Latest news with #congestionpricing
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
NYC's Congestion Toll Slashes Traffic Jams in Manhattan by 25%
New York City's congestion pricing toll has cut Manhattan traffic delays by 25% and reduced gridlock in nearby New Jersey counties by as much as 14%, undercutting fears the policy would worsen traffic outside the city, a new report from the Regional Plan Association shows. Time lost due to traffic in Manhattan fell 28% from Jan. 5, when the toll launched, through April 26, with congestion pricing accounting for a quarter of that drop, according to the report, which was released Wednesday.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Congestion pricing is ‘thriving' in New York City — but can it survive Trump?
Every week, Stan Avedon drives across lower Manhattan, moving bikes between the two NYC Velo shops he's managed for the last 15 years. What used to be a grinding crawl through some of the world's worst traffic is noticeably less painful lately. 'It's like night and day,' he said. Avedon's transformed commute is the result of the most ambitious policy to hit New York in recent memory. Starting 5 January, drivers entering lower Manhattan began paying a $9 congestiontoll aimed at deterring drivers and raise desperately needed funds for the city's deteriorating public transit system. Avedon doesn't mind being charged for his newly gained time. 'As a motorist, it's like the price of gas goes up. The cost to be in the city goes up.' For decades, New York lawmakers have proposed plans for a congestion zone where drivers would have to pay a fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan as a means of funding public transit. The idea was first floated in 1952, but it wasn't until 2007 that then-mayor Michael Bloomberg took a plan to Albany, where it was rejected by state legislators. At every turn, the attempts to introduce congestion pricing have been met with acrimony both sweeping and strange: accusations that congestion pricing is a 'plumber's tax' on blue-collar workers that wasn't democratically decided, a cynical cash grab by a mismanaged Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), or a scheme that will flood outer-borough streets with displaced traffic. Critics have warned of economic fallout, calling the toll elitist. Despite these objections, the program finally received federal approval in 2023 under the New York governor, Kathy Hochul. It seemed as though congestion pricing might finally happen. However, just days before the program was set to begin in June 2024, Hochul paused implementation, fearing a political fallout. She quickly reinstated the policy after the November 2024 election, with the toll reduced from $15 to $9. Six months since the tolls switched on, the early results suggest congestion pricing works. Yet the policy, 75 years in the making, almost never happened and is still being threatened by a Trump administration eager to terminate the program and to exert control over the president's home town. The aim of congestion pricing is twofold: to reduce the number of cars on the road, easing traffic and pollution, and to raise sorely needed funds for the city's ailing public transit network. Manhattan boasts the densest transit network in the western hemisphere, but its subway signals are nearly a century old and its dedicated bus lanes relatively scarce. Millions rely on public transit daily, yet over 25% of trains and buses are delayed, and the system remains short of legally mandated elevators at dozens of stations. The congestion toll is expected to raise $500m annually – funds earmarked for long overdue upgrades. So far, revenue is on target. While it will take time for these investments to reach riders, they are expected to make daily commutes faster and more reliable for residents across the city. And in the long term, easing congestion on Manhattan's streets could pave the way for new bike lanes, expanded pedestrian zones, and dedicated bus corridors that could transform how New Yorkers get around. In the meantime, public transit ridership has reached its highest level since the pandemic. Buses are moving up to 20 percent faster on routes through Manhattan. 'We campaigned for congestion pricing to fix the subway,' said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director at the grassroots organization Riders Alliance. 'But what it's doing right now, most notably, is speeding up some of the worst and slowest and least reliable bus commutes in the United States.' 'People taking very long distance commuter buses, getting up at 5 in the morning, spending a couple hours on the bus, some of them are shaving off 10 or 15 minutes in each direction every day,' Pearlstein said. 'That's incredibly precious time back in their lives, and they're paying nothing for it.' So are more people just paying to drive, or is congestion actually down? Since January, an average of 70,000 fewer vehicles have entered the congestion zone each day, according to the MTA. That translates to roughly 2m fewer cars on the road every month. Traffic is down moderately; vehicles are moving between 5 and 10% faster during peak hours in 2025 compared with the same period last year. While it's still too early to draw firm conclusions about the policy's environmental impact, early comparisons with London offer a hint of what may be in store. Within the first year of implementing congestion pricing, CO2 emissions fell by 15.7%, according to an estimation by Transport for London. Even without hard local data yet, Sam Schwartz, a traffic engineer and former city traffic commissioner, argues the logic is clear: 'If you have fewer vehicles moving at a faster speed, idling less, then there's less pollution.' There have been other immediate effects. Noise complaints along Manhattan's busiest streets have dropped by 70%. 