Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

New York Is Going to Court to Defend Congestion Pricing

Trump called himself “king” and tried to kill the program, but it might not be so simple.

A Manhattan toll sign.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration will try to kill congestion pricing, the first-in-the-nation program that charged cars and trucks up to $9 to enter Manhattan’s traffic-clogged downtown core.

In an exclusive story given to the New York Post, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that he would rescind the U.S. Transportation Department’s approval of the pricing regime.

“The toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways,” Duffy told the Post.

He did not specify an end date for the program, but said that he would work with New York to achieve an “orderly termination” of the tolls. But it’s not clear that he can unilaterally end congestion pricing — and in any case, New York is not eager to work with him to do so.

The attempted cancellation adds another chapter to the decades-long saga over whether to implement road pricing in downtown New York. And it represents another front in the Trump administration’s war on virtually any policy that reduces fossil fuel use and cuts pollution from the transportation sector, the most carbon-intensive sector in the U.S. economy.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” Trump posted on Truth Social, the social network that he owns. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

The Metropolitan Transit Authority, the state agency that oversees New York’s tolling and transit system, has filed to block the cancellation in court. In a statement, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that Trump didn’t have the authority to kill the tolling program.

“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” Hochul said. “We’ll see you in court.”

Since it started on January 5, congestion pricing has charged drivers up to $9 to drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street. With its launch, New York joined a small set of world capitals — including London, Singapore, and Stockholm — to use road pricing in its central business district.

Even in its first weeks in Gotham, congestion pricing had seemingly proven successful at its main goal: cutting down on traffic. Travel times to enter Manhattan have fallen and in some cases — such as driving into the Holland Tunnel from New Jersey — have been cut in half during rush hour, according to an online tracker built by economics researchers that uses Google Maps data.

Anecdotally, drivers have reported faster drive times within the city and much less honking overall. (I can affirm that downtown is much quieter now.) City buses zoomed through their routes, at times having to pause at certain stops in order to keep from running ahead of their schedules.

The program has been so successful that it had even begun to turn around in public polling. Although congestion pricing was incredibly unpopular during its long gestation, a majority of New Yorkers now support the program. In early February, six of 10 New Yorkers said that they thought Trump should keep the program and not kill it, according to a Morning Consult poll.

That matches a pattern seen in other cities that adopt congestion pricing, where most voters hate the program until they see that it successfully improves travel times and reduces traffic.

While Trump might now be claiming regal powers to block the program, the toll’s origin story has been democratic to a fault. Although congestion pricing has been proposed in New York for decades, the state’s legislature approved the program in 2019 as part of its long-running search for a permanent source of funding for the city’s trains and buses.

The federal government then studied the program for half a decade, first under Trump, then under Biden, generating thousands upon thousands of pages of environmental and legal review. At long last, the Biden administration granted final approval for the program last year.

But then congestion pricing had to clear another hurdle. In June, Hochul paused the program at the last moment, hoping to find another source of permanent funding for the city’s public transit system.

She didn’t. In November, she announced that the program would go into effect in the new year.

It’s not clear whether the Trump administration can actually kill congestion pricing. When the Biden administration approved the program, it did so essentially as a one-time finding. Duffy may not be able to revoke that finding — just like you can’t un-sign a contract that you’ve already agreed to.

In his letter to Hochul, Duffy argues that congestion pricing breaks a longstanding norm that federally funded highways should not be tolled. “The construction of federal-aid highways as a toll-free highway system has long been one of the most basic and fundamental tenets of the federal-aid Highway Program,” he says.

That argument is surprising because federal highways in Manhattan — such as the West Side Highway — are excluded from the toll by design. Drivers only incur the $9 charge when they leave highways and enter Manhattan’s street grid. And drivers can use the interstate highway system but avoid the congestion charge by entering uptown Manhattan through Interstate 95 and then parking north of 60th Street.

Duffy also argues that the tolling program is chiefly meant to raise revenue for the MTA, not reduce congestion. The federal government’s approval of pilot congestion pricing programs is aimed at cutting traffic, he says, not raising revenue for state agencies.

In its lawsuit, the MTA asserts that Duffy does not have the right to revoke the agreement. It also says that he must conduct the same degree of environmental review to kill the program that the first Trump administration required when the program was originally proposed.

“The status quo is that Congestion Pricing continues, and unless and until a court orders otherwise, plaintiffs will continue to operate the program as required by New York law,” the MTA’s brief says.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate

AM Briefing: The Greenpeace Verdict

On Energy Transfer’s legal win, battery storage, and the Cybertruck

The Greenpeace Verdict Is In
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Red flag warnings are in place for much of Florida • Spain is bracing for extreme rainfall from Storm Martinho, the fourth named storm in less than two weeks • Today marks the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Jury sides with pipeline company in Greenpeace lawsuit

A jury has ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to one of the country’s largest fossil fuel infrastructure companies after finding the environmental group liable for defamation, conspiracy, and physical damages at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace participated in large protests, some violent and disruptive, at the pipeline in 2016, though it has maintained that its involvement was insignificant and came at the request of the local Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project eventually went ahead and is operational today, but Texas-based Energy Transfer sued the environmental organization, accusing it of inciting the uprising and encouraging violence. “We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal counsel for Greenpeace USA. The group said it plans to appeal.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Fusion.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Thea Energy

Thea Energy, one of the newer entrants into the red-hot fusion energy space, raised $20 million last year as investors took a bet on the physics behind the company’s novel approach to creating magnetic fields. Today, in a paper being submitted for peer review, Thea announced that its theoretical science actually works in the real world. The company’s CEO, Brian Berzin, told me that Thea achieved this milestone “quicker and for less capital than we thought,” something that’s rare in an industry long-mocked for perpetually being 30 years away.

Thea is building a stellarator fusion reactor, which typically looks like a twisted version of the more common donut-shaped tokamak. But as Berzin explained to me, Thea’s stellarator is designed to be simpler to manufacture than the industry standard. “We don’t like high tech stuff,” Berzin told me — a statement that sounds equally anathema to industry norms as the idea of a fusion project running ahead of schedule. “We like stuff that can be stamped and forged and have simple manufacturing processes.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Electric Vehicles

Why BYD Keeps Shocking the World

The Chinese carmaker says it can charge EVs in 5 minutes. Can America ever catch up?

The BYD logo as a rabbit.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Chinese automaker BYD might have cracked one of the toughest problems in electric cars.

On Tuesday, BYD unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes. That’s made possible because of a 1,000-volt architecture and what BYD describes as matching charging capability, which could theoretically add nearly one mile of range every second.

Keep reading...Show less