Here's What You Need To Know About Congestion Pricing

The idea of charging drivers to drive on Manhattan’s busiest streets to ease traffic congestion has been talked about by politicians going back to the Lindsay administration in the 1960s. But it was Governor Andrew Cuomo who managed to get a plan approved in the state budget earlier this month. Now, New York City is poised to become the first city in the country to get congestion pricing, but the plan is already being attacked. New Jersey politicians are threatening to withhold funding from New York. The police union wants tens of thousands of NYPD officers exempt from it. And at least one Queens Senator thinks more should be done to give those drivers a break.

But the governor’s congestion pricing plan is still being hashed out. Here’s what we know, don’t know, and need to know before it goes into effect.

Where will you have to pay to drive?

The tolling zone will be everything in Manhattan below 60th Street, excluding the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway.

How much will it cost?

We don’t know, yet. But if the plan is expected to generate $1 billion a year, then the charge could be as low as $11 for cars, and as high as $25 for trucks. Drivers in the zone would be charged just once a day. And the toll is expected to be variable—higher during peak commuting time, and less during off hours.

Why are we doing this again?

Money, mostly. The MTA desperately needs cash for its $40 billion plan to modernize the signals, improve buses, and make the system almost fully accessible.

Congestion pricing is expected to generate $1 billion a year, which the MTA would use to secure $15 billion in bonds.

Vehicular congestion also costs the local economy $9 billion every year, so in some ways, reducing traffic through congestion pricing could save New Yorkers money.

(Clarisa Diaz, WNYC/Gothamist)

Will congestion pricing have any other effects on pollution?

The entire state report outlining the vision for congestion pricing barely mentions the environmental impacts, other than to note that trucks wear down the roads faster than cars, and to quote an environmentalist that notes NYC already has, “the smallest carbon footprint of any city in the United States and one of the smallest in the world.” So, the short answer is, probably. (Transportation economist Charles Komanoff has a good look at the environmental benefits here.) But that’s not really the argument anyone is making.

How will drivers be charged—like an E-Z Pass?

That is one idea. It’s still not clear what technology the MTA will go with, but Singapore, which has had congestion pricing since 1975, is exploring using satellites and GPS to collect tolls. The MTA already uses license plate readers to collect tolls, so it may just use that.

When will it start?

December 2020 or early 2021. (Yes, the timing—after the November elections—is intentional.)

Who’s in charge?

The MTA’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA or just Bridges and Tunnels) department will run the program and make the final decisions. There will also be a six member unpaid board that advises the TBTA on everything from prices of tolls, to who gets exempt.

Who’s on that board you ask? One member will be appointed by the mayor of New York, one will be from Long Island, and one from the Hudson Valley. The other three will presumably come from the MTA or the governor.

Don’t taxis and for hire vehicles already pay a congestion pricing toll? How’s that going?

True, in February of this year taxis began charging riders an extra $2.50, and for-hire vehicles $2.75 for a “congestion pricing” fee. This fee alone is expected to generate $1 million a day, which goes to the MTA. While yellow cab drivers have complained that the fee has resulted in fewer rides, the monthly data from the city didn’t show any major change in ridership in the first month. The Daily News reports that Uber and Lyft rides have continued to grow even after the fees were instituted.

It remains unclear whether taxis and for-hire vehicles will continue to pay the congestion charge they currently pay, or whether they’ll be subject to the same fee as everyone else. That will be up to the MTA now.

Wait, is there a good audio version of all this, that I could just listen to?

Yes!

Will anyone be exempt from congestion pricing?

Currently, emergency vehicles and drivers transporting disabled passengers are exempt. Manhattan residents making less than $60,000 a year would receive a tax credit.

But car-owning Manhattan residents who live below 60th Street are clamoring for exemptions, as are outer-borough politicians looking to score points with their constituents.

“I am sensitive to the fact that folks who live in that zone, we have to accommodate them in whatever way is appropriate while keeping the integrity of the whole notion of congestion pricing,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters recently, seemingly opening the door to more exemptions. “We are going to have to strike that balance.”

In a statement, Staten Island Borough President Jimmy Oddo and Rep. Max Rose said they “agree that New York City needs timely and significant investments to our transportation system.”

“However, our constituents are angry and frustrated to see plans to generate revenues for these investments go forward without assurances that we will be spared additional financial hardship,” the statement continues.

Queens State Senator James Sanders Jr. told his constituents after the budget was passed that he would continue to fight for exemptions. "More work needs to be done to lessen the impact on Queens' motorists commuting into Manhattan, south of 60th Street," he said in a statement.

Also, the NYPD’s biggest police union wants every officer to be exempt.

Will drivers who already pay a toll coming into the city on, say, the George Washington Bridge, Holland Tunnel, Lincoln Tunnel, etc. get a break?

Right now, the answer is no. The six member panel will decide all that. But New Jersey politicians aren’t waiting around for them to decide.

Speaking on WNYC, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, expressed concern about drivers switching to his state’s badly underfunded public transportation system.

“Systems that we are desperately, giving what we've inherited, working on getting back on our feet. The last thing we needs is that kind of shock to the system...for all those reasons we can’t let that stand.”

Two NJ congressman announced this week that they plan to introduce a bill that would deny federal transportation funding to New York state if Jersey drivers aren’t exempt.

That sounds like a threat. What does the MTA say about that?

MTA Chairman Pat Foye: "If people from New York state are using facilities and entering the cordon and paying it, surely people from Missouri and Illinois and New Jersey should pay it as well. That seems to me a common sense answer."

New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica told the New York Times that “New Jersey commuters aren’t being treated any differently. They’re being treated the same as everyone else driving into the Central Business District.”

What other cities outside of the U.S. have congestion pricing?

London, Stockholm, Singapore, Milan.

Who came up with the idea of congestion pricing in the first place?

It was a New Yorker! Sorta. Canadian-born, but Columbia University professor William Vickery. He won the Nobel Prize in 1996 for economics. He and had the idea for variable tolling. It was also New York traffic planner Sam Schwartz who came up the term “gridlock.” So, New Yorkers invented congestion pricing, coined the term for what happens when traffic goes unchecked. And now, in 2019 New York is becoming the first U.S. city to do something about it.

How do I know when politicians and the MTA are talking about congestion pricing?

They probably won’t call it “congestion pricing,” but may refer to it as “Central Business District Tolling.”

What's left?

The biggest questions remaining are: How much will the tolls be? Who will get carve-outs?

But we won’t know until the MTA’s six-member congestion pricing panel is created next year, and even then, they’ll likely punt the hardest decisions 'til the 11th hour, after the November election.

Stephen Nessen is the transportation reporter for WNYC. You can follow him on Twitter @s_nessen.

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