¶ Congestion Pricing in Public Transit
Doors are closing . Public transit that's my way to roll On the metro . I'm taking control . Full throttle . Bus stops , train tracks it's my daily grind , Daily grind . Public transit , it's the rhythm of my life . Oh yeah , On this episode of Transit Tangents , we discuss New York City's plan to implement congestion pricing . What is congestion pricing ?
Why did New York's's plan to implement congestion pricing , what is congestion pricing ? Why did New York's governor pause the program and what other cities around the world use this system ? All of this and more on .
Transit Tangents . Hey everybody and welcome back to Transit Tangents . My name's Chris and I'm Lewis , and today we are diving into a topic that is highly relevant right now , and that is the MTA congestion pricing .
Right , for those of you who haven't heard , congestion Kathy over in New York has currently killed the congestion pricing for New York City . There is a chance for it to be revived at some point .
But this was a policy that was set to take place literally in the month of June , and earlier in the month of June she kind of single-handedly came out and ended it .
But before we get into the details of that , we want to kind of talk about what congestion pricing is , how it works , and fortunately for Transitangents we have a subject matter expert who is sitting directly to my left here who knows quite a bit about this sort of thing .
Yeah , I work in the industry for tolling . I work in transportation in general , but a heavy focus on tolling infrastructure . So congestion pricing is something that we've been doing for decades now and congestion pricing comes in many different forms .
It can be on an express lane , where the price of using that roadway goes up or down based on how many people are on that roadway . That's sort of a more modern use case .
But we also look at cities like what new york wants to introduce in cities like london and stockholm , which do more like a a regional congestion pricing model , which is where you would take maybe a central business district and you would toll the vehicles going in and out of that central business district based on how many people are in the district at any given
time , could be based on the time of day , sort of any of those factors .
Right , and that's kind of what was being proposed in New York here , and this would be done for the most part with cameras and whatnot , from what I understand . And this would be done for the most part with cameras and whatnot from what I understand . So , similar to to , you know , uh , tolling that you might have with easy pass .
Or , you know , maybe your state takes photos of license plates and whatnot and you'd be getting the bill in the mail . Uh , that's how this would work . Obviously , you know , picking a region of a city is trickier than just like one entry point to a roadway , so I would imagine the logistics of how that works is a lot more complicated .
Yeah , it is complicated For cities like New York . It was interesting , so just a little bit of background . I was part of a bid on this project over five years ago and it was really interesting to look at the environment we had to work with .
Everything south of 60th Street , was to be told , so that's basically everything south of Central Park , and the interesting thing about New York is that you have these sort of geographic boundaries .
You have a couple of bridges and tunnels that connect it from the east and the west , not really much to the south , and then on the north side , by Central Park , you have your series of sort of blocked off roadways , and most of those are one-way roads going in or out . So being able to toll a vehicle going into this district is relatively easy .
There's just a lot of little tolling points you have to make sure that you cover and , as you said , it would be done entirely electronically . There's no toll booth or anything .
It is just cameras on a pole that are taking photos of license plates as you go in and out , and you would receive the bill in the mail later , right , and then , depending on what the final design for this project was , which we did not advance .
So I'm not entirely clear on what the final design was , but based on the design they could change that pricing again based on time of day or how many people are entering the city right , and I want to say that this proposal was something like a $15 toll essentially for entering that zone of lower Manhattan , basically .
So , and just to give some additional context to this , isn't really a new idea in New York or elsewhere . We mentioned London and we'll get into London a little bit later in the episode just as like kind of a bit of a case study , but London has had congestion pricing for over 20 years you mentioned Stockholm , I believe as well .
Study , but uh , london has had congestion pricing for over 20 years .
Uh , you mentioned stockholm I believe is one as well .
Yeah I think singapore as well , potentially , but this isn't a new idea or concept .
It's worked in other cities , so , and it's a concept that's gaining steam like yes , more and more cities are looking at this model , and a lot of cities are looking at new york specifically to see how the implementation of this was going to go right now . Who , now , who knows what's going to happen ?
now that Kathy is canceled Right , which is pretty , it's wild for a whole bunch of reasons that we'll get into in a bit . But for the New York City case in particular , like I said , it was supposed to take effect on June 30th of this month . And before that it was actually supposed to go live about four years ago .
Right , yes , it was supposed to go live about four years ago into all of the community studies and getting community feedback and it's just kept going slower and slower and slower pandemic and you had the pandemic , you needed some federal approvals .
