(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 564: One Year of Congestion Pricing

This week on the Talking Headways podcast I’m joined by Danny Pearlstein of the Riders Alliance to Talk About the One Year Anniversary of Congestion Pricing in New York City. We chat about the history of the idea, the mobilization of activists to turn the cameras on, and sour grapes from New Jersey and USDOT.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in the episode archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood: Danny Pearlstein, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

I’ve been riding the subway all my life and myself on my own probably since I was 11, which is the most special thing about growing up and being in New York. And when I found out there was a Rider’s Alliance, I was eager to become a member. That was over a decade ago, and I guess I came on staff a little over eight years ago.

I’ve been doing this work for about eight years, and congestion pricing has been a through line. It was just getting. More attention around the time I started. It was just a couple months after. Then Governor Andrew Cuomo said having opposed it, that it was now an idea whose time had come.

But the system had been so like secured and partially shuttered and locked down from the era of real disinvestment the seventies, early eighties, that we couldn’t get the stroller out of the station with the very part-time token booth. Unless it was open.

So that was an early memory that there was a trade off between waiting for the local and walking from the express. But really for me the formative experience I had of the city was when I was a daily commuter starting in seventh grade. Being able to get around the city myself, having close friends who lived in the far reaches of Queens and that was really when I first got on the bus.

’cause I grew up near many subway lines. But taking the bus through Queens now, living in upper Manhattan, taking the bus throughout the Bronx and really appreciating the challenges that are unique to riding the bus compared to the subway in the city.

Where I grew up, it was a suburb of Houston, but we had bikes and we went all over the place with our bikes. There’s a trail system that I’ll actually talk about in a future episode, but it was really freeing to just have that freedom to go wherever you need it without being driven around, which I think in a lot of places outside of New York and even outside of my suburb, was what needed to happen.

What were some of the origins of this policy?

And so there was. A significant decline in subway ridership from that time really for another 50 years. And then we saw crush loading again in the 2010s. But it was proposed then it was something that was explored in the sixties and seventies during the Lindsay administration and afterwards to, from the subway to assist compliance with the Clean Air Act before catalytic converters were widespread.

And then it was dormant again, largely until Mike Bloomberg as the mayor took it up. Part of his sustainability plan, but there was no grassroots movement behind it. Then there was no transit crisis to motivate it then. And so it didn’t really come together until that period in the late 2010s when there was a grassroots movement of transit riders that riders lines had built.

And there was a burgeoning transit crisis when subway delays quadrupled from 2012 to 2018.

And I’m wondering if you could go back in time and rega us with some stories from that period as.

He thought that could work here too. And he did the best he could. He spent a million dollars on contributions to the state Senate Republicans, who at the time where the majority and the chamber who Republican support for congestion pricing was robust, but he couldn’t. Win over the kind of broadly distributed outer borough.

Democrats in the assembly chamber who you know, were very numerous and in small districts, and ultimately the speaker decided it would. Be unfair to his members to make them cast a difficult vote for or against congestion pricing in many instances. And so the speaker at the time, Shelvin Silver, who since had a fall from Grace and has passed away, he scuttled the Bloomberg congestion pricing proposal.

And so it died then, and that was right before the 2008 financial crisis. And so in the aftermath of that crisis, there was yet another round of proposals for a bridge toll, which is somewhat similar. What happened instead was a new payroll tax that was created in large part by then Lieutenant Governor Dick Ravitch, who had been the savior of the MTA in the early eighties when he created a bunch of different petroleum and related taxes to fund the resurrection of the subway after the seventies crisis.

Utter lawlessness by the government and at the same time government working for the people with congestion pricing cameras in New York, cameras that the Trump administration has taken shots at. But so far totally. And Effectionately, and what we’ve seen in a lot of ways is comforting in the sense that what was predicted has come to pass, right?

The laws of physics and economics are the same in Singapore and in London as they are in New York. And so when you give people a nudge to take their car off the road, some of them will. And when you put a price on things and you collect the revenue, you know that those proceeds come in. And so traffic is lighter.

