How Will Congestion Pricing Actually Work?

The first driver incurred a congestion pricing fee at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday January 5. In December 2024, I sat down with Julie Tighe of the New York League of Conservation Voters — a leading supporter of congestion pricing — and Zach Miller of the Trucking Association of New York — a leading opponent of the way it is being implemented — to talk about congestion pricing. 

The wrangling over whether and how to charge for driving into the Central Business District has gone on for years. Advocates have had a hard time justifying it, and the public still sees it as a tax on something that used to be free. With the policy becoming reality, I wanted two of the most passionate and articulate voices to bring this audience into some of the more interesting aspects of the debate.

The iteration of the plan I discussed in this interview has its origins in 2017, when then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a congestion pricing scheme in response to the city’s “Summer of Hell” — a dramatic series of subway failures that engendered uproar from New Yorkers. Due to political pressure in the intervening years, the plan was put on pause under Gov. Kathy Hochul in July 2024; preparations for a slightly modified version restarted that same November.

We have seen in the years since 2017 that the Summer of Hell was more harbinger than aberration. With our crumbling transit infrastructure, the question has always been less if we should introduce a policy intervention and rather a question of when and how. 

The congestion pricing policy has given rise to so many political reactions in large part because it impacts so many facets of New York life: traffic, transit, cost of living, public health, climate change — the list goes on. The two sides are not always as far apart as they seem.

This conversation has been edited for clarity, flow and length.

Jamie Rubin: Why don't we start out by asking each of you to just tell us briefly who you are, what you do for a living and why you're here talking about congestion pricing.

Julie Tighe: I'm president of the New York League of Conservation Voters and the New York League of Conservation Voters Education Fund. We are a statewide environmental advocacy organization that seeks to elect people who are going to vote for clean air and clean water, open space, and clean energy and clean transportation. 

Zach Miller: I am the vice president of government affairs for the Trucking Association of New York. We are a member-based industry trade group. About two-thirds of our members are what we consider to be fleets, and about a third are what we consider to be industry-service providers. We understand the logic of congestion pricing. We were part of the Move New York coalition in 2015. I had so much more hair back then.

Unfortunately, from our perspective, every iteration of congestion pricing since the Move New York plan has gotten worse and worse and worse.

JR: If you were talking not to your friends in industry, but just to the average person in a bar in New York City who said to you, “Zach, what is congestion pricing?” What would you say?

ZM: Congestion pricing is a tolling scheme that will tax vehicles crossing 60th street and the West Side Highway to raise revenue for the MTA. Now, the challenge is that commercial vehicles are going to pay per trip and more than passenger vehicles.

JR: Julie, I bet you have a slightly different description of what congestion pricing is.

JT: Congestion pricing is charging you a fee to go below 60th Street. That money is going to be invested in the MTA so that we have better buses, better subways, better commuter rails.

Our main objective with congestion pricing is to make sure we're doing three things. First is generating money for mass transit. Second is reducing the amount of traffic that we have. Bus speeds are less than 5 miles an hour. Third is reducing air pollution.

ZM: When it comes to issues of clean air, we have alignment. We have alignment when it comes to the low carbon fuel standard in New York. We have alignment when it comes to finding mechanisms, either through NYSERDA's Truck Voucher Incentive Program or New York City's Clean Trucks Program, to make sure companies that are able to move to electrification have those subsidies in place.

The challenge when it comes to the congestion pricing plan is that there's a $1 billion revenue mandate to the MTA. It's not a goal. It's not a target. It is a mandate in the law. And that means that the Traffic Mobility Review Board was limited in when and how they could set their tolling rates.

Unfortunately, they decided to come down very heavily on our industry. We are the only stakeholder that pays per trip instead of per day. We also pay at a higher rate than any other vehicle: $21.60. 

JR: Congestion pricing, at least if you listen to the polls, is not what I'll call popular. Less than 50% of the people who are polled support it. How would you say it polls in your membership, Julie?

JT: You know what they say: The darkest hour is just before dawn. People are least supportive of it right before it's being turned on. We feel good that once people start seeing the benefits of it, that will change. Up to this point, when you turn on NY1, mostly you’re seeing interviews with the disgruntled driver who, in the most transit-rich part of the entire country, could take the bus, the subway or the train.

JR: Where do you, Zach, and your members enter into the congestion pricing discussion?

ZM: In terms of advocacy groups, we were in from the very beginning, and the talking points have really been consistent. We understand the MTA funding component; we understand trying to build a better traffic flow plan. When it comes to the governor's office, that's a little trickier, I would say. I don't recall engaging with Governor Cuomo too much over this issue.