That weren't happening under the trump administration , so there were a series of of issues that caused this to be delayed , leading up to the new launch date , which , as you said , was supposed to be this year , and push back once more , but uh kind of for the original
¶ NYC Congestion Pricing Controversy
idea .
In new york city the 70s and 80s , there was kind of discussion about this sort of thing , uh , but nothing really set in stone uh . The first real proposals , I would say , came in 2007 from michael bloomberg . It was part of his plan new york city , uh , 2030 , and it included congestion pricing and it .
That , to me , kind of shows that this isn't some sort of like radical idea . Like mich , michael Bloomberg is the opposite of what I would describe as a radical . He's like a very like centrist kind of like figure . I don't know he's .
He's sure he really ran as a Democrat for president at one point , but he was like kind of as middle of the road as you can be in the most boring way to , I would say probably , but so you know kind of really push forward from him .
This also had the 60th street uh kind of cut off in his plan , uh , and the revenue would go to funding MTA projects , um , which is what the current system would be doing now as well If it were not blocked by Kathy Hochul uh yet again , but that's an important thing to actually mention .
We we called it the mta congestion pricing plan in the beginning , and that is truly what it was for . It was for the mta , which runs all of the trains in new york , all the the subway trains , to have additional funding .
The money that was used from cars driving into new york would literally be used for improving public transit for those who weren't using their cars and let's be very clear too , that that money for for funding the mta in new york right now is massively needed .
Uh , there is a lot of work being done to the system overall . Right now we won't get into the specifics . There's talks of of hopeful , uh , new lines and whatnot being added extensions . Um , the system really does need help , uh .
And if this congestion pricing does not eventually go through , a service will suffer for folks in new york city , which is a place where most people rely on public transit . Most people do not drive in private cars , I would say for the most part .
Driving in a private car if you live in Manhattan or even some of the closer in parts of the boroughs , is a luxury that is mostly only afforded to folks who are on the higher end of the income spectrum . So not doing this will hurt regular working class folks in New York City . No doubt in my mind , agreed , yeah .
And , as you said , it was suggested in 2007 , but Michael Bloomberg didn't really gather a lot of steam then . I think , when people started to really focus on this again and think of it as a viable way to raise money for MTA , that sort of process really started after Hurricane Sandy .
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 hit New York City very hard Tons of damage , billions and billions of dollars worth of damage in that Northeast Corridor , and New York was sort of right at the center of it . A lot of MTA tunnels were flooded , the rail lines were corroded .
The city is still reeling from that storm because there's a lot of closures that are still happening as they make upgrades to the system and try to do future weatherproofing , and so there's all kinds of side effects from the storm that are going to be addressed by this uh congestion pricing model Absolutely Uh , and you know kind of .
The current vision of this was initially uh , uh , introduced in 2017 , uh , by Andrew Cuomo , former governor of New York . Uh , at the time , Kathy Hochul was the Lieutenant governor before Andrew Cuomo , I forget all the details . He stepped down in disgrace , I don't know 't know we'll end it there .
Yeah , we'll just leave it that yep , uh .
Anyway , he put it forward with the fix in new york city advisory council who proposed the congestion pricing again . Uh , they spent the next three to four years putting all this stuff together , planning it , as you said .
You know , things were delayed and pushed back and it was all ready to roll just essentially like flip the switch for for june 30th uh , and then we get to the present day , uh , with uh , congestion , kathy hokal ending the uh , the pricing . She , she loves traffic . I don't , I don't know what it is . I made the joke .
I think she's maybe been watching too many uh of the uh cities by diana videos . I love car centric infrastructure I love car centric infrastructure .
The smell of burning fossil fuels makes my nose tickle and I feel happy and warm inside when I breathe it uh , all that sort of stuff , I don't know .
Maybe , maybe , uh , maybe that's happened , but uh , anyway . Uh , there was actually some really interesting reporting on why she flipped on this , because Kathy Hochul was speaking in support of congestion pricing up until a few months ago .
Anybody sick and tired of gridlock in New York City ? Anybody think we deserve better transit , especially those who live and work here . Anyone think that people with disabilities deserve to have more accessibility when they travel through this city ? Yes . Anybody want cleaner air for our kids and for future generations yes . Well then you love congestion pricing right ?
Yes .
There are some really good reporting from the Lever News . They're worth checking out if you're interested in . They do a lot of good job of like following money in politics . But she legitimately received $36,000 in funding from like , the car dealer lobby in the state of New York , just in the last two months leading up to this and they literally .
