While I'm forced by events to second your assessment of Hochul, I don't share your assessment that a compelling political case wasn't made for congestion pricing. The case may have been imperfectly framed -- I've argued since Bloomberg's try that the emphasis should have been on saving *time* (all those "NY minutes" wasted in snarled traffic and stuck or late-arriving trains) rather than on pollution and climate. But IMO it was still strong enough. I detected no revolt, incipient or otherwise. Hochul and Jeffries and whoever only had to hang on for 25 more days and then bingo, the switch would be pulled, traffic would ease somewhat, the revenue would start coming in, and NY would reset. November would turn on other ills, imagined or real. The fault, dear Barkan, was in centrist Dems' cowardice.
I do appreciate your pointing out the double-tolling absurdity. My bad for leaving it out of the package of CP modifications I (futilely, no doubt) posted on Streetsblog in the middle of Tuesday night - Wed morning -- which was ironic b/c I may have been the one to first alert you to that problem. Well played by you now.
I think a political case had to be made in the public with politicians like Hochul boosting and championing the idea, along with Lieber. The MTA tried but critics always had the upper hand.
Those demolished elevated line were supposed to be replaced by subway lines. For example, the 3rd Ave "el" was to be replaced with a 2nd Ave subway extending to the Bronx years ago. Now there are no longer any plans to do so.
Hochul was plucked from obscurity by Cuomo *precisely because* she is an incompetent, charisma-free nonentity who would never be threat to him. No surprise that is what she is as governor! The really pathetic thing is she was able to cruise to election (in the primary, at least).
I'm a little skeptical of congestion tolling in our current economy (brutal capitalism) from a socialist perspective. It seems like something that would start a yellow vest revolt. User taxing our way to green, livable cities seems like a bad way to do things. Rather than targeting drivers, tax the wealthy, tax wall street, and start rebuilding mass transit. Offer free mass transit and build good parking outside of the city for visitors (think theme park).
The subways certainly need serious improvements, repairs, upgrades, expansions, and the like, but it seems that no matter how much money goes towards the MTA, none of those things happen. I'm not optimistic that congestion pricing would have changed that at all.
Plenty of low-stress, low-impact, high-paying jobs — filled with nephews, cousins, brothers, and business partners' kids — to talk about expanding, repairing and improving the subways would've been created. Maybe a few environmental impact reports would be released in a decade or so?
This is an unpopular but correct opinion that progressives are leaving unaddressed in their outrage towards Hochul. Yes, it was cowardly to pull the plug at the last minute after a decade of process, but there have always been reasons for skepticism that New Yorkers would see the benefits of congestion pricing for years, if ever.
I would have been more in favor of channeling the revenues into specific new bus lines and more frequent subway service, which you can do in an operating budget.
At this point, all NYers should be supremely pissed at the politicians in the surrounding suburbs. They are the reasons why the city is not getting congestion pricing AND affordable housing. When they blocked new housing development, Hochul had no choice but to spur development on toxic, floodprone, land in Gowanus, Brooklyn and where most of it won't even be affordable. And now those same counties, who blocked the creation of denser housing and transit centers, are getting their way, and maintaining their car obsessed lifestyle at the expense of all city residents who live here b/c they don't need their cars and believe that dense urban planning is part of the solution to the climate crisis. But we can't do it all. The rest of NY needs to get with the program instead of destroying it.
One of the issues is that the answer to these problems is always have regular people pay more money. For more street space, fewer cars, and cleaner air we will tax small business, truckers, and any regular person who doesn't want to take the train.
"It's a negligible amount and they can afford it". This kind of sloppy and arrogant sounding reasoning is where this new left leaning / democrat mindset fails. We used to try to make things more affordable, and have Organized Power pay the price - not a Bronx resident like me who is being told (again) that he can 'afford' the new tax.
The unintended consequences of something like congestion pricing are never taken into account.