I think by the time he supported congestion pricing, the pressure on him to do something for the MTA was so high that he just wasn't really talking to anybody who would possibly be opposed. When it comes to Governor Hochul, there's a lot of frustration there as well. She did pause congestion pricing, and we were hopeful that during the pause, we would reach out and try to come up with a plan that we could all agree to, to then pull our lawsuit. That's not what wound up happening.

JR: I remember very well: I was working for Gov. Cuomo in the summer of 2017 — it was called the Summer of Hell — which was when the MTA basically had to be shut down in large part. That sparked the push for congestion pricing. Julie, you were also in the state government at the time. Is that how you remember it?

JT: I don't remember if you were there that night when we went to clean the subway. Part of the problem we had with the subway was that there were fires that were happening on the tracks because of litter that people threw onto the ground. We went there one night after we had had a shellfish event on Long Island — we had a full Governor Cuomo Day. He did not always need to talk to people who were not on the same page as him, but he talked about congestion pricing everywhere. We talked about it at the Association for Better New York breakfast. He talked about it at all the civic business organizations that he went to. He was very forceful about it, as is his style.

Governor Hochul came out with her revised plan, featuring lower tolls across the board. Of course, we were happy with Plan A, which was a higher price, but Hochul’s plan is specifically meant to encourage overnight deliveries and off-hour deliveries. 

I see how bad the traffic is. I got a taxi home from a party I went to in Bay Ridge on Saturday night. I was getting to my part of the city at 11:30 p.m. and the last mile in midtown Manhattan took forever because of traffic. It was 14 minutes to go half a mile. The taxi driver noticed — that's crazy.

We have a traffic problem that can't possibly be good for your industry, Zach.

ZM: It’s true. But there are some buts there. First of all, the off-hour deliveries are a really interesting situation. The Trucking Association is very supportive of off-hour deliveries.

JR: What would be off hours?

JT: The peak hours are 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on weekdays. On the weekends, it's 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

ZM: When it comes to off-hour deliveries, we're seeing terrific success with chain stores. They're vertically integrated, so they control the entire supply chain.

But the broader challenge is that it really is customer-driven. Even if a trucking company says, “Hey, we'd really like to make this delivery at 10:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m., it would be so much better for us,” it's on the customer to say, “Okay, we could accommodate that” or “Sorry, we're not going to do that.”

Things that New York City is working on — such as micro hubs and blue highways — can have a greater impact. Under a micro hub, for example, a truck can come and make one big delivery or two big deliveries.

New York City is heavily reliant on trucks.They account for about 90% of how freight enters the city. The national average for truck freight is about 72%. And 90% is a challenge for the industry to meet. What it comes down to is the real estate in New York City is so expensive that customers are not going to allocate square footage for storage, which means that the truck is the storage. The truck is the mode in which the freight is delivered and the mode in which it is stored.

JT: Right. The other thing Zach mentioned, which I do think congestion pricing is bringing more to the front, is blue highways. We're such a coastal city and we're not using that enough to move freight around by barge.

JR: Isn’t that sort of the point? Most people have options. The only people who really don't today have options, for the most part, are the folks that drive the trucks. They can't deliver via the subway and they can't until further notice use the fancy electric helicopters. They can only do one thing.

JT: There are a lot of options. Zach's already touched on some of those. They may not be as fleshed out as we might like them to be. It would have been more ideal for some of these things to be further along than they are, but certainly the cargo bike pilot has been in place to help, and they purposely started in Manhattan because that is where the most traffic is. This is not the only place where we have too much traffic, right? Downtown Brooklyn is pretty darn congested these days. Queens is pretty darn congested. The Bronx is a whole separate story. 

ZM: I think that the challenge comes to the way they're setting these rates. I just don't see the way that the rates are set on passenger vehicles creating a massive shift away from their cars, but the biggest challenge isn't even the cars. The biggest challenge is the for-hire vehicles. That's about most of the traffic in the zone. There's nothing here that's going to meaningfully change rideshare usage. 

Now, I think the elephant in this room, honestly, is the MTA and the lack of trust that most New Yorkers have in the MTA after their decades of mismanagement. They haven't really improved access for anybody with the exception of the Second Avenue Subway.

I think that's why congestion pricing is unpopular in polling. It's the MTA that's unpopular. People are saying, well, an organization that I don't particularly have faith in is now charging me more money.

