After much ado over the fate of the Manhattan congestion pricing program — including Gov. Kathy Hochul’s own unilateral pause of it before she moved to reinstate the now $9 toll at the start of this year — the beleaguered transit-funding toll is in the crosshairs again, this time of the Trump administration. A number of local GOP lawmakers have been lobbying Trump to kill the program, which thus far seems to have been working in reducing traffic in the affected area of Manhattan below 60th Street.
That culminated in a letter sent to Hochul on Wednesday by Transportation Secretary (and one-time star of MTV reality show The Real World) Sean Duffy, who purported to inform her that the federal government was rescinding its necessary approval of the tolling program. Yet the tolls have kept rolling on, as New York has refused to comply with this turn of events. Hochul took a fiery stance on Trump’s design, saying he was trying to make New York commuters into “the roadkill on his revenge tour” and vowing to fight back.
As a few folks have pointed out, Duffy’s public statements and his letter seem to rest at least in part on the premise that driving into Manhattan is the most accessible or even only readily available option for getting into this area. His public statement complains that the tolling 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,” before asserting that “every American should be able to access New York City regardless of their economic means. It shouldn’t be reserved for an elite few.”
In another context, in a different city, this argument might have some teeth. Working-class commuters would get stuck with piling-up daily tolls that would effectively be unavoidable if they wanted to transit to their jobs. The problem with this argument here is that we’re talking about the most transit-rich ten square miles in the entire country. Downtown Manhattan is served by subways and ferries from other boroughs (and even a tram from Roosevelt Island); the PATH, New Jersey Transit, and the Metro-North from the entire surrounding metro area from Long Island to upstate to neighboring states; and buses and Amtrak from farther afield.
There is no population center close to Manhattan from which you can’t reach the city via public transit. Statistically speaking, people driving their cars into Manhattan are the elite few, and the transit commuters for whom the toll is a financial lifeline — with revenues set aside for transit improvements and capital expenditures — are the working class and middle-income people Duffy seems so concerned about.
Now, for the moment we still have some semblance of rule of law, so the federal government can’t just axe a major program by killing an already-issued approval just because this is a political preference of the president. So Duffy is advancing two basic legal arguments, at least one of which has already made an appearance in some of the ongoing litigation against the program: one, Congress has only allowed tolling on federal highway-funded roads in certain limited circumstances, including “value pricing pilot programs.” Duffy contends that this program does not qualify because it is a “cordon pricing” program that doesn’t target a specific road but an area, and doesn’t allow free options to access that area. This, it must be noted, is an extrapolation of his from the actual statute, which is pretty vague and says nothing of the sort.
Two, this exception was built in to allow for programs geared towards reducing congestion, and Duffy argues that the toll “appears to be driven primarily by the need to raise revenue… as opposed to the need to reduce congestion” before immediately acknowledging that “preliminary project data published by the MTA reports a congestion reduction benefit.” This argument is again basically a vibes-based one. Sure, the state legislature set out revenue requirements for the toll, but there’s nothing stoping this goal from existing concurrently with the separate objective to reduce traffic.
In any case, despite the fact that Trump immediately took a victory lap (including calling himself “the king,” paired with several official White House accounts posting what appeared to be AI-generated images of Trump as a literal king, which is a can of worms for another time) this is not a done deal. This letter being sent by itself does nothing, and it’s not clear yet if Duffy has actually moved to try to rescind the federal approvals. In any case, it’s not completely clear that the administration even could suddenly rescind the sign-off that the federal government had already granted, particularly as the program has already begun to operate.
In any case, the MTA has already sued Duffy, the DOT, the Federal Highway Administration and its executive director, Gloria Shepherd, in federal district court. The 51-page complaint raises a host of issues, including the fact that the statutes and regulations do not explicitly allow any one party to unilaterally rescind the agreement; polling showing that the program has been popular and that it’s been supported by business leaders; the fact that the funding is already going to transit improvements; statements made by Trump promising to “kill” the program; and broader issues like the administration’s general lawlessness, exemplified by efforts “to take a number of unilateral executive actions that have been challenged in and stopped by the courts.” The lawsuit takes the administration to task for voicing support for federalism and then acting to block a program against New York’s will.
The filing also makes explicit that New York does not intend to stop the toll just because Duffy is trying to withdraw the approval. The federal government’s actions here ”obviously do not require Plaintiffs to cease operation of the Program. The status quo is that Congestion Pricing continues, and unless and until a court orders otherwise, Plaintiffs will continue to operate the Program as required by New York law.” That means that, for now, the tolls will roll on.
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