As a sporadic visitor to Manhattan, I have found the most obvious cause of congestion (mostly on streets, not avenues) are trucks. With available electronics, trucks could be charged a modest fee of, say, $25 to use the streets between 7 am and 7pm, incentivizing “off hour” night time deliveries. Obviously, details to be pragmatically adjusted.
Never really cared about congestion pricing (I don't drive), but simply wanted people shut up about it after all these years. Either way, I agree with your broader point on Hochul who is just showing herself to be a bad politician and combined with Adams there's no wonder no political group is happen with government in our state. They promise little and give less.
I appreciate that you mention the MoveNY plan, which was how this scheme was pitched to the outer boroughs. In exchange for charging to enter the "CBD" (a term never used before this campaign), outer borough drivers were being offered reductions to other tolls, such as the Whitestone and Throggs Neck Bridge. This plan disappeared as soon as congestion pricing was snuck into the 2019 budget.
That being said, there were a lot of flaws to congestion pricing and they were never addressed, and I am personally glad it is finished (hopefully forever).
First, it overreached in terms of the times it would have ben active (making it look like a cash grab instead of an environmental improvement program). Having it go until 9pm and even on weekends struck people the wrong way. On a normal weeknight after 7pm and most weekends, I could drIve into Manhattan from Pelham Bay in the Bronx in about 25 minutes. Taking the 6 train would take over an hour and cost over $23 round trip to take a family of 4 on the subway (and possibly way more should you want to make a lot of stops in Manhattan).
Second, for hire vehicles are the reason for any increased Manhattan congestion in the last decade. Yet we all know that these companies lobbied for congestion pricing, and funded many of the "Activists" working for it. A reduction of these unregulated vehicles was not on the table.
Third, the MTAs own assessment showed increased traffic ,as a result, in the outer boroughs, especially the Bronx, which already suffers from high asthma rates. The electeds faked concerns and promised "mitigation", yet what did they end up with? Money for asthma centers! That is the most insulting part of this all. They basically hinted that increased sickness in the Bronx is an acceptable price for less cars in Chelsea. This from people who liked to call for "environmental justice" in the past. They threw that out the window to ensure that the rich part of NYC had less cars and people from the hyper gentrified areas right outside the CBD in Brooklyn and Queens would be able to ride their bikes into this area in peace.
I am glad Hochul understood this and took action. There are other ways to fund transit. I am a daily subway rider on weekdays so understand the need for a strong transit system. Hopefully this forces the city and state to look for more effective and progressive ways to fund the MTA.
I fail to see why the neoliberalism of charging individuals differentially to use a common good (roads) is a live argument. (Similarly, why would NYC residents' being domiciled across a waterway with a bridge or tunnel to Manhattan justify charging those hapless "outerborough" residents to enter that borough while those who live where they can enter the CBD without crossing a bridge would not be so charged? I'm surprised you were in favor of it when that was the thing before congestion reared its ugly head.) Hochul is all the things you say, but I and my neighbors are against congestion pricing--even though in my case, the only time I drive into Manhattan from my Brooklyn redoubt is to cover the few blocks between the 59th Street Bridge and the FDR heading to or from the GWB, for which I will be charged full freight.
I am interested to see the univocality of reports on things like congestion pricing. Powerfully placed advocates, augmented by young, unofficial shock corps like those organized by Transportation Alternatives and driven by Streets Blog, dominate the narrative, and the voices of opposition are dismissed and disrespected—and never quoted. (This has recently occurred with the conversion of McGuinness Boulevard into a 2-lane road to favor bike travel, without a serious, block-by-block analysis of road safety or the effect on residents needing to enter or leave vehicles, receive deliveries, set out trash, not to mention parking— McGuinness is a residential street, not just a route needing 'calming', whose residents are increasing by the hundreds every year thanks to luxury high-rise development. Opposition by residents is treated as selfish or childishly deluded- by bogus arguments of secret donors to the mayor—while proponents have a painfully sentimentalized bullshit narrative, unabashed scorn and derision, or, rarely, the usual air-pollution arguments).
