Today is the 110th birthday of Bill Vickrey, the Columbia economics professor and Nobel laureate who first came up with the concept of congestion pricing. This month was set to begin tolling vehicles driving south of 60th St. until Gov. Hochul illegally interfered.
It was only hours after Hochul said that the Second Ave. subway construction would stay on pace that MTA official Jamie Torres-Springer confirmed that it had in fact already halted, with stop-work orders based on Hochul’s rash decision. Maybe that came as a surprise to the governor, but it shouldn’t have.
The whole project is at risk as the $3.4 billion grant from the feds will fall apart without the MTA putting in its share, which it now doesn’t have. In the absence of congestion pricing, bye-bye goes the Second Ave. subway extension to 125th St.
The ideas Hochul has thrown out — among them politically impossible taxes that have been roundly rejected by the legislators she needs to pass them — quite frankly seem like grasping at straws, more to make the point that she hasn’t thrown straphangers to the suburban driver wolves than about actually finding a viable alternative.
This was not in any way a practical decision but at its core a political one, driven by Hochul’s unease at Democrats’ obliteration in Long Island and her own reservations about her coming 2026 reelection fight.
Politicians do things for political reasons, of course, though it’s not clear that this will even help; she’s taken much heat, and rightfully so, even before this all settles into the public consciousness and she starts getting blamed for every signal problem and delay throughout the system.
Soon enough, she’ll likely start getting held culpable for the slow emergency response times plaguing Manhattan below 60th St., which is one problem that congestion pricing very directly could have helped address. Gridlock is bad for everyone.
The MTA itself has something of what we could call the “NYCHA problem,” which is that underinvestment now compounds and just makes everything more expensive later. The longer old trains are in service, the more they’re prone to failure.
Significant increases in the costs of labor and materials have made installing elevators only costlier, and that is without even considering the impact on New Yorkers with disabilities whose access to the city’s ostensibly premier public transit system will be even further delayed.
There is zero chance the governor has an ace up her sleeve that will resolve this and give the MTA the $1 billion a year that it expected out of congestion pricing. Only congestion pricing can provide the needed money. The MTA is responsible for issuing the stop-work order, regardless of what she has to say about the status of the authority’s projects.
Hochul must reverse course; the feds have now officially signed off on the congestion plan, meaning the last remaining hurdle is the state’s own sign-off. Her hand might be forced anyway by the numerous lawsuits on the horizon, making the very reasonable argument that the Legislature passed a law and she can’t just ignore it. Better to consider this a signal delay and get back on the right track.