It’s a lot lighter in a few places. It’s a little bit lighter in a bunch of places, and there’s half a billion dollars to fund public transit upgrades that wouldn’t have come in otherwise. One of the in, in some ways, more and less remarkable indicators is the polling, the program polled poorly before it started the Valley of Death.

That was true in other places as well. It started to poll a lot better. Once it started. Two things were at play. One is most people realized they weren’t paying the toll that they thought they might have to pay before it existed, and the smaller number of people who were paying the toll decided they really liked it because they were saving a bunch of time and it was time that you could get for $9 that was unavailable at any price before the program went into effect.

The people still objecting to it are further away from the situation. And so part of the problem previously was they were polling the entire state of New York. And so there was one poll from 24 that said 63% opposed. 44% never traveled to Manhattan for any purpose. So what’s it to them? But at the same time there they’re new shape of the opposition.

In the efforts by the Trump Department of Transportation to get the program stopped, that have been effective. And in the kind of fact free statements from the president and most recently, also from congresswoman s now outgoing, Congresswoman Stefanik that that toll has destroyed New York City, which is a lot like when Trump claimed that there were no more stores in Portland.

It’s just divorced from reality. And we don’t know what he’s being fed, but it’s not the truth, obviously. And that’s frustrating. But on the ground here in New York. Everyone can trust their watch. Everyone can trust the time on their phone, and they know that has shifted. And so even while there’s nothing’s perfect and there’s always skepticism of big institutions, at the end of the day, government responded to a popular effort to fix a widespread problem in the form of traffic and transit funding, and settled on a proven solution that lo and behold continues to work here as well as elsewhere.

But I wanna go into the expertise that you have about organizing and getting people together to support this because. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately is, and we had Carter Lavin on last week whose new book is really wonderful in this respect, but how we get change and how change actually comes to pass, and this isn’t just, as you mentioned earlier this isn’t just Kathy Hochul turned it on and it was there and it took a lot longer and a lot more advocacy and work to get this to where it is now.

That turned out to be a real harbinger of the 2024 and 2025 elections. I think what she didn’t appreciate is that while everyone pays the price of groceries, very few people pay a toll to drive to Manhattan because very few people drive to Manhattan. It’s unpleasant, it’s already very expensive. But what we were able to do at key points throughout the process is mobilize a grassroots base of transit riders who wanted to see substantial change.

And that started with our neighborhood based Riders Alliance organizing a dozen years ago around. Some local train stations in Brooklyn where the train didn’t come frequently enough, and then quickly realizing that actually there was a broader transit funding situation, and that, as the lack of transit funding became more apparent.

The system also started to really stumble, train, delay, skyrocketed. There was no light at the end of the tunnel for people who needed subway accessibility. All good reasons to raise a lot of money to fix the subway and no obvious source of revenue. And at the same time, traffic was bad and getting worse, right?

The buses were slowing down. Buses had lost ridership. There was the advent of rideshare vehicles, right? Uber and Lyft coming onto the scene slowing down traffic even more, but also creating some additional support for congestion pricing in various ways. But what we did was we organized in strategic neighborhoods and moved key legislators off the fence in support of the program.

By coming to the realization that their constituents wanted them to take a controversial vote to fix the subway, and ultimately it was packaged inside the state budget, right? Nobody voted up or down on congestion pricing itself, but the speaker, just like the previous speaker, didn’t want it in the budget unless he knew that there was majority support among the membership.

And so we got there. Mostly by mobilizing in Brooklyn and Queens, the largest counties in New York. Brooklyn has 21 assembly members. Queens has 18 out of a total of 150. So a lot of transit riders and a lot of legislators in those big counties. And then in a sort of rapid response, when Governor Hochul paused congestion pricing with an apparent plan to scuttle it permanently we tried to.

