Singapore has it, London has it, Stockholm has it. And now, congestion pricing looks like it’s coming to the United States for the first time.
Starting Sunday, New York City plans to charge passenger cars, trucks and buses to drive into midtown and lower Manhattan during peak hours, beyond bridge or tunnel tolls.
The plan has been hotly contested for years, and there’s still a chance that a lawsuit or the federal government could put a stop to it.
Driving in Manhattan is kind of a nightmare all the time.
“There’s honking, there are nonstop traffic jams all day,” said Sarah Kaufman, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University.
She said deterring at least some people from driving into the city to improve traffic flow and air quality is one of the main goals of congestion pricing.
“The second is that through the toll that will be incurred by drivers … it will help fund mass transit improvements,” she said.
Most people who live in New York use the subway, especially to get in and out of midtown and lower Manhattan.
“Eighty-five percent of all daily commuters travel into the Manhattan central business district by subway, bus or commuter rail,” said Eric Goldstein at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
He said they will benefit from congestion pricing because the money will be used to fund much-needed repairs and improvements to the subway: “A modern signal system for our subways, elevators to make subway stations more accessible, new subway cars and electric buses,” he said.
There’s lots of opposition to congestion pricing, including from the Trucking Association of New York. Zach Miller, vice president of government affairs for the group, said truck drivers will have no option but to pay the toll.
“We have to go into the zone at the time that our customers demand it,” he said.
And he said it’s going to be hard for truckers to absorb that added cost of going in and out of the city multiple times a day.
“Most trucking companies are small businesses. They operate on pretty slim margins. Unfortunately, so are their customers,” Miller said.
But businesses concerned about the cost of congestion pricing are only thinking about half of the equation, said Tom Wright, president of the nonprofit Regional Plan Association.
“They’re discounting completely the benefit from less traffic, the ability to make more deliveries in the same period of time,” he said.
It’ll likely take a while — and some tweaks — to see how it shakes out, Wright said. And other cities around the country will be watching.
“I’ve fielded calls from counterparts and public officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston,” he said. They were all asking the same thing: “How did you do this?”
