Truck driver, commuters and New Yorkers cannot be slapped with another tax as Manhattan recovers from the pandemic.
It’s finally happening — maybe. Two and a half years after then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo approved “congestion pricing,” the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will hold public hearings on the program starting Thursday.
The meetings are the “first step,” in acting MTA chief Janno Lieber’s phrase, in deciding whether, when and how much to charge car and truck drivers to enter Manhattan.
New York, which has screwed up so much in the past two years, can’t screw this one up — and the buck stops with Gov. Kathy Hochul.
The Legislature passed congestion pricing in April 2019. The idea was to raise $1.5 billion a year for the MTA, helping to fund its five-year, $51.5 billion plan to do things like bring Metro-North trains to Penn Station and modernize subway signals.
It was typical Cuomo diabolical politicking. The 2019 law allows the MTA to launch the tolling program, thus winning the accolades of “transit advocates,” an impressionable lot. But the law doesn’t force the MTA to start the program — ever.
Cuomo never wanted to actually levy the tolls and alienate swing suburban voters. Last year, he blamed Trump for all the mysterious delays (the project needs a federal environmental review).
This year, Cuomo ran the clock out early — on himself.
Now, the Hochul-era MTA has begun the federal environmental process. But the new governor is in no more hurry than the old one was.
Under the schedule announced last week, the MTA won’t even determine whether to impose tolls until late next year. The “decision” falls somewhere between late November and early December. Coincidentally, that’s right after the election Hochul hopes to win.
The delays are a good thing. Manhattan is a vastly weakened and diminished place from two years ago. Only 20 percent of office workers are back at their desks. Starbucks has closed almost 20 percent of its Manhattan stores, indicating it doesn’t expect high foot traffic. Global tourists are still missing.
The tale that the people who have abandoned transit have turned to their cars instead is not true. Last week, the MTA’s bridge and tunnel traffic was flat on its best day and down 11 percent on its worst day compared with before the pandemic. Meanwhile, Manhattan garages are shuttered much of the time or offering discounts.
So, it’s good that we’re not imposing a new $7 to $45 toll to enter the borough (the likely range of potential tolls, based on existing bridge tolls, depending on whether you’re in a car or a truck) quite yet.
To bide its time over the next 14 months, the MTA will have dozens of virtual meetings, taking comments from everyone from New Jerseyites to “tribal nations,” and work on seven possibilities: doing nothing or imposing different possible tolls on different drivers at different times.
Since we have time, we might as well do a few things right:
First, no exemptions. Everyone from public-employee union members to the restaurant industry is going to ask for a free pass. If we’re going to do this, everyone should pay. (That said, it’s reasonable to give yellow-taxi owners a grace period, to make up for the fact that playing by the rules and buying the medallion, when Uber and Lyft didn’t, was a crude form of congestion pricing.)
Second, give the city a say in traffic management. It’s probably a good idea to hike the toll on high-traffic days, such as the weekend before Christmas, and on air-quality alert days. The next mayor’s administration should have input. But he can’t ask for exemptions for the unions that supported him.
Finally, the money can’t fill endless MTA deficits. For years, the “advocates” have presented congestion pricing as the be-all-and-end-all savior of the MTA.
It’s not. The MTA already has plenty of dedicated taxes, from a payroll tax to a tax on petroleum. Before COVID, these taxes brought in $6.5 billion annually, close to 40 percent of the budget. The inflation-busting budget just grows faster.
Hochul must stand firm on asking for savings from the unions.
After congestion pricing, there is no savior. Future legislators’ appetite for saving the MTA will be low, especially with low ridership. Washington won’t come forward with another huge bailout, as it did during COVID.
The best-laid plans — or the worst-laid ones — could still fail. Who’s to say a Hochul rival won’t base much of his or her campaign next year on not doing congestion pricing? Then we’ll have someone new to blame.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post