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
Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

Keep reading...Show less
Adaptation

Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

Keep reading...Show less
Green