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Commentary By Nicole Gelinas

What Congestion Pricing Accomplishes — and What it Doesn’t

Cities New York City

Advocates must acknowledge the pitfalls of a policy that will change much about New York's traffic flow.

It’s natural that transportation and transit advocates who have spent years, if not decades, advocating for congestion pricing would accentuate the positive and minimize the negative in responding to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s massive enviro-document dump last Wednesday. There are a lot of positives: Raising $1 billion annually and reducing vehicle miles traveled within the Manhattan central-business district by 7.1 to 9.2 percent is not nothing.

But there are also a lot of potential negatives. Even though none of the negatives outweigh the need for the implementation of congestion pricing, we should all advocate to use the federal environmental review process the way it’s meant to be used: to understand and combat the few negatives.

Continue reading the entire piece here at StreetsBlog

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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 StreetsBlog