Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty
If there’s one city that gave New York the courage to consider congestion pricing — the $15 charge to drive into Manhattan, now “indefinitely paused,” that was intended to fund the MTA and reduce traffic — it’s London. Its toll has been in place for 20 years; slashed pollution and traffic have helped make life tolerable for the 2 million people who have moved to London in that time, and the Underground is in far better shape than our subway. It works. The toll arrangement has also been adjusted and refined over the years after a somewhat bumpy start. In that fact lies a path forward for Governor Kathy Hochul, who backed the plan until an abrupt about-face weeks before the launch. What might she do to turn the indefinite pause into a definite reboot?
By any measure, the bog is deep. Hochul now faces lawsuits from toll proponents who argue that she overstepped her authority, since the plan was passed by the State Legislature. She also faces financial pressure. Before the cancellation, the state was facing a projected $2.3 billion deficit for 2026 that grows to $4.3 billion in 2027 and $7.3 billion in 2028. Making the MTA whole again would add $1 billion to each one of those numbers — then require lawmakers to come up with $1 billion per year for another 12 years. Both factors worsen Hochul’s position in Albany: The Democratic lawmakers who’d managed to get the toll passed, and expended political capital on a program experts say is good policy that nonetheless polls poorly, are frustrated. “We got to congestion pricing over years of analyzing and agonizing,” State Senator Michael Gianaris, the chamber’s deputy majority leader, told me. “So, now we’re back to square one.” So she has political motivation and financial motivation to find a middle ground.
Hochul has, usefully, made a few of her issues with the plan clear. During a sitdown at the Aspen Institute on August 2, she renewed her objection to the peak toll (“I really believe to my core that $15 right now is too much to start”), saying, “London, which everyone uses as their role model — started at £5 and over many years worked up to £15. They excluded their theater district. I’ll tell you, Broadway, and Times Square, and the businesses in the city are scared to death of this.” The governor’s retelling doesn’t precisely square with the history (£5 then is equivalent to about $14 today), but she is right that the British capital’s program was less expansive, providing a framework for a potential deal: a more tailored toll that provides much of the money the MTA needs with concessions to her concerns about hurting local businesses.
London’s initial charge was unexpectedly effective at reducing traffic coming into the center of the city. Stunned newspaper reporters at the time wrote about being able to hear birds chirp in the city for the first time ever. It was perhaps too effective. Shops and restaurants in the theater-heavy West End complained it was pinching business. After an extended back-and-forth (those businesses blamed the toll, officials blamed a larger economic slowdown during the Iraq War), they cut back the hours of the toll slightly, from 6:30 p.m. to 6 p.m., to boost the pre-theater dinner business. The program was tweaked, but the core principle remained untouched: People commuting into London when transit is running its best schedules should not do so by car.
Here’s how a compromise based on those principles could look here in New York. First, the $15 toll stays but is applied more tightly, on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. when the subways and railroads are running their most frequent schedules. Data show that this shorter peak-tolling period would still cover the bulk of the traffic south of 60th Street (407,000 of the 633,000 vehicles per day on average, down from 522,000) and the busiest traffic periods of the day (roughly noon to 2 p.m., though that varies from year to year). The change would still clearly send the signal that commuting to Manhattan by car during the day is a luxury good but, as in London, also acknowledges that transit may not suit people working an evening shift or with a long, late trip home after dinner and a show.
Second, create a toll-free passage between bridges or tunnels and the closest freeway (either the FDR or the West Side Highway, both of which are exempted from the charge already) inside the congestion zone. The MTA’s absolutist position that people traversing, for example, the two blocks from the Lincoln Tunnel to the West Side Highway should pay the congestion toll gave critics an easy rallying point. Lawmakers could (and should) argue that they meant to do as much when they kept the freeways free in the original legislation.
Third, expand the credit for the tunnel crossing to cover the full cost. If you paid $13 or so to come in, there, you get that knocked off your congestion fee. The toll-on-toll angle always gave critics another way to hit the program, and sometimes, there is value in ducking the punch. Beyond the politics, there is a potential major policy gain. Every day, the side streets of Long Island City and downtown Brooklyn are flooded by cars heading toward the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queensboro Bridges. The Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels directly connect to expressways, so coaxing them toward the tunnels should keep a sizable number of them on the freeways and away from neighborhood streets.
It’s not a perfect set of changes. They’d mean less money for the MTA and likely a more modest reduction in overall traffic. But it might get Hochul to a yes, especially when the alternative is months of litigation and a broke MTA — and, Albany being Albany, the odds aren’t zero we end up financing the latter by putting a casino in every neighborhood. And I’m only mildly exaggerating on that last one.
This isn’t about policy at this point. It’s about politics. Politics is about winning — and more importantly, letting everyone involved plausibly claim to have won. It’s about providing an off-ramp or an exit strategy that allows Hochul to “unpause” the program without losing face. The governor keeps talking about London, so offer London’s compromises. We’d cut traffic, substantially reduce the risk to the budget, and keep the rationale of the toll intact while addressing major complaints about the proposal. Advocates should make the offer. Hochul should take the deal.
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