The automobile fee was going to reduce the ‘time tax’ on New Yorkers who use public transit. The indefinite pause means they could be waiting even longer.
When New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused congestion pricing in June, it was as if every countdown clock in the city’s 472 subway stations suddenly read “delay.” Among many other urgent capital priorities, congestion pricing was slated to modernize the clunky signal system from the 1930s, allowing faster, more frequent service less prone to breakdowns. The program was going to raise billions for elevators, affording New Yorkers who can’t climb stairs access to many more destinations, far more quickly than the bus or Access-A-Ride paratransit system allows. And while dedicated to infrastructure upgrades, the toll would also take fiscal pressure off day-to-day operations, reducing the likelihood of longer waits due to service cuts.
Put another way, congestion pricing was going to reduce the “time tax” on millions of New Yorkers who rely on public transit. And for good measure, it was going to do the same for millions of cars and trucks, albeit in a trade for a modest sum paid by those who do choose to drive.
Alas, it wasn’t to be, not yet at least — and now New Yorkers can see the results as countdown clocks too often show increasing wait times for trains.
What riders want
The clocks themselves represent progress, replacing the lean and long gaze down the platform into the tunnel that was a practiced move of many a straphanger for the past century. They rolled out to every subway station in 2017, the same year former Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared congestion pricing “an idea whose time has come.”
As delays mounted during and after that year’s notorious “summer of hell” on rails, riders armed with “subway delay action kits” shared photos of their long wait times with the governor on social media. Widespread frustration with delays three and four times as frequent as just a few years earlier became a powerful motivation for the legislature to pass congestion pricing and the governor to sign it into law. Five years later, big gaps between trains became fodder for another successful rider-led campaign, this time for more frequent subway service, which rolled out on 14 lines starting last year.
What distinguishes countdown clocks from other Cuomo-era niceties like USB ports on buses or his Enhanced Station Initiative’s sleek glass partitions is that they get at what really matters. By and large, riders don’t take transit for the amenities or aesthetics. Instead, we want fast, reliable trips, a seamless riding experience that takes no longer than necessary. While countdown clocks don’t speed up service, they set expectations for people waiting for the subway and colleagues, family, friends and others dependent on riders’ arrival.
Which brings us back to congestion pricing, which promised to upgrade infrastructure, improve reliability and ultimately reduce travel time. A much better system that more fully respected straphangers’ time was in reach — and then escaped our grasp with the pause.
Stopping congestion pricing sets us back because of what the program promises in time otherwise lost to our too often broken down, inefficient and frankly inequitable transportation systems.
By and large, riders don’t take transit for the amenities or aesthetics. Instead, we want fast, reliable trips.
For example, by the first Metropolitan Transit Authority board meeting of the summer, it was clear that 23 station accessibility projects were on indefinite hold. Stopping the only immediately available revenue stream for new elevators instantly dimmed any light at the end of the tunnel for one million New Yorkers largely excluded by a physical disability from the city’s most efficient way to get around.
Those long-promised modern signals, the centerpiece of former New York City Transit President Andy Byford’s historic “Fast Forward” plan, were sent back into limbo, where they could now take five times as long to complete. Riders on the A and C subway lines, which serve three boroughs and are the second and third least reliable lines in the system, have now seen signal upgrades stalled twice, first by litigation with the state of New Jersey and now by New York’s own governor. Even as infrastructure upgrades sit on hold, major incidents that delay 50 or more trains at once went up significantly in the first several months of 2024.
The pause even threatens millions of daily riders with longer waits between buses and trains, since the MTA’s annual operating budget faces a new squeeze alongside generational capital projects. Without congestion pricing, ridership and revenue projections are lower, borrowing costs are higher, and maintenance and overtime expenses to keep ailing equipment in service longer can be expected to spike, leaving less money for service. Service cuts can send a transit system into a death spiral of falling ridership, taking more and more time from the lives of a dwindling number of disadvantaged riders.