At least Mr. Komanoff, below, who took a premature victory lap on Washington Spectator's site, had the honesty to admit that the reasons for instituting congestion pricing were a shifting group of excuses, of which he liked saving time the most, a rationale not virtuous enough for modern-day argumentation. In the most recent version, the rationale was pollution reduction but then switched to paying for mass-transit improvements (built into the authorizing docs, I guess), without being much called out on that switch.
I find it disingenuous at best to ignore the excuses for this tax and act as though the opponents are on the wrong side of history, justice, probity, and all good things.
My own experience is that London traffic with congestion charges remains beyond dreadful, Stockholm is a small town (yes, I've lived there, and it has fewer residents than Queens, though similarly diverse outside the downtown area), and Singapore, well, Singapore is a curated, tightly controlled autocratic city-state with a whole array of subcontracted services and a modern-day road system whose tolls vary with the time of day. But arguments proffered in NY defending this classic extraction of funds from the usual non-elites never offer a cogent account of how the system works in each of these places, the rationale for its adoption—or even why nowhere else in the world has yet jumped on board.
If paying for mass-transit expansion is the current rationale, I really don't see why raising taxes on 'the superrich" or on businesses is not the obvious remedy.
And if Hochul's interruption is 'merely" motivated by the need to protect congressional majorities in the suburbs, I'd pick that any day over congestion pricing. She may be a terrible politician, but she's got the right idea here.
The political case was made. In the state house, where it passed, then over and over and over again for each ridiculous delay.
Yeah, drivers, saving the planet costs money. Sorry. And please spare me the argument that somehow she actually did this for working class residents. She doesn't listen to them. This is for the small number of influential assholes who occupy elite positions who refuse to ride transit. I hope they enjoy driving on a dead planet.
I was waiting for your take on this - thank you for pulling it together line this for us. How does the waste on setting up for tolling compare to other kinds of government waste? Is it common to throw that much work out?
While I'm forced by events to second your assessment of Hochul, I don't share your assessment that a compelling political case wasn't made for congestion pricing. The case may have been imperfectly framed -- I've argued since Bloomberg's try that the emphasis should have been on saving *time* (all those "NY minutes" wasted in snarled traffic and stuck or late-arriving trains) rather than on pollution and climate. But IMO it was still strong enough. I detected no revolt, incipient or otherwise. Hochul and Jeffries and whoever only had to hang on for 25 more days and then bingo, the switch would be pulled, traffic would ease somewhat, the revenue would start coming in, and NY would reset. November would turn on other ills, imagined or real. The fault, dear Barkan, was in centrist Dems' cowardice.
I do appreciate your pointing out the double-tolling absurdity. My bad for leaving it out of the package of CP modifications I (futilely, no doubt) posted on Streetsblog in the middle of Tuesday night - Wed morning -- which was ironic b/c I may have been the one to first alert you to that problem. Well played by you now.
I think a political case had to be made in the public with politicians like Hochul boosting and championing the idea, along with Lieber. The MTA tried but critics always had the upper hand.
The MTA blew billions and never conducted an emissions test. Liars.
The NYC subway map isn’t virtually unchanged since the 1930s, it’s now considerably smaller than it was.
unchanged in terms of add ons - yes, a lot of the elevated lines came down in the 40s and 50s
Those demolished elevated line were supposed to be replaced by subway lines. For example, the 3rd Ave "el" was to be replaced with a 2nd Ave subway extending to the Bronx years ago. Now there are no longer any plans to do so.
Hochul was plucked from obscurity by Cuomo *precisely because* she is an incompetent, charisma-free nonentity who would never be threat to him. No surprise that is what she is as governor! The really pathetic thing is she was able to cruise to election (in the primary, at least).
I'm a little skeptical of congestion tolling in our current economy (brutal capitalism) from a socialist perspective. It seems like something that would start a yellow vest revolt. User taxing our way to green, livable cities seems like a bad way to do things. Rather than targeting drivers, tax the wealthy, tax wall street, and start rebuilding mass transit. Offer free mass transit and build good parking outside of the city for visitors (think theme park).