There was a fundraiser that was set to take place just days after she made this announcement .
Here is the actual announcement , just for the full context of how much Kathy Hochul flipped in the last six months . So let's talk about congestion pricing , which would impose a $15 charge on cars entering Midtown and below , beginning in just a few weeks weeks .
It was enacted five years ago to achieve two essential goals reduce traffic and emissions in New York City and provide a funding stream for much-needed capital investments in public transit . It was also enacted in a pre-pandemic period where workers were in the office five days a week , crime was at record lows and tourism was at record highs .
Circumstances have changed and we must respond to the facts on the ground , not from the rhetoric from five years ago . So , after careful consideration , I have come to the difficult decision that implementing the planned congestion pricing system risks too many unintended consequences for New Yorkers at this time .
Just wild to such a coincidence ? Oh yeah , I mean , yeah , she definitely wasn't changing her mind based on this at all . Right , I mean very good faith . I mean she , you know , happy to take the money , but well as reporting suggests .
It may not just be car lobbies putting a little bit of pressure on .
Right , yeah , so when you look a little further , politico also did some reporting here .
¶ Urban Congestion Pricing Benefits and Controversies
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There's been kind of like back and forth of who asked for this meeting , but there was some sort of meeting , whether it be directly between Kathy Hochul and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the US House of Representatives , that there's some concern over some House district races outside of New York City that Republicans are doing better than they ever have done in
those districts , and those would include areas where people very likely would want to drive from New York City or from outside of the city into New York and there's some concern that congestion pricing might help tip Republicans over the edge or something like that .
And it's so funny because a lot of those concerns are coming from districts that are not in New York . They're coming from , I think , new Jersey districts , and that's just amazing to me , that the interests of New Jersey are affecting the interests of New York citizens .
Right , there's been a lot of hilarious memes on Twitter . People just talking about this on Twitter saying like , yeah , Kathy Hochul is worried about losing voters from suburban New Jersey , folks in like Staten Island , who obviously Staten Island is part of New York , but like they're not voting for Kathy Hochul for the most part is what it seems like .
I'm not super up on all the New York City area politics , but they're not voting for Kathy Hochul for the most part is what it seems like . I'm not super up on all the New York City area politics .
We're not trying to push any conspiracies or anything , but there's a lot of evidence to this being very politically motivated and it's being reported in very legitimate news outlets , so definitely worth looking at , especially considering again .
Kathy Hochul is a Democrat who claims to care about the environment , who claims to care about the environment , who claims to care about all these issues and physically talked about all the positives of them just a couple months ago , yeah , and then flips on a dime for it like it came out of nowhere .
People were not expecting not , not prepared at all . Yeah , um , which led to a lot of new yorkers um , of really just all backgrounds being pretty furious about this absolutely there's .
I've seen photos and videos of protests and whatnot . People are showing up at Kathy Hochul's events and whatnot complaining about this , and it sounds so funny .
It almost sounds counterintuitive .
Right , people are upset that there's not this tolling model going into place , but the thing is , as you said , most people in New York use public transit , and most New Yorkers have been faced with delays and issues with the MTA over the last decade especially , and so this was a lifeline to MTA that was suddenly ripped away Right and again I mean this would
less cars in New York City makes it kind of like in this portion of where the congestion pricing would take place would make that area kind of better for everyone .
If you want to spend the money $15 15 isn't also isn't a crazy amount of money if you're only doing it here and there . Like that , that taking place would have less congestion , better air quality . You could have more room on the streets for better bike infrastructure , wider sidewalks , like .
Think about the amount of people walking through new york city and the amount of people sitting in their cars and also just the amount of space that that takes up . We were talking about just before this . Everyone being in a personal vehicle in a dense urban area like that is the most inefficient use of space ever .
If you want to move a lot of people around , you do it with something like public transit , with things like bikes , with making better space for walking .
It's inefficient for the individual as well , because you drive into the city , you're going to sit in traffic , you're going to be frustrated because you have to stop for pedestrians and lights and bicycle .
Yes , you're going to drive in circles looking for a parking spot .
Exactly that's what I was about to say You're going to spend over an hour looking for parking . In some cases , like , driving into New York is not necessarily a pleasant experience .
No .
So the vast majority of people that this is going to hurt are those who are already ready in and out of the city , but only using public transit . I also think about the funding that this would generate and how it could go to improving stations .
