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Yet over the decades, the moment passed; a cordon toll has become increasingly obsolete. The system can’t differentiate between a van that moves around Manhattan all day making deliveries and a van that travels two blocks from the West Side Highway to a private garage. Any expert proposing a congestion pricing program today would propose a toll based on time spent traveling, or idling, within the congestion zone, and London is now exploring what comes next.
Second, Mr. Cuomo’s motive in enacting congestion pricing wasn’t to reduce congestion, but to raise money for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as its expenses outpaced billions in annual tax revenues. The law included no congestion-reduction mandate, but it did include a revenue-raising mandate. The M.T.A. had to raise $1 billion a year so that it could borrow against that money to raise $15 billion for infrastructure. In London, the point of congestion pricing was to cut driving, not raise large amounts of money; the program there raises only $460 million annually.
The strict $1 billion requirement locked the state into a program that couldn’t be flexible. It could have started off, for example, with a modest toll for cars, say $8, and only during peak hours, say, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Instead, the M.T.A., constrained by its revenue requirement, was forced to devise a 24-hour program, with a lower fee at night. (London’s program operates only from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.) The toll, unavoidable in the late-night hours when mass transit is infrequent and congestion nonexistent, began to look more like a tax than a fee.
Those handicaps to an optimal congestion pricing program didn’t have to be insurmountable. But 2024 New York is not 2019 New York. The city’s slow recovery from Covid-19 lockdowns left little room for error. As of 2022, the last year for which full data are available, the number of people coming to Manhattan each day was 28 percent below 2019 levels. Driving has recovered more quickly than transit ridership, with car journeys now close to or above 2019 levels, and transit journeys less than three-quarters of normal for that year. Congestion pricing thus risks encouraging some drivers to work from home more often or out of Manhattan altogether rather than trying mass transit, reducing Manhattan’s chances for a full economic recovery.
New York’s deteriorated public safety and reduced public order since 2020 further harmed the prospects of congestion pricing. People are reluctant to return partly because they feel unsafe on the trains; New York has suffered 35 subway homicides since 2020, most of them random. Before 2020, it took nearly 17 years for the transit system to amass such a death toll. Disorder is rampant. Similarly, it’s hard to conjure up visions of traffic smoothly flowing on congestion-free streets when the public is terrified of moped and e-bike drivers zipping every which way, crowding pedestrians off sidewalks and regular cyclists from bike lanes.