing those polled agreed on was that the toll would be effective at raising money for the MTA. The question was couched with the proviso that the “raising revenue” would go “to improve public transit including the subways and buses.” But that can be a negative, even in transit-dependent New York, thanks to deep-seated cynicism about the agency’s ability to manage money as illustrated by the poll’s next set of questions. They asked whether New Yorkers would be more likely to support the program when told what programs it would fund.

When told that the toll would fund “critical investments and improvements” in transit that would make riding the trains and buses “more efficient and affordable,” 48 percent of respondents said that would make them more likely to back the program. That margin grew when the question zeroed in on the Second Avenue Subway extension that would run past Caballero’s building — 54 percent said they would be more likely to support the toll knowing that is what it would fund, with 27 percent opposed. That split grew to 59-21 when respondents were told that the money would go to putting in more elevators at stations for the disabled, the elderly, and young families with strollers.

“If there were two big messaging failures on congestion pricing, it was failing to tie to specific projects for the MTA; and beyond that, it was failing to tie it to specific tangible benefits beyond a revenue stream for the MTA,” said Evan Roth Smith, who oversaw the poll. People who don’t trust the MTA to spend the money in the aggregate become more supportive when the dollars are attached to actual projects or firm plans.

That discovery shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s similar to the results of focus groups conducted by supporters of congestion pricing in 2018 — when the subway system was in crisis and leaders in Albany, including then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, were frantically searching for ways to find billions of dollars for the desperately needed repairs and upgrades proposed by the MTA’s then-chief of city transit, Andy Byford. The focus-grouping produced a report with clear instructions: that the state needed to say what the money was for, and show the public a fixed and well-publicized list of projects, countering the public’s cynicism about government (more broadly) and the MTA (specifically).

“This framing is necessary because the biggest hurdle persuadable voters have is a concern for waste and misuse of the funds by the MTA and other officials,” the nine-page document prepared for Fix NYC Transit reported. “We need to deliver a message on where the funds will go and who will have a say. Framing it as more funding for needed improvements leaves it vulnerable to concerns on misuse,” it continued. It warned: “To be clear, while voters grow more open to congestion pricing, New Yorkers are a highly cynical audience — even more so when they think about transportation, which is a constant source of stress in their lives.”

Why that didn’t happen is, perhaps predictably, a head-slapping moment. The congestion-pricing legislation in 2019 instructed the MTA to create a toll that would raise $15 billion, part of a $55 billion five-year program to put the subway back on solid footing and kickstart its modernization. Here is where the politics collide with the practical considerations. At the time, the subway system was in a very different crisis from the one it faces now — breakdowns of aging trains, signals and switches ruined commutes on a near-daily basis — and waiting for the congestion money to start rolling in would defer the advertised upgrades and modernization projects for too long. So the money was combined into the overall five-year program. The upside was that officials could start issuing contracts. (For example, in 2022, they ordered 650 new subway cars that will allow the MTA to finally retire the breakdown-prone 1970s trains on the A and the C lines by 2026, and the G train’s signals and switches will be replaced starting this summer.) The downside was that everything and nothing became funded by the expected toll revenues, because congestion pricing was just another tranche of money flowing into the MTA. That helped feed the messaging problem that lingers on upper Second Avenue — and in the polling.

Advocates and the MTA largely waved the issue away when asked about it by reporters in recent months. Rallies held in front of subway stations featured a recurring crew of activists and MTA officials, and there were debates over the finer points of the policy at the agency’s monthly board meetings. There was no TV ad campaign or mail blitz like you’d see in politics. After all, the law was the law, which meant that congestion pricing’s boosters were focused on the legal challenges facing the program, not the political ones. Few thought it could just go poof.

The battle for public opinion hasn’t been entirely lost, says Slingshot’s Roth Smith. “There is absolutely a way to convince voters that the problems that they’re experiencing getting around New York can be solved by congestion pricing. Every day that lower Manhattan is totally snarled by traffic, every summer beach day when it takes two hours to get down the Van Wyck, lay it at the feet of congestion pricing,” he said. “But that hasn’t been done yet.”