Congestion pricing, we hardly knew ye.
New York Metropolis’s spectacularly unpopular congestion pricing scheme is on dying row because the Trump administration will announce Wednesday it’s pulling its approval of the toll — slamming it as “backwards and unfair” — in a significant blow to Gov. Kathy Hochul, The Submit has discovered.
The US Division of Transportation’s Federal Freeway Administration will terminate the approval of the controversial program, in keeping with a letter Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is about to ship to Hochul on Wednesday afternoon.
“New York State’s congestion pricing plan is a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners,” stated Duffy, noting that commuters getting into NYC have already financed the development and enchancment of metropolis roadways by their taxes.
“But now the toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways. It’s backwards and unfair,” he stated, blasting this system as dangerous to small companies within the Large Apple that rely upon clients from New Jersey and Connecticut.
The division will formally rescind the Nov. 21 settlement signed beneath the Worth Pricing Pilot Program (VPPP) that imposed a stiff $9 surcharge for drivers getting into Manhattan beneath sixtieth Avenue beginning in January.
“Every American should be able to access New York City regardless of their economic means. It shouldn’t be reserved for an elite few.”
The division stated the congestion pricing toll runs counter to the federal freeway assist program, which prohibits tolling on roads constructed with federal funds except Congress grants an exception.
The DOT letter additional outlines Duffy’s justification for terminating the pilot, together with that it fails to supply a toll-free various for drivers who don’t have any selection however to traverse metropolis roads by car.
It additionally claims the toll fee — which immediately made NYC the most costly metropolis within the US to drive in — was established to be a income generator for the MTA, relatively than set at an quantity really designed to cut back congestion in accordance with the plan’s acknowledged objective.
“The pilot runs contrary to the purpose of the VPPP, which is to impose tolls for congestion reduction — not transit revenue generation.”
Within the letter to Hochul considered by The Submit, Duffy writes, “To be sure, the termination of the program may deprive the transit system of funding, but any reliance on that funding stream was not reasonable given that [Federal Highway Administration] approved only a ‘pilot project.’”
At a press convention final month, The Submit requested Hochul how the MTA — which is tens of billions in arrears — or the state deliberate to find out the efficacy of the toll scheme, which aimed to boost billions to fund the transportation community’s $15 billion 2020-2024 capital enchancment plan.
“There’ll be more data than you can imagine. Today is the first day, I wouldn’t count today’s data. Let’s give it a few days to sink in and get a trend,” Hochul stated on the time.
The toll scheme was so unpopular that NYC drivers started implementing stealthy strategies of ducking the surcharge inside days of its Jan. 5 implementation.
The Division of Transportation stated it’s going to work with the mission sponsors on an “orderly termination” of the tolls, but it surely was not instantly recognized when the tolls would stop being collected.
