From the archives: New York’s long road to congestion pricing
The decades of work that went into getting the policy very, very close to the finish line
Ben Adler chronicles the endless struggle to bring congestion pricing to New York, for Issue 15. Read it on our website here.
It has taken almost 60 years to bring traffic congestion pricing to New York. This is the story of how politicians and advocates built the coalition it needed to finally happen.
In the 1980s, New York’s Department of Transportation held a series of public meetings open to any interested New Yorker on what to do about the city’s chronic traffic problem. ‘This older, professor-like guy attended these meetings, by the name of William Vickrey, and he kept pestering me to do congestion pricing’, said Sam Schwartz, then an official at the Department of Transportation. ‘I hadn’t heard that term before.’
The idea of congestion pricing for New York City dates back to 1952, when it was first proposed by William Vickrey, a young academic at Columbia University who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. It was an idea ahead of its time that would take decades to gain traction. This is the long and tortuous story of how, more than 70 years later, Vickrey’s congestion pricing vision may be about to become reality in New York City.
The long road to congestion pricing
New York, by far the largest and densest US city, is also the most choked by congestion. The city’s drivers lose an average of 112 hours per year to gridlock, according to the Dutch location technology firm TomTom. The next-worst US city, with 89 lost hours annually, is Los Angeles.
The costs of this inefficiency are enormous. By 2016, according to the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, one third of the 3.6 million people who traveled into Midtown and Downtown Manhattan each day were in automobiles, crawling along at less than 12 miles per hour during rush hour. The group estimates that traffic directly costs the regional economy more than $13 billion a year in lost hours and extra fuel, equivalent to more than twice the annual budget of the New York Police Department.
The knock-on effects are even greater. Cities are rich because people become more productive when they can work in a larger and deeper pool of people. Cities with slow transport have a lower effective size – although a lot of people live in the metropolitan area, it is difficult to get around to work with one another. The lack of a reliable connection to the center could be making those living in outer suburbs take worse jobs than they might otherwise get, leaving potentially tens of billions of dollars in productivity on the table.
When London introduced congestion charging in 2003, total traffic fell 18 percent, increasing road speeds and cutting air pollutants such as particulates and nitrogen oxides. Civic organizations have long advocated for similar policies in New York. By dedicating the revenue raised to bolstering New York’s struggling mass transit system, they argue, the program could allow New Yorkers to move faster on both the roads and subway.
Under state law, New York City cannot impose taxes or tolls without explicit state permission. In 2014 for example, Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators repeatedly blocked Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposed millionaires’ tax.
Previous congestion pricing proposals met a similar fate, failing to get through the state capitol. But Cuomo was eventually persuaded that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the subways, buses, and some suburban commuter rail lines, needed a new source of revenue. In 2019, at Cuomo’s behest, congestion pricing was passed into state law with a mandate to raise one billion dollars per year for the MTA’s capital improvements program.
Five years later, the system is still not in place, and New York’s traffic remains as bad as ever. While it is scheduled to roll out on June 30th, 2024, legal challenges could yet derail it.
‘I’m giving it a 70 percent chance at this point’, said state senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat from Manhattan who has supported congestion pricing since Mayor Michael Bloomberg first proposed it in 2007.
These delays in implementation are minor compared to the almost 50 years that elapsed between the first time the New York City government proposed congestion charges and when the state finally authorized them. Congestion pricing didn’t pass the New York State legislature until its fifth attempt.
New York’s long, winding road to congestion pricing contains lessons for other cities around the world that may want to follow suit. You can’t take the politics out of policy, you need to offer the communities that will be paying more something in return, and that something must involve a cut of the revenue rather than merely easing traffic.
You can read the rest of the piece here.