New Yorkers’ ongoing attempts to rein in car traffic on the island of Manhattan took a serious blow yesterday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy terminated the city’s congestion charge, which made drivers pay for going below 60th Street.
Duffy claimed that it’s unfair that drivers should have to pay to use roads since there are already tolls on bridges into Manhattan and claimed there are no alternatives, ignoring the buses and subway trains operated by the Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Further, the city is being unfair against people who live far away, Duffy said. “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 said in a statement.
Worse yet, Duffy claimed the congestion charge, which was implemented to improve air quality for more than a million Manhattan residents and workers, is somehow discriminatory against the poor. “Every American should be able to access New York City regardless of their economic means. It shouldn’t be reserved for an elite few,” Duffy wrote. As a result, he has rescinded the required Department of Transportation approval necessary to impose a road toll.
Congestion pricing has often proved unpopular before implementation, even in cities less poisoned by car-brained policymakers, such as Stockholm and Singapore. Business owners fear a loss of customers from the removal of cars and parking, despite plenty of evidence that disproves this shibboleth. And once in place, city residents quickly start to love the reduction in car traffic, noise, and pollution, not to mention the added income for city programs like more public transport.
New York’s attempts to improve the quality of life of its residents by reducing car traffic below 60th Street have been long and tortuous. There have always been tolls to drive across the bridges or through the tunnels into Manhattan—one can thank Robert Moses for that. New tolls or bans on cars coming into Manhattan had been proposed over the years, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the state legislature made it official.