Close off the exits. We prevented passage in a couple of critical days. At the end of the 2024 legislative session, there were some alternatives floated that we quashed. We, we rallied in New York, we rallied in Albany, I think a couple of days in a row and quashed those.

And so they didn’t come to pass and the legislators went home and they had the elections and then we also sued the governor and she didn’t have another good funding option. She had a lawsuit holding her to account for the 2019 state law, and then she had an incoming Trump administration, which I think finally sealed the deal for her.

That there, there wasn’t gonna be new money coming to rescue from Washington, dc quite the contrary, and realizing she had to do it and she had to be brave. She had all the talking points. She had been talking the best game about it in town for a couple of years, so she knew just what to say again.

She cut the toll from 15 to $9, but she turned it on and she was very quickly, pleasantly surprised, like so many people that the thing just worked. And I think we all have stories from people who were skeptical, right? They couldn’t figure out exactly what wouldn’t go wrong, but a new toll doesn’t sound so appealing.

So of course something’s gotta go wrong and it didn’t. From the beginning it had been really battle tested and every IMT dotted, several times it just worked. There was a tremendous investment by the MTA in making sure that would work, and it did, and it continues to work every day to the extent that there’s no longer any polling on the topic.

It is part of the furniture. It is not a live political controversy. The pollsters have moved on to other issues.

Funny the other day, watching the press conference with the mayor and the governor and she said, oh yeah, I was always gonna turn this back on. And I was like, what are you talking about? If you’re paying attention? You knew that wasn’t really the case unless somebody pressured you. But the pressure was really fascinating because in the other day I was listening to David Roberts, who has a podcast called Vaults, and he was talking with Samuel o Bragg about misinformation and the way that things people have their ideas about what they think is the right answer or the wrong answer, and they’ll stick to it unless something changes their mind and that changes their mind is like social proof basically.

And so what’s interesting about this is like all of that fighting that happened during the pushback galvanized a group of folks. And now everybody that was galvanized as well as the people that saw this work, are now on the side of this program happened, it worked, and we can do things again.

And I find that really fascinating from just a lot of different perspectives. It gives me hope again, but it also I feel like changed a generation of people into like active transportation activists to a certain extent.

We had built it up over 20 18, 20 19 to push it over the finish line in the legislature. But there weren’t like several hundred people out for congestion pricing all at once at any given point until it happened for many days in a row after June 5th, 2024. And one measure, and I don’t think this is true of anything else that I can think of.

There, there’s a local news aggregator, email, city and state New York that comes out every morning and every evening. And it was the top story every morning and every evening for two weeks running that doesn’t happen. And that was actually something where we were a little bit caught off guard by the groundswell of support that suddenly came out.

The governor’s team, I think, and the governor in particular, was surprised by the press interest. In the pause, but like there, there was no story like this that the press could feast on. There was just something so enticing about it and I think cause it tied politics to traffic and everything in between.

And we thrive in our media environment, which is a precious thing more and more. But we thrive on having a lot of traffic report. There have been traffic borders in New York forever and they cover transit and they cover what riders do. And that’s been a big part of our success is getting the word out and it works.

But I think that Transit Press Corps and the local press corps and the TV news crews made it really hard for the governor to escape the pause and to just get things to quiet down. And so they didn’t. And so she kept saying things like, oh, it’s gonna raise the price of a piece of pizza.

And then everyone would jump on her for saying, oh, new Yorkers don’t say piece. We say slice of pizza. And so it was a real moment where New Yorkers came together. Just have that reality check. And I think. It, it wasn’t obviously the decisive factor. It contributed to the rise of Zohran, Mamdani running on affordability, but also running on the quintessential features that subways and buses are in New Yorkers lives.

Starting with the proposal free buses that was alive in October 24, right during the pulse.

At least

This is your freedom that’s at stake, that should motivate you. And the same sort of freedom that motivates you to do all sorts of other antisocial things. And then I think the last piece of it is, I think, and this is newer, but also a long time coming, which is that like they’re indistinguishable from the oil industry.

