Trump’s Attempt to Kill Congestion Pricing Will Backfire

Charles Guerin/abacapress.com

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There are always two levels of communication when Donald Trump makes a decision. There is the blustering proclamation of the president himself, and then there is the ass-covering legalese his staff conjures up to justify his whims.

Wednesday’s announcement that Trump intends to make good on his promise to end New York City’s congestion pricing was an example of this. “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is saved. LONG LIVE THE KING,” the president posted on Truth Social. Later, the White House shared an A.I.–generated image of him wearing a crown.

As for the legalese, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy issued a four-page letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul outlining two reasons he feels the federal government was mistaken in authorizing the tolls around Manhattan’s central business district—the lack of toll-free alternative routes and the program’s focus on raising money for mass transit—and must now rescind the state’s authority to operate them.

Hochul said she is keeping the cameras on, and the state filed suit within minutes, arguing that Washington had given no good reason to cancel a pilot program it had approved just three months earlier. With its compendium of Trump’s previous social media promises to “kill” congestion pricing and otherwise ignore environmental law, the 51-page brief implies that the administration made a decision first and came up with a justification second.

It’s worth remembering why Donald Trump is involved at all. When Washington started investing in highways more than a century ago, Congress insisted they be toll-free (with certain exceptions for bridges and tunnels). But in 1991, Congress authorized the federal Department of Transportation to form agreements with local governments for “congestion pricing pilot projects” (later renamed “value pricing programs”). It is under that law that New York state hammered out its November agreement with the Federal Highway Administration. Our bridge-and-tunnel president, whose childhood subway riding long ago yielded to decades of chauffeured limos, has declaimed the idea for years.

The tolls began Jan. 5, and the early indicators have been positive: Manhattan has experienced dramatically less traffic, fewer crashes, and faster trips for drivers, bus riders, and emergency service providers, with some trips taking 50 percent less time. Pedestrian traffic and mass transit ridership are up, while subway crime was down 36 percent in January year over year. With congestion pricing, the city has achieved travel-time savings that the engineers of highway megaprojects can only dream of.

Duffy makes two arguments for canceling the agreement. First, he says the toll rate is “driven primarily by revenue targets” rather than congestion goals. (Actually, the $9 toll rate is driven by Kathy Hochul’s desire to run for governor again in 2026, but you won’t find that in either Duffy’s letter or New York’s response.) More significantly, he argues that the tolls should never have been approved because there is no free driving alternative, and that Congress did not mean to permit such “cordon pricing.” It’s an unsupported theory that seems to open up the question of whether New York must build a free bridge to New Jersey, since all six of the crossings between the states have always been tolled.

Finally, Duffy notes that New York made most of its congestion pricing investment before the final agreement was signed in November. The implication is that although New York may have spent a lot of money for nothing, the U.S. DOT does not bear responsibility. But the state worked with the feds for years on the agreement, including on the program’s design and on thousands of pages of environmental assessment. In a development that will please readers of Robert Caro’s bridge-and-tunnel history The Power Broker, in which the master planner Robert Moses cleverly locks up toll money in bond contracts, the state’s lawyers note in their filing that they have already issued almost a billion dollars in debt supported by congestion pricing revenue—with another $500 million loan closing at the end of the month.

Roderick Hills Jr., an expert in administrative law at New York University, is not impressed with Duffy’s reasoning. “Compared to all the other reversals of action of the Trump administration—trying to rescind or freeze spending, for example—this particular action is surprisingly unjustified,” he told me. “Impoundment theory, at least there’s a theory. Birthright citizenship, there’s a book I can read about that. Here there’s no argument. It’s a complete fabrication devoid of any support in the statutes.”

The administration’s sketchy justification is only part of the issue, Hills says. More important is the sense that the DOT has made an “arbitrary and capricious” change of course, right after the Supreme Court reduced the rulemaking powers of executive agencies last summer. Hills said: “In the eyes of a federal judge, Duffy and Pete Buttigieg are the same person. [Metropolitan Transportation Authority lawyer Roberta] Kaplan is right in her complaint to say, ‘You had a chance to bring this up—we went through this whole process. No one mentioned this anti-cordon-pricing rule through thousands of hours of discussion.’ ” Amusingly, New York is now arguing that Washington can’t end the toll without writing up thousands of pages of its own environmental review.

If Trump has opened up an umpteenth court battle over congestion pricing, he has also, ironically, firmed up the policy’s support in New York. Hochul, who got cold feet about implementing the toll last summer, has now picked her first big public battle with the president, turning the fight for congestion pricing into a resistance issue. Holding up the White House’s A.I. composite of King Trump, she said: “Think about this the next time you’re stuck in traffic.”

It helps that the initial results, media coverage, and early polling of congestion pricing have been positive. “In the court of popular opinion, we’re seeing more and more people supportive of congestion pricing,” said Kate Slevin, an executive vice president at the Regional Plan Association. “You’d think Trump would be watching things like commercial vacancy rates, transit ridership.” (Would I really?)

Greg Shill, a law professor at the University of Iowa and the author of a new paper, “Beyond Congestion Pricing,” says the nation’s largest city should never have found itself in this position in the first place. “The idea of congestion pricing was introduced when Penn Station was still standing,” he said. “It’s farcical to put the interminable delays solely at Trump’s feet.” The latest of those delays, after all, came from Hochul, who instituted a six-month pause last June—making some of the same arguments as Duffy about the toll’s fundamental unfairness.

“The 2024 pause,” Shill writes, “sharpened the question of why the city has failed, over and over, to seize the levers it already controls.” Those include some things that are obvious: enforcing traffic regulations; building bus lanes, bike lanes, and expanded sidewalks; and establishing parking rules. But he also argues for a bigger, bolder New York City that uses a combination of growth-driven revenue and efficiency-driven savings to achieve greater self-determination, hedging against hostile forces in both state and federal government. “The city needs to develop a sense of using its capacious authority to maximize the welfare of its own people,” he told me.

It’s an unfortunate accident of history that the man best positioned to enact Shill’s suggestions to strengthen New York City’s hand is apparently being extorted by the president of the United States to provide immigration enforcement in exchange for freedom from prosecution. But the good news is that there’s an election in June, and it seems certain that congestion pricing—its benefits, consequences, and possibilities—will still be a subject of discussion.