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“Congestion pricing” is the stuffy-sounding name of a New York policy that is, by every available metric, a resounding success. Anyone, including lapsed New Yorker President Trump, saying otherwise is simply ignoring the evidence.
Here’s the basic topline:
That last point is especially bad news for the folks like Trump who oppose the $9 toll to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan at the busiest times of day. Their arguments against congestion pricing — largely based on speculation that it would hurt businesses, when in reality even more people are visiting business districts than before — look even sillier when you consider the undeniable economic upsides.
“The impact of the congestion relief zone in the city has been immediate and positive,” Kathryn Wylde, the CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, recently told my colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn . “Congestion pricing is a market-driven user fee that allows people who opt to drive into the city to gain immediate benefits.”
Days after the president, calling himself the “king,” vowed to kill the congestion pricing program (which was met with a swift lawsuit from the city to stop him), transportation officials announced that the toll system brought in nearly $49 million in its first 27 days, putting the city well on track to meet its goal of bringing in half a billion dollars a year.
That money will pay for municipal bonds that fund urgent updates to the New York Subway, which is effectively held together with duct tape and prayers from the 3.6 million people (equal to the entire population of the state of Utah) who ride it every day.
On top of the pure economics, there’s the whole public health and safety factor.
Some key stats from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the congestion pricing program:
Sure, these are preliminary data that could change. But what New York has created — after more than a decade of planning and research — is a simple, market-based solution to a deadly problem that is expected to inconvenience a small fraction of the city’s population (The vast majority, 85%, of commutes to the congestion relief zone are taken via bus or train.) It’s the kind of local, limited government intervention that Republicans would praise –if only it had emerged from a red state.
The Trump administration didn’t respond to a request for comment on Monday’s MTA announcement.
All of this might sound like some local news griping from a disgruntled outer-borough cyclist and subway rider. But it isn’t only that. The administration’s meddling in local affairs should serve as a warning to any other American city trying to implement local solutions to local problems.
As MTA board member Neal Zuckerman noted Monday: It’s about New York, the largest municipal and regional economy in America, “having someone muck with the economic engine.”
New York is the largest single municipal economy in the country, and has historically spent far more in federal taxes than we get back from Washington. The city has created a system backed by experts to rectify a problem created by motorists who — to be clear — are offering no alternative solution to the problem they are directly responsible for.
We’re not here to play politics. We’re too busy for that. All we want is to get to and from work without hearing the words “signal malfunction,” and for anyone who doesn’t live here to leave us alone.
—CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn contributed to this article.
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