They’re a subsidiary, and this president promised as much, and I think. It seems weird, right? Because. It’s efficient. It’s a user fee. It’s pro-business, right? It didn’t just have grassroots support in New York. It had business and real estate support, but it’s it’s almost like it’s too rich of a vein for them to go after, but because they have so little to stand on, they resort to silly stuff.

The city is dead. On account of a $9 toll which you can see with your own eyes, which is just nonsense, right? You can go outside and you see it’s not true and transit ridership which is something we could talk about, right? It’s been rising since the pandemic. It’s risen a lot in the past year.

In large respects. It’s back to pre pandemic levels outside of the rush hour.

It’s been a major feature in our lives, and the comeback as it were from that is also just like a big story in itself and something that feeds into this discussion as well. I feel I think there’s one other thing. It’s that they want us to feel unsafe. Being able to confidently go out in public without a multi ton tank around us.

We talk about immigration and transit, safety and law and order, and they want a narrative that you should be scared to ride the subway and that’s bipartisan, right? There’s plenty of Democrats who dine out on that as well, or at least tried to, and that failed in the last mayoral election for various specific reasons.

But it’ll be back. And I think we’ll see that in this gubernatorial campaign as well, because we’ve seen it so many times in New York, which is the subways and safe. And again, it’s a little bit of a denial of reality, which is it’s getting increasingly safer. Since the worst of the pandemic.

And also that several million people ride it without incident. Every single day we count for something, but you don’t hear about it.

That’s a lot of people.

There’s no denying that.

The information about that was high because of the fear factor of it, but in the end, it didn’t really pan out the way that folks said it would.

But I think the fact that the traffic analysis was so far off is one of the more egregious aspects because it was mandatory and it took years and it turned out to be bunk. That’s infuriating. That should infuriate everyone. Yeah that was something the federal bureaucracy required of New York.

It was something that the MTA and its consultants went along with and it was garbage. And there were people, smart people coming outta the woodwork early on saying, no, this doesn’t make any sense. But it also took on a life of its own. Like the New York Times was able to take it to like random public health experts in other states who started to hem and haw about what this would mean for asthmatics and environmental justice communities when in fact is.

In environmental justice communities in New York City, better transit is essential, right? Those same communities rely overwhelmingly on public transit. And of course this didn’t produce a spike in asthma, right? We’re not seeing that. We’re not seeing anything like that. And naysayers will still do silly things like post pictures of red traffic roads on Google Maps, but those don’t distinguish between traffic speeds below 30 miles an hour which most New York streets are below 24 7. So I think that merits some kind of reckoning. And this is part of a lot of different discussions we’re having about planning and approvals. Why do we have to jump through all those hoops and why were they so worthless?

We could try to do this and push it forward, but there’s gonna be all this discussion about the collapse of the market for office buildings and things like that is really gonna push people back, even though there’s still a lot of car traffic in, in, in San Francisco, there’s still a lot of Bay Bridge traffic coming in to the city.

And you know that proof that even more. It was wrong than if we said it was gonna be, would be super helpful in LA in Boston, in San Francisco, in other places that could actually benefit from pricing and it could benefit the transit systems here and there.

The only concern in the other places, I think it’s even more important to follow the London model of improving transit first. I think, relatively speaking across time, like we are seeing that in la right? LA Transit is much better than it was 30 years ago, which is not true of New York because New York’s transit system is so much older.

But Right. The equity concern is not that we’re gonna create hotspots or whatever else. The equity concern is just like, are we charging the people who can best afford to pay, which in New York we are, because overwhelmingly low income people are already in transit. In San Francisco if there’s a lot of middle income people who are driving in from the Central Valley, that’s something we wanna solve for in tandem with rolling something like this out in New York. There’s not a population like that.

Is there something that you notice that isn’t really getting a lot of airtime.