'There's less frenetic energy on the streets than there was before,' noticed Stan Avedon, the manager from NYC Velo. Perhaps the most dramatic transformation has occurred outside the toll zone. In Queens, traffic crashes in Astoria and Long Island City have fallen by 27%, with injuries down 31.4%. The reason, Schwartz says, is geographical. 'It's no surprise to me that Long Island City and Astoria would be the biggest beneficiaries of congestion pricing,' he said. That part of Queens is served by three crossings into Manhattan within a short distance but previously, only one, the Queensboro Bridge, was toll-free. Now, with tolls applied regardless of the entry point, more drivers are staying on the highway instead of diverting through local streets to avoid charges. While new to the US, congestion pricing has worked for decades in cities like London, Stockholm and Singapore. The policy faces early opposition everywhere, but quickly blends into the urban fabric and gains support as its benefits become visible. New York is following a similar path. As implementation neared post-pandemic, suburban politicians began to push back, arguing the new toll would hit working class commuters hardest amid steep inflation and anxiety over the cost of living. That line of attack was familiar to those who had long followed the debate. '[The opposition's] argument boiled down to: poorer drivers are going to be affected by this,' said Gersh Kuntzman, the editor-in-chief of Streetsblog NYC, a local outlet dedicated to covering mobility in the city. 'That's a classic political misdirect that we at Streetsblog are constantly pushing back on, because it's an inherent lie that opponents of congestion pricing are speaking on behalf of the working man, the working woman of New York City. All of the studies of census data and mobility data show that the vast majority of people who are subject to the toll are significantly wealthier than their transit-using neighbors.' The numbers bear that out. For every low-income driver forced to pay the toll, 50 low-income New Yorkers will benefit from the toll through improved public transit, according to an analysis by the Community Service Society. And many of the fears surrounding congestion pricing's unintended consequences have not materialized. Preliminary data shows no increase in truck traffic in the Bronx, where advocates worried about spillover congestion and pollution if drivers sought to skirt the tolled zone. Concerns that riders would abandon taxis to avoid the added $0.75 congestion fee have also proven unfounded. January was the most prosperous month for taxis since the pandemic began, with trips up 19% within the toll zone. Uber and Lyft trips have held steady. Fears about wider economic impacts haven't come to pass either. 'Restaurants and Broadway ticket sales are up. Business is up. Commercial leasing is up. All of these things that people were concerned about really haven't come to pass, and all of the benefits that people were hoping would appear have, in fact, come to pass,' said Ben Furnas, executive director of advocacy nonprofit Transportation Alternatives. Though experts generally agree the program is an early success, plenty of hostility toward the toll remains. A daily driver from New Jersey expressed her discontent as she exited her vehicle on the way to work downtown: 'I hate it. I hate having to pay, and traffic is exactly the same.' A number of other drivers told the Guardian they felt traffic hadn't changed. For a policy this ambitious, it's not surprising that the response is not unanimous. But what was once enormously contentious has largely been accepted as a fact of life. Public sentiment has greatly improved since it was installed – jumping 10 points in approval ratings in one Sienna College Research Institute poll to 42% in March. Now, some of the strongest support comes from the very drivers most affected, with 66% of those entering the toll multiple times a week backing the toll, according to a poll by Morning Consult. 'What was surprising to people who hadn't been paying attention was how quickly it worked. And that's why everyone I know has a story, or many stories, of people who said 'I didn't think it would make a difference, or I outright opposed it, but now I support it,'' said Pearlstein. Despite its success, the program has drawn fierce opposition from conservatives. President Trump and his Department of Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, are leading efforts to revoke the federal approval granted in 2023 under Joe Biden. 'CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,' Donald Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social back in February. 'Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!' The federal government's sudden pivot is less about policy than politics. 'Federal bureaucrats have trashed the program because they don't want to see Democratic leaders succeed in adopting a policy that works,' said Pearlstein. The feeling from Washington to Wall Street is that Trump has already lost the fight. 