When New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced last week that she was putting New York City’s congestion-pricing plan on an indefinite hold, she potentially killed one of the city’s single largest climate-mitigation projects ever.
By charging a toll for most cars driving between Battery Park and 60th Street at most times of the day, congestion pricing was set to not only reduce traffic — and thereby air pollution — across Manhattan’s busiest business and tourist districts, but also fund the transit agency’s most ambitious capital plan in decades too with some $15 billion in toll revenue. While transit advocates saw congestion pricing as a way to reshape the increasingly car-dependent city back to being the home of a world-class public transportation system, it has been a four-letter word in some outer-borough communities that have long been burdened by heavy truck traffic and lack good transit access — the South Bronx chief among them.
Criss-crossed by freeways, parkways, and expressways planned by none other than Robert Moses, the man who remade New York in his incredibly racist image in the 1950s and ‘60s, the South Bronx has some of the worst air quality in all of New York City. It’s a very poor neighborhood — Representative Richie Torres’s congressional district, which covers most of the South Bronx, is one of the poorest in the country. It is also predominantly Black and Latinx, and has sky-high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases.
So it’s no wonder that residents were concerned when it was suggested that more trucks might cut through the South Bronx in an effort to avoid Manhattan’s congestion-pricing tolls. In response, the MTA came up with a $155 million package of mitigation efforts for the neighborhood and other environmental-justice communities in the tri-state area. Not only would they make a dent in the pollution from what was expected to be around 700 additional daily truck trips, but also the emissions for the 27,000 heavy-duty vehicles that already drive along the Cross Bronx Expressway every day. With congestion pricing now on ice, however, those mitigation efforts will be delayed indefinitely too.
“The $155 million of mitigation efforts were going to be funded by congestion pricing. With congestion pricing on pause, those will be on pause too,” an MTA source said.
It’s been mostly chaos and confusion in New York politics (both city and state) since Governor Hochul’s reversal on congestion pricing last Tuesday. A lot of very big questions remain, including whether or not the Governor actually has the authority to kill congestion pricing when the MTA is already legally required to enact the tolling system. The about face could have national implications as well, with cities across the country watching how it goes for the U.S.’s largest, densest metropolitan area to take the decidedly un-American step of adopting a mass transit-first approach to city transit and the regulation of private vehicles. If New York can’t get congestion pricing up and running successfully, there’s no chance of, say, Los Angeles adopting it sometime in the future.
Hochul is trying to push what is widely being referred to as a $1-billion IOU through the legislature to cover one year of lost toll revenue, but it doesn’t appear that she has the votes to get it passed. While there isn’t much clarity on what will happen next with congestion pricing (Hochul insists the hold will be temporary so that it can be better determined what effect the tolls will have on middle-class New Yorkers; meanwhile there’s already a 4,000-page study looking at just that, among other effects), having $15 billion disappear effectively overnight is forcing the MTA to radically change it’s plans. The agency has already put a slew of projects on hold as it tries to find other funding sources, including updating the old mechanical signals on some lines, finally finishing the second phase of the Second Avenue line expansion in Upper Manhattan, and following through on an extensive court-ordered effort to increase accessibility across the system. Congestion pricing-funded projects that don’t have to do with maintaining the existing transit system, like pollution mitigation, won’t happen at all unless the tolling goes into effect.
In the greater scheme of things, the pollution-mitigation efforts slated for the South Bronx and other environmental-justice communities are small change, amounting to about 1% of the $15 billion in toll revenue. But if it’s small in terms of budget, it’s symbolically much larger as an example of what the MTA could do with the kind of funding it was set to receive: not only clean up the air and the roads in parts of the city like Broadway and Lower Manhattan that are international tourist destinations but also to help right long-standing climate injustices in neighborhoods like the South Bronx.
According to MTA data, congestion-pricing toll dodgers would increase soot pollution from trucks by 5%, and overall soot (which includes non-transit sources) by 1%.
That’s caused many in the Bronx, including the climate-justice organization South Bronx Unite, to be adamantly opposed to congestion pricing from the start. But there is some debate over what might happen to air quality in the neighborhood if trucks seek out the expressway rather than driving through the tolling district.
“In my view, the whole specter of increased pollution in the south Bronx is almost certainly delusory,” said Charles Komanoff, a transport economist who specialized in congestion pricing. “Congestion pricing is going to produce better air quality, not worse,” even without additional mitigation efforts.
While Komanoff has long maintained that opinion, he also said, “I think it’s great that Richie Torres and others in the South Bronx have used congestion pricing as leverage to reduce overall pollution—that is long overdue.”
The mitigation package included a number of different projects, ranging from infrastructure changes like installing air filtration systems at schools near freeways to regulatory ones like lowering overnight toll rates and creating other incentives to make overnight truck trips, when there’s less overall traffic and gridlock, a more attractive option.
A total of $55 million was earmarked for the Bronx in particular, and the South Bronx would likely have also benefited from the programs available to all 13 environmental-justice communities too. At $30 million, one of the bigger-ticket items in the package was replacing the refrigeration units at Hunts Point produce market, the city’s primary wholesaler for fruits and vegetables. A $25-million asthma case management and program center was also slated for the Bronx.
But instead of being able to pursue transformative change, whether in the air in the South Bronx or on the congestion-clogged streets of Midtown Manhattan, the MTA will instead go back to what it has been doing in the particularly cash-strapped years since ridership tanked in 2020: keeping the trains running, and oftentimes, just barely at that.
This story has been updated with new information from the MTA. It has also been edited to reflect that the pollution-mitigation funds would be applied to environmental-justice communities across the tri-state area, not solely the South Bronx. The program at Hunts Point is to replace refrigeration units at the market, not to electrify refrigerated trucks as was previously stated. We regret the errors.