Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at the ripple effects of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to put congestion pricing on an indefinite hold.
The fallout from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s unexpected halt to the congestion pricing program for Manhattan is continuing. What was supposed to be a major win for mass transit has become a cautionary tale that has raised questions about whether New York is still willing to try ambitious new ways of doing things. That’s an idea that I wanted to discuss with Michael Kimmelman, The Times’s architecture critic.
First let’s talk about why congestion pricing would have been a benefit, not an economic threat, as Hochul said when she put it on indefinite hold.
New York has spent the better part of half a century trying to figure out how to deal with traffic and congestion — and in the process, to capitalize on that traffic to benefit people who take public transit, which is most people in the city.
Yes, there are lower-income people in the city who own cars, some who live in underserved parts of town that subways don’t reach because New York basically stopped expanding the public transit network years ago. But the fact is that those earning less than $60,000 who have cars constitute a vanishingly small percentage of drivers into what would have been Manhattan’s congestion toll zone below 60th Street. And they would have been exempt from the tolls.
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