'Everything we've seen suggests that congestive pricing is here to stay. From the fact that the federal attorneys leaked accidentally an internal memo explaining how weak their case was because it's based on outlandish arguments, and most recently, that the MTA was able to sell half a billion dollars in bonds backed by toll revenue because the bond market is confident that the fee is here to stay.' If the program is pulled, it would leave a $15bn hole in the MTA's capital budget, potentially forcing alternatives like a new business payroll tax or a broader sales tax. But the stakes go beyond funding, to a battle over states' rights and the limits of federal power. 'A really big issue is at stake that is so much bigger than congestion pricing: can the federal government, after giving approval to something that was undertaken under one set of rules, suddenly, upon a change of administration, withdraw that approval?' noted Kuntzman. 'If that becomes a precedent, there's a potential for a real logjam of stuff getting done in this country.' The Trump administration's most recent salvo to gut the program has been blocked by a court's temporary injunction. In the meantime, New York still faces a slew of lawsuits from outside the city and in New Jersey. For now, the MTA is successfully fighting them off. 'Congestion pricing isn't just surviving, it's thriving. We're pleased that Judge Liman has put a stop to threats by Washington intended to deprive New Yorkers of the benefits of the program–less traffic, safer streets, cleaner air, and better transit,' said the MTA's chair and CEO, Janno Lieber, in a statement. 'It's been a success. It's not going to be taken out without a lot of people complaining. There are lives that have been saved and people who didn't get injured, there's property that didn't get damaged, there are lungs that didn't get polluted. All of those things are benefits that we're reaping from this,' said Schwartz.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
MTA defies feds' fourth deadline to kill congestion pricing, calls Duffy threats a ‘sham'
Fourth time's a 'sham.' The Metropolitan Transportation Authority defied the feds' fourth deadline to kill congestion pricing — while ripping Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's repeated threats as a 'sham.' In a pair of letters sent to Duffy on Wednesday, the MTA and the state Department of Transportation said that his deadlines and letters threatening to yank federal funding were irrelevant — since the battle over the tolling program is playing out in court. The May 21 time limit for the MTA to stop collecting the $9 tolls on drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street was ordered in a letter Duffy sent to Gov. Kathy Hochul last month — when his third deadline came and went. The April 21 letter gave Hochul another 30 days to prove to him why the US Department of Transportation shouldn't 'remedy New York's non-compliance' by yanking untold amounts of federal transit funding. But state agencies argued in the recent filings that the whiplash back-and-forth was 'procedurally improper.' The MTA attorneys argued there wasn't even a point in responding to Duffy's threat, since according to the transportation secretary's original Feb. 19 letter announcing he was pulling federal approval for the first-in-the-nation program, he has already made up his mind. That letter 'already purported to 'terminate'' congestion pricing, wrote attorney Roberta Kaplan, 'without any prior notice or opportunity to be heard as required by the relevant regulations.' 'It is thus obvious that USDOT's decision has already been made, and that this is an 'opportunity to be heard' in name only,' Kaplan argued. 'Secretary Duffy did not afford the Project Sponsors any notice or due process before that alleged termination, and he cannot cure that failure now through a sham exchange of letters,' Kaplan wrote. The state DOT letter goes further, and hints that Duffy's lawyers may be trying to form a new legal argument to kill the toll — citing Duffy's ask last month that Hochul address 'policy concerns' mentioned in his Feb. 19 missive. 'The Secretary's February 19 letter did not state that those policy concerns were an independent basis for his decision,' state Assistant Attorney General Andrew Frank wrote, 'and as a legal matter they cannot be a basis for termination.' Kaplan added that 'those supposed policy concerns' were mere 'after-the-fact rationalizations to justify the Secretary's illegal attempt to end the Program.' Both comments hint at the concerns expressed in an internal Department of Justice memo erroneously filed to the public docket on behalf of the US DOT by since-removed federal attorneys. The memo expressed doubts over Duffy's legal reasoning behind his original letter, casting his strategy as 'very unlikely' to succeed, and encouraged a move towards one focused on shifting priorities and policies. The latest filing by the feds in the case is a memo opposing the MTA's request for a preliminary injunction asking the judge to bar Duffy from making good on his threat to pull funding in retaliation for the agency not stopping the tolls. The memo notes that the US DOT's 'decision making process is still unfolding.' A federal DOT spokesperson told The Post that 'we will be reviewing New York's response to determine if they remain in compliance.'
