Had Andrew Cuomo still been governor, congestion pricing would already have been scuttled. Now in exile, and hoping to somehow claw his way back into politics, Cuomo editorialized months ago against the very legislation he signed into law, back in 2019. But unlike his successor, Kathy Hochul, who shocked the political world by halting, last week, the implementation of congestion pricing, Cuomo would have been cleverer and more cutthroat about smothering an initiative he never much wanted. The tolling cameras, which would charge motorists $15 to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street on weekdays, were set to be turned on June 30; there is little chance that Cuomo would have come so close to the deadline — he would have pulled the plug before spending $507 million on tolling cameras.
And that’s the trouble for Hochul. By halting a program that would have discouraged automobiles from entering Manhattan’s core while raising $1 billion a year to help fund mass transit, she’s managed to make herself look feckless, even if she’s getting a temporary boost from the many outer-borough and suburban residents who hated congestion pricing. When it came to killing the tolls, bipartisanship wasn’t dead. Phil Murphy, the liberal Democratic governor of New Jersey, was happy to be on the same side as Nicole Malliotakis, the Trump-supporting Republican congresswoman from Staten Island. The United Federation of Teachers teamed up with Vito Fossella, the Republican Staten Island borough president, on a lawsuit; Democratic congressional candidates in the Hudson Valley and Long Island were as opposed to congestion pricing as Republicans.
Hochul panicked, seemingly goaded on by Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a Brooklyn Democrat, who was worried that new tolls could drag down his candidates in the suburbs.
This was unfortunate, if predictable — new tolls are never going to poll well, and they’ll only poll worse if politicians and advocates don’t figure out how to sell them to the public. And no one did. “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, a leading transportation expert, backed the Move NY proposal, which would have added tolls to the free East River crossings — the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the Ed Koch-Queensboro Bridge — and lowered tolls on other outer-borough crossings, including the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island. Cuomo and the Democratic legislature did not embrace this plan, instead establishing a blanket toll south of 60th Street and charging motorists twice who traveled through tolled tunnels. A New Jersey commuter who paid to enter the Lincoln Tunnel would pay again once in the congestion zone — this never made a great deal of sense.
Hochul’s decision to pause congestion pricing has blown a massive hole in the MTA’s capital budget. The transportation authority could be short as much as $15 billion for the rest of the decade — congestion pricing was going to allow it to borrow more money — and certain infrastructure projects that were in the pipeline, such as much-needed signal upgrades for popular subway lines and the expansion of the Second Avenue subway to East Harlem, are now in jeopardy.
Remarkably, Hochul had no serious plan B, no feasible idea for what would replace this revenue. The state legislature was days away from ending the legislative session, and not returning until January. Somehow, Hochul thought she could kill congestion pricing and hustle the Democrats there to pass a bill replacing the funding stream within a few short days. They understandably balked, especially when Hochul pitched a politically toxic tax hike on New York City businesses. The chairwoman of the State Senate’s finance committee, Liz Krueger, is a strong supporter of congestion pricing, and Hochul never seemed to have considered this as she pondered new legislation related to tax hikes or revenue streams.
Now what? Hochul has talked up buttressing the MTA with state reserves, but this also appears to be a nonstarter. State lawmakers are headed home. Hochul could call a special session later in the summer and fall and try, with her limited political ability, to force the legislators to do something. How she’ll succeed is anyone’s guess. If Hochul never wanted to oversee congestion pricing — if she hated how unpopular it seemed — she could have announced a year ago that she was abandoning it for an alternative plan to cut down on traffic and raise cash for the MTA. She could have collaborated with the legislature. Instead, she panicked, seemingly goaded on by Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a Brooklyn Democrat, who was worried that new tolls could drag down his candidates in the suburbs. Perhaps Hochul bailed out the Democrats in Congress. She has done this, though, at the expense of statewide transit and the environment. Maybe she’s comfortable with that tradeoff.
Given that no alternative funding proposals exist for the MTA, it’s not impossible, after November, for Hochul to bring congestion pricing back, possibly adding in new concessions for motorists. In the meantime, she will face lawsuits from transit advocates, including City Comptroller Brad Lander, who feel that she has no legal standing to abandon congestion pricing — that the law mandates she implements it. It’s unclear if they’ll succeed since Cuomo was savvy and cynical enough never to write a start date into the legislation. He foresaw much of this, as a master of triangulation and sabotage; this was the same governor who created a commission to investigate corruption in state government, only to kill it when the commission asked too many questions of the executive branch. He knew how to stab in the back. Hochul only knows the front way in. ❖
Ross Barkan is a writer from New York City.