The subways certainly need serious improvements, repairs, upgrades, expansions, and the like, but it seems that no matter how much money goes towards the MTA, none of those things happen. I'm not optimistic that congestion pricing would have changed that at all.
Plenty of low-stress, low-impact, high-paying jobs — filled with nephews, cousins, brothers, and business partners' kids — to talk about expanding, repairing and improving the subways would've been created. Maybe a few environmental impact reports would be released in a decade or so?
This is an unpopular but correct opinion that progressives are leaving unaddressed in their outrage towards Hochul. Yes, it was cowardly to pull the plug at the last minute after a decade of process, but there have always been reasons for skepticism that New Yorkers would see the benefits of congestion pricing for years, if ever.
I would have been more in favor of channeling the revenues into specific new bus lines and more frequent subway service, which you can do in an operating budget.
At this point, all NYers should be supremely pissed at the politicians in the surrounding suburbs. They are the reasons why the city is not getting congestion pricing AND affordable housing. When they blocked new housing development, Hochul had no choice but to spur development on toxic, floodprone, land in Gowanus, Brooklyn and where most of it won't even be affordable. And now those same counties, who blocked the creation of denser housing and transit centers, are getting their way, and maintaining their car obsessed lifestyle at the expense of all city residents who live here b/c they don't need their cars and believe that dense urban planning is part of the solution to the climate crisis. But we can't do it all. The rest of NY needs to get with the program instead of destroying it.
Thanks God. It's a total
Scam.
One of the issues is that the answer to these problems is always have regular people pay more money. For more street space, fewer cars, and cleaner air we will tax small business, truckers, and any regular person who doesn't want to take the train.
"It's a negligible amount and they can afford it". This kind of sloppy and arrogant sounding reasoning is where this new left leaning / democrat mindset fails. We used to try to make things more affordable, and have Organized Power pay the price - not a Bronx resident like me who is being told (again) that he can 'afford' the new tax.
The unintended consequences of something like congestion pricing are never taken into account.
As a sporadic visitor to Manhattan, I have found the most obvious cause of congestion (mostly on streets, not avenues) are trucks. With available electronics, trucks could be charged a modest fee of, say, $25 to use the streets between 7 am and 7pm, incentivizing “off hour” night time deliveries. Obviously, details to be pragmatically adjusted.
Never really cared about congestion pricing (I don't drive), but simply wanted people shut up about it after all these years. Either way, I agree with your broader point on Hochul who is just showing herself to be a bad politician and combined with Adams there's no wonder no political group is happen with government in our state. They promise little and give less.
I appreciate that you mention the MoveNY plan, which was how this scheme was pitched to the outer boroughs. In exchange for charging to enter the "CBD" (a term never used before this campaign), outer borough drivers were being offered reductions to other tolls, such as the Whitestone and Throggs Neck Bridge. This plan disappeared as soon as congestion pricing was snuck into the 2019 budget.
That being said, there were a lot of flaws to congestion pricing and they were never addressed, and I am personally glad it is finished (hopefully forever).
First, it overreached in terms of the times it would have ben active (making it look like a cash grab instead of an environmental improvement program). Having it go until 9pm and even on weekends struck people the wrong way. On a normal weeknight after 7pm and most weekends, I could drIve into Manhattan from Pelham Bay in the Bronx in about 25 minutes. Taking the 6 train would take over an hour and cost over $23 round trip to take a family of 4 on the subway (and possibly way more should you want to make a lot of stops in Manhattan).
Second, for hire vehicles are the reason for any increased Manhattan congestion in the last decade. Yet we all know that these companies lobbied for congestion pricing, and funded many of the "Activists" working for it. A reduction of these unregulated vehicles was not on the table.
