Last week, President Trump kept yet another promise to voters: he moved to end Manhattan’s six-week-old congestion-pricing program. If this was predictable, so was New York governor Kathy Hochul’s reaction to it. She gave the president what he wants: performative outrage that makes the Empire State look desperate and weak. Rather than playing a supporting role in the Trump show, Hochul could have projected strength by remaining calm and responding rather than reacting.
Instead, barely two hours after Trump’s announcement, the grim-faced governor breathlessly strode through the subway turnstiles in Grand Central Terminal as if she were the sheriff entering the saloon for a showdown with the bad guy. Flanked by the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, her counsel, and two elected officials, she recounted a somber timeline, as if chronicling a natural disaster or the moment a terrorist had struck: “at 1:58 p.m.,” she said, Trump had “tweeted” his decree. “New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years,” she said. “We sure as hell are not gonna start now.” Without congestion pricing to fund New York City transit, Hochul warned, “the nation’s economy could shut down.”
The governor could instead have acted to protect congestion pricing without trying to match Trump’s dramatics. Indeed, the MTA filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday afternoon to safeguard the program. A judge is likely to issue a narrow ruling on the question of whether the federal Department of Transportation has the authority to revoke permission for a pilot program that it granted just last fall. (The federal government has a say on the program in the first place because federal law governs tolls on roads that have received national highway funding.) Nothing the governor said at her press conference will affect the court’s ruling.
By trying to match Trump’s theatricality, though, Hochul has widened the battle from the courts to the political arena. That’s a risky move, even if the MTA wins its lawsuit. The Republican-controlled Congress could respond by prohibiting future federal transportation funding from going to states that sponsor congestion-pricing programs.
By announcing at the news conference that “We’re in fight mode,” Governor Hochul seemed to sleepwalk into just such a scenario. Consider who stood behind her: two elected Democrats from Manhattan, a state senator, and a city councilwoman—hardly a team that represents swing-voter interests.
Queens or Bronx voters who were part of New York City’s shift toward Trump in last fall’s election might think it strange that the prospect of losing another toll in a state already straining under high costs is what roused the governor to swear at the president. The governor still can’t point to any polling that shows strong voter support for congestion pricing.
Further, Hochul’s effort to stoke fear not just of a transit-funding crunch but of a nationwide economic crisis in the event of congestion pricing’s disappearance may backfire. Is the local economy (never mind the national economy) really going to fall apart without the money from a new fee that we lived without until just several weeks ago—and that makes up less than 3 percent of the MTA’s budget?
It doesn’t help Hochul’s case that, even with the program’s estimated $500 million in annual revenue (eventually swelling to $1 billion), state lawmakers must soon find billions of dollars in other annual tax or fee money to meet the MTA’s $20 billion budget, which already includes nearly $9 billion in annual taxes. That perpetual deficit exists because MTA costs—including for construction projects for which the authority borrows long-term debt to fund—regularly outpace revenues, even after accounting for how taxes grow with inflation and the economy.
Hochul should keep in mind that congestion pricing is in peril not just because Republicans have come into power in Washington but also because they’ve done so with the help of New York voters, frustrated over unaffordability. If Congress does act to kill congestion pricing, the effort will be spurred on by key GOP members from downstate New York swing districts (as well as a New Jersey Democrat).
The governor should also remember that she herself was an architect of the congestion-pricing program’s fragility. To help protect vulnerable House seats, she delayed the program’s start until after the November election. If she had begun it on schedule last June, it would have had longer to prove itself before Trump asserted primacy. Further, though congestion pricing is undoubtedly reducing traffic in and to Manhattan (and even possibly helping to reduce car crashes), the MTA still hasn’t released data that might answer Bronx, Staten Island, and northern New Jersey residents’ and elected officials’ key question: Is the program only displacing traffic around Manhattan, rather than reducing it altogether?
To beat Trump politically, Hochul would be well advised to ignore the president’s digital offensives and focus on what she can control. Can she curb the MTA’s costs, so that the authority doesn’t need a new or higher tax or fee every few years? Can she broker a compromise to head off New Jersey governor Phil Murphy’s opposition to the program?
Meantime, congestion pricing’s fate can wind its way through the courts. Outside of the legal arena, only quiet competence can save the program now.
Top Photo by Alex Kent/Getty Images