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
NYC DOT under fire after bike lane revisions cause gridlock for drivers trying to avoid congestion tolls
The NYC Department of Transportation has put the screws to drivers who are trying to avoid congestion pricing tolls by entering Manhattan via the Queensborough Bridge, critics told The Post. The agency helped spur relentless massive gridlock last month by removing a key left-turn lane along East 62nd Street heading northbound on First Avenue — to create a seven-foot-wide safety buffer area abutting the 62nd Street bike lane. 'It makes me feel like the New York City Department of Transportation is deliberately trying to ruin the only toll-free route into Manhattan from Queens,' said Dylan Yen, 24, an Upper East Side tech consultant and U.S. Coast Guard member who regularly commutes between boroughs by taking the bridge. 'They're deliberately trying to make it as difficult as possible so that people will either pay the congestion toll or, more cynically, they make it so bad that we as a neighborhood decide that we need congestion pricing.' Northbound travelers such as Yen avoid the controversial $9 toll for Manhattan drivers below East 60th Street by using the bridge's upper level exit, leading to East 61st Street. Exiting the lower level leaves drivers off at East 59th Street where they have to pay the piper. Yen continued: 'This is manufactured congestion to cater to the whims of Transportation Alternatives,' referring to the powerful anti-car group that critics say has incestuous relationship with DOT, indirectly lobbies for Uber and Lyft and wields a lot of power with lefty officials. The revisions leave only one lane operating during certain hours for both drivers needing to turn left to onto First Avenue or continue east onto the FDR Drive. The road's right lane is supposed to be open to traffic except Sundays and overnights the rest of the week, midnight to 7 a.m. when parking is allowed. However, it's routinely blocked during business hours by trucks making deliveries, residents said. Previously, the strip had a lane dedicated for left turns, a center lane for thru-traffic to the FDR Drive and a right lane with 'No Standing' zones regulations in affect most hours beyond Sunday. The DOT insists its plan was always to eliminate the left lane and create a safety buffer for bikers since the 62nd Street bike lane was installed in 2021 under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration. That part of the project was put on hold for years because outdoor dining sheds were blocking the right lane until Mayor Eric Adams instituted new rules phasing out many of the blighted structures, officials claimed. Bridge users aren't buying the excuse. Michael, a 34-year-old Upper East Side resident who works at a Queens tech company, said his average commute time is now 75 minutes, compared to 25 minutes before the traffic patterns changed. He said the traffic now routinely backs up onto bridge's upper level and is especially bad on Sundays when the right lane on East 62nd Street allows parking — adding it's deplorable that drivers are being charged the congestion toll for 'creeping 300 feet into the zone' to exit and enter on the lower-level. 'On Sundays, it's backed up to the middle of the bridge,' he said. 'They don't give a s—t! The DOT does not give a s—t! It's an open targeting of drivers.' Traffic congestion near the Manhattan side of the bridge has historically been a problem, but it's now nonstop, said Sebastian, who lives on East 62nd Street near First Avenue. 'The traffic is 24 hours [a day], he said. 'It's a safety concern for pedestrians.' Linda Santangelo, 61, of the Upper East Side, said she doesn't drive but is now forced dealing with the honking horns and car fumes the extra traffic congestion has brought to the neighborhood. 'I was surprised by the gridlock going on [because of the traffic changes], ' Santangelo said. 'And I do a see a lot of extra traffic on the Upper East Side because of this. It's gridlock everywhere!' Councilwoman Julie Menin, a Manhattan Democrat who represents the Upper East Side-Lenox Hill areas near the bridge, told The Post her office has fielded plenty of complaints from local residents about the changes causing 'added congestion.' 'DOT should review this location to determine whether this intersection should be reverted to a configuration that better supports traffic flow and continues to make our streets safer for pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists,' said Menin. DOT spokesman Vincent Barone said the bike lane project was put in place by the de Blasio administration 'to create safer crosstown connections for cyclists and pedestrians while also preserving the same number of vehicular travel lanes during rush hours in a historically congested area near the bridge.' 'These corridors were chosen for safety upgrades in part because they were the locations of hundreds of injuries and multiple pedestrian fatalities — and if there are any delays due to drivers dangerously and illegally parking in travel lanes, we will work with our sister agencies on enforcement,' he said.
Bloomberg
28-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
NY Congestion Pricing Is Likely to Stay Until Year End During Court Case
New York's congestion pricing program is likely to stay in place through late 2025 while a federal judge decides whether the Trump administration can stop New York from charging motorists to enter Manhattan's busiest streets. The state's Metropolitan Transportation Authority sued in February to prevent the federal government from revoking approval for the $9 toll. US District Judge Lewis Liman, who has blocked the US from withholding any funds or blocking new projects while the case proceeds, signaled in an order Wednesday that he could take until the end of the year to reach a decision.
