New York Is Going to Court to Defend Congestion Pricing

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.