Congestion pricing is ‘thriving' in New York City — but can it survive Trump?

The Guardian

6 hours ago

Every week, Stan Avedon drives across lower Manhattan, moving bikes between the two NYC Velo shops he's managed for the last 15 years. What used to be a grinding crawl through some of the world's worst traffic is noticeably less painful lately. 'It's like night and day,' he said.
Avedon's transformed commute is the result of the most ambitious policy to hit New York in recent memory. Starting 5 January, drivers entering lower Manhattan began paying a $9 congestiontoll aimed at deterring drivers and raise desperately needed funds for the city's deteriorating public transit system.
Avedon doesn't mind being charged for his newly gained time. 'As a motorist, it's like the price of gas goes up. The cost to be in the city goes up.'
For decades, New York lawmakers have proposed plans for a congestion zone where drivers would have to pay a fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan as a means of funding public transit. The idea was first floated in 1952, but it wasn't until 2007 that then-mayor Michael Bloomberg took a plan to Albany, where it was rejected by state legislators.
At every turn, the attempts to introduce congestion pricing have been met with acrimony both sweeping and strange: accusations that congestion pricing is a 'plumber's tax' on blue-collar workers that wasn't democratically decided, a cynical cash grab by a mismanaged Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), or a scheme that will flood outer-borough streets with displaced traffic. Critics have warned of economic fallout, calling the toll elitist.
Despite these objections, the program finally received federal approval in 2023 under the New York governor, Kathy Hochul. It seemed as though congestion pricing might finally happen. However, just days before the program was set to begin in June 2024, Hochul paused implementation, fearing a political fallout. She quickly reinstated the policy after the November 2024 election, with the toll reduced from $15 to $9.
Six months since the tolls switched on, the early results suggest congestion pricing works. Yet the policy, 75 years in the making, almost never happened and is still being threatened by a Trump administration eager to terminate the program and to exert control over the president's home town.
The aim of congestion pricing is twofold: to reduce the number of cars on the road, easing traffic and pollution, and to raise sorely needed funds for the city's ailing public transit network. Manhattan boasts the densest transit network in the western hemisphere, but its subway signals are nearly a century old and its dedicated bus lanes relatively scarce. Millions rely on public transit daily, yet over 25% of trains and buses are delayed, and the system remains short of legally mandated elevators at dozens of stations.
The congestion toll is expected to raise $500m annually – funds earmarked for long overdue upgrades. So far, revenue is on target. While it will take time for these investments to reach riders, they are expected to make daily commutes faster and more reliable for residents across the city. And in the long term, easing congestion on Manhattan's streets could pave the way for new bike lanes, expanded pedestrian zones, and dedicated bus corridors that could transform how New Yorkers get around.
In the meantime, public transit ridership has reached its highest level since the pandemic. Buses are moving up to 20 percent faster on routes through Manhattan. 'We campaigned for congestion pricing to fix the subway,' said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director at the grassroots organization Riders Alliance. 'But what it's doing right now, most notably, is speeding up some of the worst and slowest and least reliable bus commutes in the United States.'
'People taking very long distance commuter buses, getting up at 5 in the morning, spending a couple hours on the bus, some of them are shaving off 10 or 15 minutes in each direction every day,' Pearlstein said. 'That's incredibly precious time back in their lives, and they're paying nothing for it.'
So are more people just paying to drive, or is congestion actually down? Since January, an average of 70,000 fewer vehicles have entered the congestion zone each day, according to the MTA. That translates to roughly 2m fewer cars on the road every month. Traffic is down moderately; vehicles are moving between 5 and 10% faster during peak hours in 2025 compared with the same period last year.
While it's still too early to draw firm conclusions about the policy's environmental impact, early comparisons with London offer a hint of what may be in store. Within the first year of implementing congestion pricing, CO2 emissions fell by 15.7%, according to an estimation by Transport for London.
Even without hard local data yet, Sam Schwartz, a traffic engineer and former city traffic commissioner, argues the logic is clear: 'If you have fewer vehicles moving at a faster speed, idling less, then there's less pollution.'
There have been other immediate effects. Noise complaints along Manhattan's busiest streets have dropped by 70%. 'There's less frenetic energy on the streets than there was before,' noticed Stan Avedon, the manager from NYC Velo.
Perhaps the most dramatic transformation has occurred outside the toll zone. In Queens, traffic crashes in Astoria and Long Island City have fallen by 27%, with injuries down 31.4%. The reason, Schwartz says, is geographical.
'It's no surprise to me that Long Island City and Astoria would be the biggest beneficiaries of congestion pricing,' he said. That part of Queens is served by three crossings into Manhattan within a short distance but previously, only one, the Queensboro Bridge, was toll-free. Now, with tolls applied regardless of the entry point, more drivers are staying on the highway instead of diverting through local streets to avoid charges.
While new to the US, congestion pricing has worked for decades in cities like London, Stockholm and Singapore. The policy faces early opposition everywhere, but quickly blends into the urban fabric and gains support as its benefits become visible.
