Congestion pricing has been decades in the making, a drama featuring lawsuits, outrage, and even a weird last-minute temporary cancellation by the governor earlier this year. Republican politicians and right-wing media have plainly been staking their futures on the opposition, which has included random motorists, restaurant owners, some major labor unions, and the governor of New Jersey. Ruin and chaos have been forecast. Yet now, two weeks in, all evidence suggests it is working. Indeed, New York City’s congestion pricing, which began this month, might already be one of the most effective climate policies ever enacted in the United States.
The congestion pricing model is simple: Charging a toll to enter the city center gets cars off the road—improving traffic while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other toxic pollutants from our atmosphere—while raising revenue for the public transit system. More public transit funding on its own would help decarbonize our society simply by strengthening this alternative to cars. But the penalty for driving is congestion pricing’s chef’s kiss: It gives many commuters the push they need to get out of their vehicles and get on the train.
In the first week of the new policy, Manhattan traffic dropped by 7.5 percent. Commute times are down dramatically on many major and notoriously clogged arteries, including, every single day, almost all day, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Holland Tunnel, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the Queensboro Bridge—meaning not just lowered congestion and pollution but time savings for those motorists who do need to drive. Subway, bus, and commuter rail ridership are already way up.
The right-leaning New York media spins these same facts as evidence of a crisis. The New York Post, which has spent months finding every possible person inconvenienced by the policy, reported the public transit increases as a negative: Trains and buses are now too “crowded,” with “riders smashed up against one another.” A suburban Long Island paper for the Orthodox Jewish community, 5 Towns Central, also followed the playbook of reading failure into success, showing photos of the empty Lincoln Tunnel and declaring that the policy had backfired, turning the city into a “ghost town.” The Post also indignantly lambasted what it called the MTA’s “bogus data” from the first week of the policy, declaring the traffic and transit numbers released by the agency “prove nothing and are irrelevant to the tolls’ true purpose, which is to bleed the public.”
Congestion pricing, in other words, now faces a crucial test that every good climate policy going forward will have to pass: Can its success stand up to a relentless campaign of fake populist counternarrative and reactionary misinformation?
For many Americans, the Los Angeles fires and perhaps Hurricane Helene in the fall are the most frighteningly real the climate crisis has gotten: the most tragic and terrifying evidence that it’s happening now, not sometime in the future to our still-unimagined descendants. That makes it especially urgent to identify specific emissions-reductions policies that are working and to defend them so that they can keep working and be adopted elsewhere.
In other countries, the grumbling and political grandstanding about congestion pricing policies have stopped once people see what it can accomplish. In London, which introduced congestion pricing in 2003, traffic delays dropped 30 percent in the first year, and over the ensuing two decades, carbon emissions dropped by 30 percent. After just five months, support shot from 39 percent (prior to the policy’s enactment) to 59 percent. Similarly, in Stockholm, the policy faced skepticism in a pilot program, but residents liked the effects so much that a referendum to make it permanent passed with 70 percent of the vote. In Singapore, which has had congestion pricing since 1974, the salutary effects on traffic, air quality, and carbon emissions have long been popular.
If New York City’s plan is allowed to continue, its successes should multiply: Subways and buses will get more efficient, beautiful, and functional with the additional revenue, which is expected to fund the extension of the Second Avenue subway line to East Harlem, the construction of more elevators to make more stations accessible to riders with disabilities (not to mention parents with strollers), upgraded signal systems, the addition of hundreds of new electric buses, and massive improvements to the Long Island Railroad and Metro-North commuter lines. These improvements could also serve as tangible signs of climate-friendly policies’ ability to improve everyday life.
Even if the revenue from congestion pricing comes in under expectations—that is, if it’s more effective than predicted at keeping cars off the roads, therefore lowering the amount of money collected from tolls—our public transit system will be safer with more people using it, and it will feel safer too as using it becomes more normal, acceptable, and instinctive even to suburbanites who have resisted it. (By the way, a word about those suburbanites: You’d think from some of the media coverage that all of New Jersey was ready to add to the Geneva Convention the inalienable human right to spend one’s days in Manhattan gridlock. But the numbers suggest otherwise: Three out of four commuters from New Jersey relied on public transit even before this month.)
Traffic should decline still further—projections suggest it will reduce by some 17 percent overall. Greenhouse gas emissions are expected to decline by some 20 percent. Child asthma and other pollution-related health problems should decline as the city’s air gets cleaner; air pollution should decline by about 10 percent, leading to fewer of those depressing air quality warnings and allowing New Yorkers to literally breathe easier. And with fewer cars on the road, fewer pedestrians, bikers, and motorists will die in traffic accidents.
Congestion pricing’s opponents may continue to try to spin it as a failure, even as the data on these successes mounts. The right will not easily relinquish such a high-profile target, and congestion pricing has almost everything the far-right loves to hate: a Democratic governor and legislature, public transit, an attack on cars, a climate angle, division between city and suburbs (so far no one has blamed trans athletes or immigrants, but give it time). That makes congestion pricing a test of our media ecosystem’s resilience under climate crisis: Can American media outlets help amplify good solutions built on solid data, evaluating the evidence fairly and emboldening others to try them? Or will they fall prey to questionable culture-war narratives, and let the world burn?
