The Trump administration on Wednesday pulled approval for New York City's congestion pricing, which went into effect on Jan. 5, meddling in state policymaking by ending a popular program intended to fund much-needed subway repairs while reducing traffic and encouraging use of mass transit in one of the most congested cities in the country.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made the announcement in a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, saying that the congestion pricing plan "is a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners."
Under the program, most passenger cars must pay $9 to enter Manhattan’s busiest area, which includes major tourist attractions like Times Square.
"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," Duffy said. "It’s backwards and unfair."
Duffy added that congestion pricing goes against the Value Pricing Pilot Program, a Department of Transportation initiative that “provides transportation agencies with options to manage congestion on highways through tolling and other pricing mechanisms.”
Duffy said the VPPP is intended to "impose tolls for congestion reduction—not transit revenue generation.”
However, congestion pricing has reduced congestion in New York City with tremendous success.
In just the first month of the program, 1 million fewer vehicles entered Manhattan’s most congested zone in the first month the program went into effect, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Travel times at bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were also 10% to 30% faster, according to the MTA.
“Before the start of congestion relief, talk of lawsuits and doubts dominated the conversation, but now it’s the undeniably positive results we’ve been seeing since week one,” MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber said in a January news release. “Better bus service, faster drive times and safer streets are good for all New Yorkers.”
In fact, the program has been so successful that a February poll from the Partnership for New York City found that 59% of New Yorkers said they wanted the Trump administration to allow the program to continue.
Halting the program will almost certainly raise the levels of congestion and travel times again, as well as depriving New York City of much-needed funds.
None of this stopped Trump from bragging on his Truth Social site about ending the popular and successful program.
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,” Trump wrote. “Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”
Later, the official White House account tweeted the same message, with a horrifying image:
Beleaguered New York City Mayor Eric Adams—whose corrupt deal to enforce Trump’s immigration policy in exchange for dropping his criminal indictment has put his mayorship in jeopardy—is unlikely to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to end congestion pricing.
“If he reverses it, it doesn’t matter if I support or don’t support (it),” Adams said in January, before Trump was inaugurated and when Adams was sucking up to the incoming president to try to get his prosecution dropped. “If the federal government has the authority to do something within their powers, then we can’t sit back and complain about it, because we do things within our powers.”
But even if Adams doesn’t fight it, other New York leaders vowed to challenge the Trump administration’s move and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority filed suit on Wednesday challenging the federal order, claiming termination of the program is a violation of the agreement and is “arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with the law[.]”
MTA chair Lieber criticized the administration’s move in a statement.
“It’s mystifying that after four years and 4,000 pages of federally-supervised environmental review – and barely three months after giving final approval to the Congestion Relief Program – USDOT would seek to totally reverse course,” Lieber said.
Hochul’s pushback was more direct.
“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” the governor said in a statement on X. “The MTA has initiated legal proceedings in the Southern District of New York to preserve this federal program. We’ll see you in court.”
Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, who represents Manhattan in the House, said the Trump administration’s reasons for killing the program “are utterly baseless and frankly, laughable.”
“Congestion pricing has not only consistently withstood significant legal challenges, emerging victorious in every court decision to date, but it has also become immensely popular among New Yorkers, delivering on its promises—less traffic, fewer crashes, and reduced noise pollution, all contributing to safer, quieter streets,” Nadler said in a post on X. “The notion of revoking approval for a federal initiative of this magnitude is nearly without precedent. I firmly believe that there is no legal basis for the President to unilaterally halt this program. The Value Pricing Program is solidly established under federal law, and its approval cannot be arbitrarily revoked, especially when it is clearly delivering tangible benefits.”
Republicans love to talk about states’ rights and letting states make their own policy decisions.
But this decision is just more proof that Republicans only care about states’ rights when it benefits them, no matter how unpopular their actions are or how much damage they inflict.
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