New York is following a similar path. As implementation neared post-pandemic, suburban politicians began to push back, arguing the new toll would hit working class commuters hardest amid steep inflation and anxiety over the cost of living.
That line of attack was familiar to those who had long followed the debate. '[The opposition's] argument boiled down to: poorer drivers are going to be affected by this,' said Gersh Kuntzman, the editor-in-chief of Streetsblog NYC, a local outlet dedicated to covering mobility in the city. 'That's a classic political misdirect that we at Streetsblog are constantly pushing back on, because it's an inherent lie that opponents of congestion pricing are speaking on behalf of the working man, the working woman of New York City. All of the studies of census data and mobility data show that the vast majority of people who are subject to the toll are significantly wealthier than their transit-using neighbors.'
The numbers bear that out. For every low-income driver forced to pay the toll, 50 low-income New Yorkers will benefit from the toll through improved public transit, according to an analysis by the Community Service Society.
And many of the fears surrounding congestion pricing's unintended consequences have not materialized. Preliminary data shows no increase in truck traffic in the Bronx, where advocates worried about spillover congestion and pollution if drivers sought to skirt the tolled zone.
Concerns that riders would abandon taxis to avoid the added $0.75 congestion fee have also proven unfounded. January was the most prosperous month for taxis since the pandemic began, with trips up 19% within the toll zone. Uber and Lyft trips have held steady.
Fears about wider economic impacts haven't come to pass either. 'Restaurants and Broadway ticket sales are up. Business is up. Commercial leasing is up. All of these things that people were concerned about really haven't come to pass, and all of the benefits that people were hoping would appear have, in fact, come to pass,' said Ben Furnas, executive director of advocacy nonprofit Transportation Alternatives.
Though experts generally agree the program is an early success, plenty of hostility toward the toll remains. A daily driver from New Jersey expressed her discontent as she exited her vehicle on the way to work downtown: 'I hate it. I hate having to pay, and traffic is exactly the same.' A number of other drivers told the Guardian they felt traffic hadn't changed.
For a policy this ambitious, it's not surprising that the response is not unanimous. But what was once enormously contentious has largely been accepted as a fact of life. Public sentiment has greatly improved since it was installed – jumping 10 points in approval ratings in one Sienna College Research Institute poll to 42% in March. Now, some of the strongest support comes from the very drivers most affected, with 66% of those entering the toll multiple times a week backing the toll, according to a poll by Morning Consult.
'What was surprising to people who hadn't been paying attention was how quickly it worked. And that's why everyone I know has a story, or many stories, of people who said 'I didn't think it would make a difference, or I outright opposed it, but now I support it,'' said Pearlstein.
Despite its success, the program has drawn fierce opposition from conservatives. President Trump and his Department of Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, are leading efforts to revoke the federal approval granted in 2023 under Joe Biden. 'CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,' Donald Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social back in February. 'Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!'
The federal government's sudden pivot is less about policy than politics. 'Federal bureaucrats have trashed the program because they don't want to see Democratic leaders succeed in adopting a policy that works,' said Pearlstein.
The feeling from Washington to Wall Street is that Trump has already lost the fight. 'Everything we've seen suggests that congestive pricing is here to stay. From the fact that the federal attorneys leaked accidentally an internal memo explaining how weak their case was because it's based on outlandish arguments, and most recently, that the MTA was able to sell half a billion dollars in bonds backed by toll revenue because the bond market is confident that the fee is here to stay.'
If the program is pulled, it would leave a $15bn hole in the MTA's capital budget, potentially forcing alternatives like a new business payroll tax or a broader sales tax.
But the stakes go beyond funding, to a battle over states' rights and the limits of federal power.
'A really big issue is at stake that is so much bigger than congestion pricing: can the federal government, after giving approval to something that was undertaken under one set of rules, suddenly, upon a change of administration, withdraw that approval?' noted Kuntzman. 'If that becomes a precedent, there's a potential for a real logjam of stuff getting done in this country.'
The Trump administration's most recent salvo to gut the program has been blocked by a court's temporary injunction. In the meantime, New York still faces a slew of lawsuits from outside the city and in New Jersey. For now, the MTA is successfully fighting them off.
'Congestion pricing isn't just surviving, it's thriving. We're pleased that Judge Liman has put a stop to threats by Washington intended to deprive New Yorkers of the benefits of the program–less traffic, safer streets, cleaner air, and better transit,' said the MTA's chair and CEO, Janno Lieber, in a statement.
'It's been a success. It's not going to be taken out without a lot of people complaining. There are lives that have been saved and people who didn't get injured, there's property that didn't get damaged, there are lungs that didn't get polluted. All of those things are benefits that we're reaping from this,' said Schwartz.