Where Does $9 Congestion Pricing Get Us?

Hochul at today’s press conference. Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

After five decades of debate, five years of lawmaking, and five months of an “indefinite” suspension, congestion pricing appears, improbably, to be back. Governor Kathy Hochul took to the lectern today at her midtown offices on Third Avenue to unpause the program, now with its toll set at $9 instead of $15, a 40 percent cut the governor was very eager to tout. The fee, she promised, would remain fixed for at least three years. Hochul and the aides who lined the dais promised that despite generating less revenue, the program would still provide the MTA with the legally required $15 billion and would still make a dent, though a smaller one, in midtown’s crippling traffic. There will be carve-outs for low-income workers, a discount on tunnel tolls, and a steep markdown overnight (all of which were on the old plan, too).

How does that pencil out? The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was created in the 1960s as an instrument of financial engineering — mainly so Nelson Rockefeller could evict Robert Moses from state government — and will need to do some more of that very activity. Since the money will flow in from the toll more slowly, the bonds that it pays back will either have to be issued more slowly or paid back over a longer period, or projects might be delayed, though no one would say precisely which ones or for how long. (There are other financial questions too, like: Will the $9 toll nudge fewer drivers onto the train than $15 would?)  Details were light at 633 Third Avenue.  State officials are clearly still working through the specifics, but the MTA can begin to pursue its capital plan and its major expansion projects again. The authority’s chairman, Janno Lieber, promised that the contract to begin the tunneling work for the extension of the Second Avenue Subway into East Harlem would be issued promptly.

Hochul’s “pause” to get it right — which she justified because “I heard from people who are struggling and we have to do something about that,” although some sources say she was more worried about suburban congressional races — tells us a lot. Her predecessor as governor, Andrew Cuomo, micromanaged and bullied MTA staff to the point where talent left and the system fell into disrepair; he then repeated the pattern with those he hired to clean up the mess, and the circus only stopped after he resigned. Hochul has taken the exact opposite approach, and that has had its own shortcomings: She appointed virtually every member of the panel that developed the tolling proposal, but never intervened as it crafted the $15 tolling program with which we now know she was deeply uncomfortable. It was then approved by the MTA board, where she also has tremendous sway. It got to within weeks of launch in June before Hochul’s sudden and stunning suspension because she allowed it to. Politics and policy sometimes don’t align, which is why we elect political leaders to bridge those gulfs. Her odd last-second turn left the state, its transit authority and the public in a lurch. She’s also cutting it close: President-Elect Trump wants no part of it, and will surely, vindictively, try to yank the federal matching funds if he can. And now, five months in, she’s hitting the giant erase button. It was just a dream; Bobby Ewing wasn’t actually dead. Except this isn’t a prime-time soap opera trying to write its way out of a jam. This all actually happened, and no one is going to forget it.