Third, the MTAs own assessment showed increased traffic ,as a result, in the outer boroughs, especially the Bronx, which already suffers from high asthma rates. The electeds faked concerns and promised "mitigation", yet what did they end up with? Money for asthma centers! That is the most insulting part of this all. They basically hinted that increased sickness in the Bronx is an acceptable price for less cars in Chelsea. This from people who liked to call for "environmental justice" in the past. They threw that out the window to ensure that the rich part of NYC had less cars and people from the hyper gentrified areas right outside the CBD in Brooklyn and Queens would be able to ride their bikes into this area in peace.
I am glad Hochul understood this and took action. There are other ways to fund transit. I am a daily subway rider on weekdays so understand the need for a strong transit system. Hopefully this forces the city and state to look for more effective and progressive ways to fund the MTA.
I fail to see why the neoliberalism of charging individuals differentially to use a common good (roads) is a live argument. (Similarly, why would NYC residents' being domiciled across a waterway with a bridge or tunnel to Manhattan justify charging those hapless "outerborough" residents to enter that borough while those who live where they can enter the CBD without crossing a bridge would not be so charged? I'm surprised you were in favor of it when that was the thing before congestion reared its ugly head.) Hochul is all the things you say, but I and my neighbors are against congestion pricing--even though in my case, the only time I drive into Manhattan from my Brooklyn redoubt is to cover the few blocks between the 59th Street Bridge and the FDR heading to or from the GWB, for which I will be charged full freight.
I am interested to see the univocality of reports on things like congestion pricing. Powerfully placed advocates, augmented by young, unofficial shock corps like those organized by Transportation Alternatives and driven by Streets Blog, dominate the narrative, and the voices of opposition are dismissed and disrespected—and never quoted. (This has recently occurred with the conversion of McGuinness Boulevard into a 2-lane road to favor bike travel, without a serious, block-by-block analysis of road safety or the effect on residents needing to enter or leave vehicles, receive deliveries, set out trash, not to mention parking— McGuinness is a residential street, not just a route needing 'calming', whose residents are increasing by the hundreds every year thanks to luxury high-rise development. Opposition by residents is treated as selfish or childishly deluded- by bogus arguments of secret donors to the mayor—while proponents have a painfully sentimentalized bullshit narrative, unabashed scorn and derision, or, rarely, the usual air-pollution arguments).
At least Mr. Komanoff, below, who took a premature victory lap on Washington Spectator's site, had the honesty to admit that the reasons for instituting congestion pricing were a shifting group of excuses, of which he liked saving time the most, a rationale not virtuous enough for modern-day argumentation. In the most recent version, the rationale was pollution reduction but then switched to paying for mass-transit improvements (built into the authorizing docs, I guess), without being much called out on that switch.
I find it disingenuous at best to ignore the excuses for this tax and act as though the opponents are on the wrong side of history, justice, probity, and all good things.
My own experience is that London traffic with congestion charges remains beyond dreadful, Stockholm is a small town (yes, I've lived there, and it has fewer residents than Queens, though similarly diverse outside the downtown area), and Singapore, well, Singapore is a curated, tightly controlled autocratic city-state with a whole array of subcontracted services and a modern-day road system whose tolls vary with the time of day. But arguments proffered in NY defending this classic extraction of funds from the usual non-elites never offer a cogent account of how the system works in each of these places, the rationale for its adoption—or even why nowhere else in the world has yet jumped on board.
If paying for mass-transit expansion is the current rationale, I really don't see why raising taxes on 'the superrich" or on businesses is not the obvious remedy.
And if Hochul's interruption is 'merely" motivated by the need to protect congressional majorities in the suburbs, I'd pick that any day over congestion pricing. She may be a terrible politician, but she's got the right idea here.
The political case was made. In the state house, where it passed, then over and over and over again for each ridiculous delay.
Yeah, drivers, saving the planet costs money. Sorry. And please spare me the argument that somehow she actually did this for working class residents. She doesn't listen to them. This is for the small number of influential assholes who occupy elite positions who refuse to ride transit. I hope they enjoy driving on a dead planet.
I was waiting for your take on this - thank you for pulling it together line this for us. How does the waste on setting up for tolling compare to other kinds of government waste? Is it common to throw that much work out?