You’ll lower the cost of driving and make it easier to take transit. More people will take transit relative to other ways of getting around. I think sometimes that gets lost in. The sort of politics of congestion pricing because it’s a lesson that we can extrapolate further. But otherwise, I do think that like it has taken on a life of its own as an issue where it has been very extensively covered.

And so compared to things like the federal funding of transit, it’s been. Exhaustively covered, right? And there are other, and there are other issues in transit funding besides congestion pricing, right? It’s not solving all of New York’s problems forever. Like we still have this structural challenge of finding new funding sources every so often that gets harder and harder to meet.

And congestion pricing for all of the excitement around charging a fee to drivers and why it’s that sort of takes on a life of its own isn’t inclusive of all transit news. Yeah. In the way that I think some outlets would like it to be.

It’s different than trying to build a second avenue subway for one thing. It’s like it takes longer to tunnel than it is to turn on some cameras, but at the same time, like. Going to China this year and seeing kind of all the stuff that’s been happening there and seeing what happened with pricing, I feel like very positive about like we can actually do stuff.

And I feel like that’s been missing over the last four to 10 years, which is we can actually do these things. And turning the cameras on was actually proof that some of the policy things we’ve been talking about for 50 years actually work.

New York built an extraordinary amount of transit infrastructure in the first third of the 20th century. That was an explosive period for us. China has done more in a more compressed period, but we did have that critical period here, and that’s why we have this tremendous legacy that we’re struggling to care for.

But we can expand on that. We can build on that. I think, having the Interborough Express which is in its sort of early engineering stages, will be the most transformative built project since the second World War in New York. Nothing since has compared to that.

And that should also embolden us to do even more and to go beyond that,

Buses. We have the slowest buses in the country. Congestion pricing has moved the needle a little bit on the slowest of the slow buses in the core of Manhattan, but where. People are relying on buses most in the outer reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Queens. The buses are very slow. In commercial districts, they’re very slow where they connect to the subway, and that is because of a lot of car traffic.

And so I think there’s a question of how do we get those cars outta the way? If we’re gonna have free buses, how do we fund free buses? Could that involve charging for parking in a way that would reduce some driving and parking, as well as hitting the sweet spot of.

Bringing down in the funding, which is what congestion pricing does, right? It does two things at once. Parking charges could also do those two things at once. And how do we speed up individual corridors and get to the point where we have bus rapid transit. We looked at a couple of corridors and we found that with BRT conditions we could be saving 10 to 15 minutes per trip off of trips that take 30 or 45 minutes.

That’s an enormous savings. And for long suffering bus riders, that’s. Especially meaningful on a par with saving the bus fare, right? We want the bus to be fast and free. Both of those things are very meaningful to people who have little money and little time.

Like the amount of time, like it, the first couple weeks was crazy about people talking about how they got to places 30 minutes ahead of time or 45 minutes ahead of time. This is just wild. And so if you could do that for bus riders, right? How amazing would that be,

Yet are really stymied. ’cause it’s not effective, it’s not an effective way to get around in so many cases where it moves at a walking pace. But yeah. The biggest beneficiaries of congestion pricing so far have been drivers from New Jersey, the place that is still suing New York over congestion pricing.

It can save some people money. It’s saving insignificant ways in terms of reduction in crashes, right? Crashes. Don’t just result in the loss of life and limb. They eliminate wage earning incapacity. They drive up healthcare costs. We can be very crass and say let’s set the emotions aside, like a crash is really bad for your wallet.

Whoever you are and there have been estimates that the city new Yorkers collectively spend billions of dollars each year on traffic crashes. And so to the extent that we can speed up traffic a little bit, not so much that the crashes are more damaging, but a little bit to the frustration and the anxiety are decreased and there’s less traffic overall to get in a crash, which is, I think what we’re seeing that close closing in on that sweet spot.

That is, that’s really something, right? It’s really something in terms of human life and limb and as well as the pocketbook. And so we can hit those notes each as well as something that’s just people say cities aren’t loud, cars are allowed.