I don't know how many times I've been to New York and either an escalator's broken and there's all these signs saying you know , if you need wheelchair access , you have to go multiple blocks away to the next station , or you have to catch the bus instead of using the train there's a whole host of issues there or you have to catch the bus instead of using the
train . There's a whole host of issues there . Also , I love New York City . I love using MTA . The stations are disgusting . Yeah , they could absolutely be improved , and if a little bit of that money was going to cleaner stations .
That would be great , and those are points , too , that a lot of transit advocates in New York City are pointing out . So many stations do not have wheelchair access at all , like , let alone like , oh , it's a , it's inconvenient , they don't exist .
I saw , uh , it was a younger person who's in a wheelchair and uh , he's like there was a , it was a video , and he was . He was like this must be . Uh , this is the mta under kathy hokal . She's doing everything for for folks in wheelchairs and whatnot .
And he went down in his wheelchair down the stairs oh my god , like I mean , he was actually really talented . I'll see if I can find the video to put it here . But he's like , yeah , this is , you know , this is what it's like in in you know , the greatest city in the world , in new york city .
How we're supposed to do it , like when clearly these sorts of upgrades could have been funded , and now , instead of that , it's going to be worrying about how to just like keep the bare minimum running . Um , so we'll kind of keep an eye on it as this goes , but we do want to look .
I pulled some statistics on London just to use as a case study here , because London has had congestion pricing since 2003 . So it's been 21 years . The success of their system is pretty amazing . So people entering the central business district in London in a car is down 48% since implementation . Now , when you look at that you might be like okay , down 48% .
Like I'm curious .
It must be hurting businesses .
Right , it must be hurting businesses , right , chris ? Yes , but overall the amount of actual people entering the Central Business District is up 21% . So you have almost a 50% reduction in cars in the district , but you have an increase of 21% in the amount of people who show up , which is amazing .
And it leads to all sorts of nice things , like the air quality improving . It leads to safety improvements . You have less car crashes , which means safer for pedestrians , safer for people on bikes Literally .
When I looked at the statistics on cycling , the amount of people riding their bikes into the Central Business District tripled during this time frame and there are now almost as many people biking into the Central Business District in the morning rush hour than there are cars .
It's 39,000 bikes versus 50,000 cars , which is that's a lot , that's a lot , that's a lot , and you don't even really think about London as like a big bike city , right ?
It doesn't come to mind , right , yeah , it does not come to mind , I think , a big biking city , but that is really impressive and it's a good model to look for . This isn't just a European thing , this can be an American thing as well .
Right , and I mean , does every city need this ? Like , probably not at this stage . Right , but there are cities across the US that you know are looking for a good model to show and say , hey , we can make our city less filled with traffic . Also , we can improve the air quality in our city . We can have another mechanism to fund our public transit .
And instead , unfortunately , well , and I think , of North American cities as cities as a whole , like good candidates for this type of pricing scheme would be those that have some type of geographical constraint . So when I think of north american cities , starting at the top , I think of montreal , which most of the cities kind of on an island , same with vancouver .
Uh , go a little further south , look at seattle . It's basically built onto an isthmus right off the sound . You can very easily kind of constrain that geographically .
I think of Boston . It's on a peninsula kind of yeah .
Boston's a little bit on a peninsula , I think of San Francisco . Yeah , easy , Very easy . So there are a lot of use cases here and it doesn't have to be something that's geographically constrained .
Those are just sort of the easiest ones that I can think of that have really high population centers of that , have really high population centers , really high density , where this makes the most sense , right , um ?
well , with that , let us know what you think about this . Uh , I learned a lot about this in the last two weeks , just kind of like watching this unfold , um , and it drove me nuts to see just like it's .
It's so crazy how one person , one government official , can hold so much power on something that people spent years planning , yeah , um , and also how that person can be so for power on something that people spent years planning , and also how that person can be so for it months , just a couple of months ago and flip on a dime conveniently at the same time that
some money and some other politics are happening , drives me freaking crazy . That's what this this is the exact reason why I'm so cynical .
I was going to say it doesn't help your optimism at all .
No , this is because this is just one example . I'm so cynical I was going to say it doesn't help your optimism at all . No , no , this is because this is just one example . I find shit like this all the time . That drives me nuts . It drives me nuts . I'm congestion , kathy . Three thumbs down no .
¶ Supporting Public Transit Through Engagement
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