It started last midnight, congestion pricing hopes to accomplish four things. The first is to improve air quality by reducing the number of cars in Manhattan from the Battery to 60th Street. The second is to reduce gridlock, cars unable to make it through an intersection blocking the cars trying to travel perpendicular such that a huge traffic jam ensues. Third is to fund mass transit, a morass of waste, filth and abuse that carries the majority of New Yorkers to work and play and threatens bankruptcy weekly.
The fourth is to prove that Democrats can run a city.
Having spent 25 years as a daily commuter into the city, first on the Long Island Railroad, and then on the subway, it served me pretty well. But prices have since skyrocketed, while service has declined. The problem, we’ve been told, is money, that costs have gone up and need to be covered, and that includes new equipment and maintenance. What’s rarely mentioned are that many riders just hop the turnstyle and don’t pay anything, meaning that law-abiding riders pay fares to cover the cost of fare beaters.
Recently, a group of pro-Hamas protesters took to the subways, refusing to pay the fare, as a form of protest against Israel, because nothing helps Gazans more than not paying the subway fare.
Now it will be drivers covering the cost of fare beaters. And the cost of the homeless living in the subways. And the cost of clean up the litter, and dirt, and filth and things broken by people who have no stake in the system because they freeride and then bitch about how bad it is.
But then, I’ve also had friends who drive into the city every day because they found it inconvenient to live their lives by train schedules. Why this was worse than spending a couple hours in their Porsche going three miles an hour on the LIE, the world’s biggest parking lot, I can’t say. It was not a choice I would make, and that their commute would exact an additional $9 per day hardly seems an excessive cost for such privilege.
But there are others who will also be subject to congestion pricing who didn’t ask for the problem. There are the disabled, for whom the mass transit system doesn’t work very well. There are the people who live in Jersey without sufficiently easy access to mass transit to get to work in the city. There are the cabbies and uberers, and their passengers who will pay a premium fare to cover a piece of the cost.
Will it work?
Supporters of congestion pricing have long relied on two related assumptions. First, that New York City has a silent majority of car-free households whose self-interest lies with the program’s goals of better mass transit and less traffic. Second, that congestion pricing gains support (or at least becomes tolerable) over time, as other cities that have implemented it discovered.
Taken together, these two arguments echo a broader concept about politics, in which people support the policies — and the politicians — they get something out of. The author Matt Stoller chose the word “deliverism” to sum up this governing philosophy in the context of the Biden administration, which oversaw the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act. These were landmark bills, but they generated little good will even among the people they most directly advantage. A similar danger hangs over this program, since some of its benefits will accrue over time.
The analogy to Biden’s grandiose omnibus initiatives strikes me as flawed. Congestion pricing is a fairly straightforward concept, and the funds raised are dedicated to a particular use, mass transit. There are no hidden fiscal bombs without thousands of pages of tendentious rationalizations, no plethora of tangential regulatory tape that will turn nice sounding goals into a grand total of six charging stations built for all the trillions allocated.
But the unasked question is whether the beneficiaries of congestion pricing will realize any real improvement. Will the monies raised by enough to make a dent? Will the Metropolitan Transportation Authority finally demonstrate some capacity to run an effective mass transit system, or will the funds be squandered on new curtains for the main office and “artwork” in the stations, soon to be covered by graffiti and churro grease? Can they make the trains run on time?
The tacit assumption is that the “car-free households” will make up the bulk of New Yorkers applauding the new pricing regime, given that they get benefits while others have to pay for them. Who doesn’t like that? But the assumption that the problem is lack of money, rather than mismanagement on the one hand and privileged lawlessness on the other, may prove that money alone isn’t the cure.
And when prices rise to cover the costs of trucks bringing food, clothing and other goods into the city of the sort enjoyed by “car-free households,” they will not be pleased as they wait, and wait, and wait, for the 4 or 5 to come to take them the work where their pay hasn’t kept pace with inflation.
Maybe Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams can pull this off. Maybe they will manage to fix not only the fiscal shortfall, but the vast collateral beast that makes fixing anything in NYC next to impossible. If so, maybe the Democrats will prove they can govern a city and make it work. I know my old buddy Pat Foye tried his best. Maybe they can make it work this time.