Honking is way down because of congestion pricing. And as someone who doesn’t live anywhere near the congestion zone, I’m jealous, right? ’cause I want honking reduction here. I want incredibly, I want all EVs so I don’t have to hear engine noise. We all deserve a quieter more livable space.

The irony as you say if you like that, you move to the suburbs. But then as my friends describe, you hear suburban noises like leaf blowers and in the city, ’cause I live near a park, I also hear a lot of leaf blowers. So I get it all. But we we deserve, if we’re gonna live closer together, as I think in a lot of respects is better for people and for the planet.

We need to live a little bit more sensitively, closer together and cut out some of that unnecessary noise. And I think that is something where, by lowering the levels of anxiety and frustration of sitting in traffic congestion rising is saving people’s ears. And that’s a grace note of the program overall.

As you say, we should all be very much more sensitive about living close together because a lot of the research is often down about cities because of how many instances of mental health issues, how many instances of respiratory issues, et cetera, come from being in intense place.

But that’s because of the secondary effects of driving most of the time. And so I feel like that’s something that is a little bit under discussed as well is just the whole public health outcome of living closer together is, which is beneficial for us ’cause we can walk everywhere, et cetera.

But also from the reduced amount of particulates and reduced amount of noise, et cetera.

We said like even in the scenario where it diverts, there’s gonna be less overall pollution in the region. And so that pollution moves around and even if there’s some local increases, there’s some regional decreases to offset that, as well as the hundreds of millions of dollars that the program is spending on actual emissions mitigation.

At this point just to mitigate background emissions ’cause there’s no new emissions going to the program. But that’s a really important point, which is that we are and again it’s not just respiratory health. It’s the costs associated with poor respiratory health that are being alleviated downstream because of congestion relief.

Because of that, which is really fascinating and I’m wondering if that could be reproduced. After this, there’s probably incredible. Ton of studies that could happen related to that, right? There’s so many things you could wanna find out. So I do wanna go over some of the things that actually ha that happened.

There was, there have been a lot of articles talking about the benefits. There was a, Emily Badger and et al had a New York Times article talking about some of the benefits. 73,000 fewer vehicles, faster traffic. For, in some cases, going across tunnels through bridges through tunnels and over bridges.

More transit riders, bus speed increases. Obviously we just talked about the noise, pollution, emissions and reduced crashes. There’s just so many things that are beneficial that have come from this, and I did wanna mention them because. I, it wouldn’t be a good discussion if we didn’t actually mention some of the things that, that have been benefit.

I just feel like sometimes because of the folks that are listening to the show know that to a certain extent, but it’s good to reiterate.

She’s from upstate, she has to prove herself here and this is how she’s doing it. And with the exception of the pause she’s doing a bang up job. Yeah.

And yeah, I think that those. Those stats. The wait times at the Holland Tunnel I think Will, will always take the cake.

Just because they’ve decreased so dramatically and it’s just 50%. Yeah. People in New Jersey just don’t want to pay for it. And they and I don’t know what that’s doing in New Jersey but it’s doing something good. You have all these roads that sort of funnel into the Holland Tunnel and now there’s many fewer drivers on them.

They’re already seeing a benefit in terms of wanting to redo some of the study work for the hol, the New York Jersey turnpike expansion that the governor, previous governor had planned to push more cars into the Holland Tunnel is saying this doesn’t make any sense. There’s a toll at the other end, people don’t wanna pay.

That’s another downstream effect, right? I think it’s dissuading. They’ve scaled that project down somewhat, not entirely. Since congestion prison.

We can’t really drive to New Jersey without paying a toll on a major road including Interstate 95. And it’s such. It’s such a weird combination of sour grapes and crocodile tears and whatever other metaphor you wanna use for them to complain at all about this. But it’s, for them, it’s smart politics, right?

It’s the same reason why secretary Duffy or President Trump wants to do it. It’s let’s go rail against something that is superficially, should be very unpopular, but for some reason is a essentially one weird trick at this point.

So we have an active schedule making the most of this moment around fast and free buses.