Without proper capital funds, when trains and buses do run, they’ll be at greater risk of disruptions from flooding and other challenges posed by climate change. Adaptation funding, an essential part of the next five-year MTA capital program from 2025 to 2029, is in jeopardy. That means that more New Yorkers will get a bitter taste of what understandably infuriated New Jersey riders regularly experience. They are stranded for many an evening at Penn Station by the Garden State’s neglected commuter railroad.
The true costs of the failure of congestion pricing
Put another way, without congestion pricing or some yet-to-be-envisioned replacement for its $15 billion in revenue, every remaining dime in the MTA budget is chasing a state of good repair for the long-disinvested network, parts of which are well into their second century of continuous service. There will be more and more and more delays. And every delay will mean untold numbers of riders late for work; late to pick up our kid; or missing interviews, medical appointments and other critical life opportunities. It’s true in one sense that time is money, but in fact it’s even more valuable, because time is something we can never get back.
In some ways, the system we depend upon now, even in its slightly diminished postpandemic state, is a victim of its own success, and the City’s. During the 2010s, public transit took up more and more of New Yorkers’ time. Service and maintenance cuts in the wake of the Great Recession meant longer waits for service and more uncertainty and time lost to delays once on board. Misguided efforts to slow down trains deliberately added commute time. Rising rents scattered families and communities to the edges of the city, lengthening not just work trips but also the “social commute.”
As population, jobs and tourism reached new heights, ridership did, too, even as the system was wasting more people’s time, more often. By 2018, the New York Times reported on a new phenomenon, that of New Yorkers arriving at our destinations early to make up for a transit system that more and more frequently was making us late. Mounting delays and even additional construction meant to address those delays had made travel by public transit increasingly burdensome and anything but the seamless experience it should be.
Funding transit upgrades and protecting operations from cuts aren’t the only crucial temporal benefits of congestion pricing. New York’s shamefully slow buses move more people than the next three largest cities combined, but often barely faster than a walking pace. Nowhere in the city are buses slower than Manhattan, where congestion pricing would give its biggest boost to traffic speeds by nudging drivers to cancel or combine trips, freeing up scarce space on the street. Faster bus trips, faster deliveries and faster emergency responses would start on day one, rather than accumulating over time like funding for transit upgrades.
Congestion pricing promised to upgrade infrastructure, improve reliability and ultimately reduce travel time. A much better system that more fully respected straphangers’ time was in reach — and then escaped our grasp with the pause.
Even the public health benefits of reduced air pollution from less driving represent significant time savings in forgone health care appointments, morbidity and mortality. With car pollution to blame for an estimated 1,400 excess deaths each year, it’s no exaggeration to say that congestion pricing would give some New Yorkers more time on the planet than we may otherwise have. The same is true for lives cut short by traffic crashes that can be averted through less driving. Monetary losses are significant of course, but time, with friends, loved ones and devoted to life’s pursuits, is the most poignant measure.
Congestion pricing opponents will argue that most cities, including many with more reliable and frequent public transit and less traffic congestion than New York, seem to have achieved their gains without a controversial new toll on automobile travel. Yet leading examples like Paris charge a whole host of other taxes and restrict vehicles from many parts of the city. The transit boom in and around the City of Light is made possible by greater, consistent investment, which brings individual projects into easier reach (and is a cause as much as an effect of lower construction costs). Ultimately, the biggest benefit to 12 million Ile-de-France residents is of course time savings.
Hochul, no doubt, has now spent much more time on transit funding than she hoped, either upon taking office, or more recently when she paused a superficially unpopular new revenue measure. But ultimately, millions of New Yorkers value our own time immensely. We’ve lost far too much of it in transit already, due to disinvestment and misplaced priorities.
Perhaps ironically, the quickest move the governor can make now is also the one that will save New Yorkers untold hours in the months, years and decades to come. With the flip of a switch, the cameras could turn on. Given the popularity of congestion pricing once it starts — as proven by London and Stockholm and elsewhere — it will be as if the governor turned the clocks backward. For that, hurried New Yorkers, few of whom will ever pay the toll, would be uniquely grateful.