New York City began a congestion pricing plan that will charge most cars $9 to enter certain parts of the city in 2025. Officials anticipate raising $15 billion for transportation infrastructure repair. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
Jan. 5 (UPI) — While not likely to face its first stringent test until Monday morning rush hour, New York City’s new congestion pricing plan for drivers kicked off just after midnight Sunday, and transportation leaders declared that it went off without a hitch, despite some pushback.
“We will start to know specific numbers and have some comparatives within a few days, and we’re going to share that information publicly,” Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency overseeing the program, told the New York Times.
Most passenger cars are now being charged $9 to enter the new tolling zone, from 60th Street to the southern tip of Manhattan, once a day.
It’s the first congesting pricing plan of its kind in the nation and did not arrive without decades of controversy and multiple legal challenges, including in the last weeks prior to it going into effect.
Even the state of New Jersey challenged the plan that allows New York City to charge the toll, an effort to unclog some of the city’s most traffic-heavy streets.
Roger Corrado, 62, who lives in North Bergen, N.J, called congestion pricing a “slap in the face. I really feel slighted,” he said at a gas station near the Lincoln Tunnel. “Think about a guy like myself, for 40 years commuting into Manhattan, paying the tolls, contributing to all the businesses in Manhattan. Now we feel like, where’s the loyalty? Like, this is how you treat us?”
There are a host of efforts aimed at overturning the congestion proving initiative, including one by president-elect Donald Trump, a New Yorker who takes office in a few weeks.
Despite the conflict, about 100 supporters of the plan showed up at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 60th Street in Manhattan to mark the occasion.
“Me and my friends were the first people to drive through the new congestion pricing zone :),” one driver posted on social media. The driver is in a silver SUV and the windows are emblazoned with the words “Just Tolled,” and dragged a series of metal cans behind with the same message. A passenger held a sign out the sunroof as the car made its way down a largely deserted Manhattan street.
A man named Noel Hidalgo, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, was also among the first drivers to pay the toll. He drove his Mini Cooper across the threshold while toll supporters cheered and clapped from the curb, according to an account by the New York Times.
Mostly supporters showed up at the kickoff to clap and chant, “Pay that toll! Pay that toll!” One opponent tried to drown them out by banging a cowbell. The exchanges grew a bit testy at times, but the event was largely uneventful.
The MTA said it chose to roll out the congesting pricing plan during a slow traffic time like early Sunday morning, but acknowledged that the real test will come during the Monday morning rush hour, which could be complicated and snarled still further by an expected snowfall.
The MTA said on an average weekday, at least half a million vehicles enter the congestion pricing zone, a number that Lieber said officials will be tracking “very, very closely.”
Transportation officials predict the new congestion pricing plan could reduce the number of vehicles entering the zone by at least 13 percent. They expect the toles from the cars that do still enter to generate $15 billion to pay for repairs and improvements to New York’s aging subway system, buses and commuter rail lines.
Implementing the congestion plan was prompted in part by the fact that New York ranks as the most congested city in the world among other large cities, according to the 2023 INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard. Mexico City, London, Paris, and Chicago round out the top five list of the most congested cities, the report said.
