Summary
New York City has become the first U.S. city to implement a congestion charge, with car drivers paying up to $9 daily to enter areas south of Central Park.
The scheme aims to reduce traffic and fund public transport but has faced opposition, including from Donald Trump, who has vowed to overturn it.
Fees vary by vehicle type, with trucks and buses paying higher rates.
Despite legal challenges, the initiative moves forward as New York remains the world’s most congested urban area, with peak traffic speeds averaging just 11 mph.
This is great work by the city leadership. It’s taken decades to get this system in place and the city sorely needs it.
Congestion charges work. It’s not a new thing nor an untried approach to mitigating extreme congestion from unfettered use of the city streets.
The weird part about all of this, to me anyway, is that tools and congestion charges are very much an economic and Libertarian style solution, but strangely conservatives often fight them tooth and nail. Isn’t their whole schtick that the market driven solutions are best? The city owns the streets. The use of the streets are in high demand. So, the city puts a price on a resource. That’s just econ basics.
Just a slight correction to your post - it isn’t NYC leadership per se. The final call is made by the NY State governor as the MTA is regulated on the state level.
They see it as a tax. They don’t really like taxes.
And honestly there’s a fair amount of stuff in lower Manhattan that can’t be adequately serviced by public transportation. Large conventions, cruise traffic, hotels. People bring their cars to those things because they want to have more than just what they can carry with them, and when they return they don’t want to have to stand around for two to three hours to get enough trains through to disperse them back to Secaucus where they parked. (And God forbid there be a breakdown in the line right there)
If it doesn’t adequately reduce the congestion it’s just a tax. If it does adequately reduce the congestion, You’re going to put a hell of a lot of parking, hotels and convention out of business.
Congestion charges make sense when it’s congestion just for the sake of people wanting to drive, But it doesn’t solve the reasons people are driving. New York City public transportation doesn’t have the capacity to handle these big events.
I hate to be on Trump’s side with anything, but this issue needs some infrastructure changes along with the congestion tax where it’s going to be just a massive tax with no actual solution.
It’s not going to stop people driving in entirely. It’s just going to add a cost. So that people who deem the cost “worth it” can still drive in. Like those taking a cruise.
So it’s just a tax on those people for no reason. I can’t really say that I love it.
It’s a price increase to use a limited resource. That’s how markets work.
Doesn’t the congestion revenue explicitly help fund public transportation? Which would help mitigate a lot of the issues you bring up, there will for sure be growing pains but with smart decisions should adapt to the needs of traffic
How much congestion tax would it take to add a new line to New Jersey to handle the offloading of big traffic?
Looking at the numbers to fix the infrastructure, the tax is a drop in the bucket.
Yet to the businesses in the area, it’ll severely lower their income.
I’d hate to see Comic-Con leave the Javits center to move to New Jersey.
Additional tunnels are already being built as part of the Gateway Program which will double train capacity.
So put the congestion charge in once they can handle the traffic…
I lean towards libertarianism and I oppose congestion pricing because I think all the claimed benefits are just marketing and it’s simply a new tax. If it does improve conditions in Manhattan significantly, I’ll admit I was wrong.
We don’t have to guess what the future holds. London has had congestion pricing for about 22 years now. Its been largely successful.
Your article makes congestion pricing in London seem like a failure, and I would call getting those same results in New York a failure.
You might need to work on your reading comprehension.
It did what it was intended for decades, and recently the original symptom is present again. What you also apparently missed is the net total of people able to enter London has increased since then except they are largely served by 3x in pubic buses as well as 137% increase in bicycle use. So many many more people are being served in London today than they were back then, and the worst of the problem is only what it was about 22 years ago. That is an amazing success. Further, we have London to look at for an archetype for modifications to a plan for New York to possibly make it even better/longer lasting in New York than 20+ years. Even if we can’t, 20+ years for a fix for a problem of this scale is an amazing success.
Your statement alone looks comically bad. I paraphrase your response as: “We have a problem today in Manhattan which has a solution in the form of congestion pricing, but that solution will potentially need to be adjusted in 20 years time. So the best option is to NOT use the solution that will buy us two decades of a fix.”
Yeah, to be honest, that’s a crappy article from CBS. London’s Low Emission Zone is a huge success in terms of air quality and active transportation. The city has continued to pour the revenues generated from the zone fees into its public transit system, so the iconic double-decker busses run frequently all day, and they have continued to open new train lines like the Elizabeth Line. New York has never managed that level of investment, and without the income and incentives congestion pricing creates, it won’t be able to. If anything, London still prices the LEZ too low, just like NYC has priced it too low at $9, rather than the $15 was supposed to be before Gov. Hochul’s cowardice.
Hello, left-lib here, congestion pricing is just market economics at work. If you demand to drive your car into town, then the city will supply you with a drivable street, provided you will pay for such. Nobody is forcing you to drive into the city, there are viable alternatives, you’re still free to choose something else. What congestion pricing does is take crowded downtown streets (a free good, which means that demand will almost always consume all available supply) and use price pressure to reduce demand and ensure an actually useful experience for those who want to use the street.