JT: I don't deny that that's how people think about it. I think that the current leadership there is actually doing a pretty darn good job. I think Janno Lieber has done a tremendous job of trying to improve things. Some of the things are not going to be terribly visible, like signals, but they're going to make trains run so much better. Who's to blame for why New York's infrastructure is the way it is? Of course, Robert Moses.

JR: Always going to pick on Robert Moses.

JT: He purposely didn't allow funds to come to New York for transit. For decades, New York wasn't getting the transit funds that it needed. 40% of this country's transit is in the New York metropolitan region — 40% of the entire United States of America[’s transit] is in this region. And still traffic and transportation is one of the leading causes of climate pollution here.

A way we can make it even better would be to have transit fares be cheaper. Right now, people are paying not for the subway but for the commuter rail lines. They're not necessarily under $9, the toll for driving in the congestion zone. This is still a challenge where we're going to need people to be making behavioral changes.

JR: Of course, one of the great ironies is we actually don't want them to change too much because we want to raise as much revenue as possible.

ZM: This is what I'm saying. The fundamental problem with the way the rate was set was the $1 billion mandate. That's not something that any other country that has a congestion pricing program put into place. 

JR: If three years from now, they look back and they say, “Oh, last year it only raised $900 million,” then what happens?

ZM: The billion dollars is to get $15 billion in bonding. I would think they need to find a way to get a billion dollars.

JR: One of the things that you haven't said yet is that your folks can simply pass on the cost. Trucks seem uniquely positioned to do that, and for-hire vehicles like taxis and rideshare basically just tack it on.

JT: Right. That was on purpose, by the way. The point was it's meant to be on the rider, not on the driver.

JR: How is that not ultimately going to be the case with the truckers as well? 

ZM: Some companies are going to have to eat the cost, just because of the way their contracts are done. Other companies that can pass it along are going to pass it along. 

It's not just the e-commerce package you get. There are service providers as well. There are plumbers. There are elevator repair people. There's HVAC repair people. They all use commercial vehicles. A lot of them make multiple trips in the zone per day, and those costs are going to go up as well.

JR: How long before the average person is going to be able to notice something is different?

JT: In some ways, it should be right away. You should see less traffic pretty immediately.

JR: How about the negative? What are people going to see that says this wasn't a success?

ZM: We have members that have already reached out to their customers and said, assuming [congestion pricing happens], these are what the rates are going to be. But does that make it a success? Not a success? That's a trickier one to answer.

JT: The MTA has started to do contracts again for projects that they are anticipating paying for with the congestion fee. That is going to put New Yorkers to work building some of these improvements. That is real money. $15 billion worth of construction contracts is going to result in real work for people.

JR: If you were talking to Janno Lieber, for example, he’d say, look, all of it's bonded. That's great. All of it's for big projects. That's incredibly important. Is there some way to show the people that are paying for this that they're getting the benefit faster than they would expect?

JT: The MTA is building some of these new stations. That is something that's going to be identified with congestion pricing. They're doing these new bus routes, and increasing the number of buses and rolling stock. I was on one of the new C trains this morning, which is very cool. It tells you where you are on the train car, and where the various streets are. They're going to be starting to move into more electric buses, for example, and that's something that will be paid for with this.

ZM: I would actually take it above Janno. What are the city and state doing to offer relief for trucking companies that now are going to see this toll shoot up to their third- or fourth-largest expense? There's a lot that could be done: more curbside parking, more overnight truck parking, getting rid of the highway use tax, getting rid of the city motor vehicle tax. If the industry is going to be investing heavily in the transit system, there's only so much the MTA could do back to industry, but the state and city could do a lot.

JR: Let's make predictions. Five years from now, congestion pricing has been up and going for five years. What does the city look like in a best-case scenario?

JT: I say we have way more bus lanes. We have way more people riding buses because they're faster. I think it's probably not only Manhattan that has this reduction in traffic. Our subways are running in a way that New Yorkers deserve. We have less air pollution. I am very hopeful that we will see success like in London and Singapore and Stockholm.

JR: Zach, I'll ask you the same question. Let's say it's five years later, and you're living in New York City, Trucker's Paradise. What does that look like?

ZM: Oh my gosh, New York City, Trucker's Paradise?! I think that's my new goal in life right there. I think in five years — taking some of what Julie said — if we can actually replicate what's going on in other cities around the world, where the trucks pay once a day, where they pay the same rate as cars, where cars are actually the ones targeted by a congestion fee, I think we could start to see some of the positive results that Julie mentioned.