NY Gov Kathy Hochul Wins Place On Everyone's Climate Sh*t List With This One Weird Trick!
When Bill McKibben says you've taken 'the most aggressively anti-environmental stand I can recall a major Democratic governor taking,' you should probably rethink.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul threw away years of hard work, exhaustive planning, and diligent coalition building Wednesday when she announced she’s putting an indefinite hold on “congestion pricing,” New York City’s plan to reduce traffic and carbon emissions in the city’s business district by adding a $15 EZ-Pass toll on all cars entering lower Manhattan, with higher fees for trucks, between $24 and $36 depending on size.
The system was supposed to go into effect starting June 30, and was projected to raise about a billion dollars a year for the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Reduce cars and their emissions, improve clean public transportation: It’s a huge part of the effort to decarbonize cities worldwide.
The climate and health benefits of reducing city traffic are significant: After London implemented a congestion pricing plan, carbon emissions dropped by 20 percent, and bus ridership shot up 37 percent. In Stockholm, air pollution dropped by between five and 10 percent, which was enough to have a dramatic effect on childhood asthma: After a few years of cleaner air, the rate of asthma attacks plunged by nearly 50 percent. That’s especially important for New York, since kids in the Bronx have among the highest rates of asthma in our great dirty nation.
Just two weeks ago, Hochul herself gave a rousing endorsement of the plan, offering excellent reasons to adopt it. Let’s quote the governor at length, because boy was Two Weeks Ago Hochul right!
Walk around many major cities and it won’t take long to encounter frustrated drivers caught in traffic jams, cars spewing exhaust on overpacked streets. We determined that the average New York City driver spends 102 hours a year stuck in traffic. Those hours add up to more than four days of your life — every year. […]
There has to be a better way. So, starting next month, New York City will become the first city in the US to implement congestion pricing. We’ll charge people $15 every time they drive into New York’s Central Business District.
London, Milan, Stockholm, and Singapore have all implemented similar plans with great success. In New York City, the idea stalled for 60 years until we got it done earlier this year. […]
We estimate congestion pricing will reduce the volume of vehicles in Manhattan’s central business district by 17 percent. Fewer cars mean less gridlock, traffic and pollution. Fewer cars means safer streets, cleaner air and more room to maneuver for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Congestion pricing will generate $1 billion every year, which will then fund large-scale projects that make public transit faster and more accessible. That’s key because we’ll never change people’s habits if we don’t offer safe, reliable alternatives to driving that work for everyone.
Well said, Kathy Hochul of May 20, 2024! She should have a word with the Kathy Hochul of this week, who “explained” in a statement that “we must respond to the facts on the ground — not from the rhetoric from five years ago.” Well fine, but what about two weeks ago? Easy: The “rhetoric of five years ago” line appears to have been cut from the remarks that she delivered live.
Hochul said that congestion pricing “risks too many unintended consequences” for now, saying it could pose an obstacle to the city’s “continued recovery” from the pandemic’s economic slump.
“Let’s be real: A $15 charge may not seem like a lot to someone who has the means, but it can break the budget of a working- or middle-class household,” Hochul said.
She worried that instead of taking public transportation to work to avoid the $15 fee for drivers, too many workers would choose to work from home, meaning offices would stay empty and there would then be “fewer people patronizing restaurants, delis and dry cleaners.”
Climate activist Bill McKibben was whomperjawed by Hochul’s sudden flip-flop, noting that there’s no clear explanation, but plenty of speculation, from “brain worms,” to big donations from area car dealers, to a rumor that House Democratic Leader Hakeen Jeffries had asked Hochul to hold off congestion pricing to improve the chances of New York Democrats winning enough seats to retake the majority in the House this fall.
And who knows — if it’s brilliant five-dimensional chess, New York Dems take GOP-held seats, and Hochul ends the “pause” on congestion pricing not long after, that would be nice, but it sounds a bit like whistling past the tailpipe emissions.
McKibben notes that if electoral fears were Hochul’s motive, that would be “political malpractice: you don’t wait until the last possible moment to jerk around the advocates who have spent years working with you to craft an agreement.”
The broader consequences are dire, Heatmap News founder and editor in chief Robinson Meyer writes in a blistering commentary, and may amount to a “generational setback for climate policy in the United States.” Calling it far worse than any single oil and gas infrastructure project approved in the last few years (he names some, too), Meyer explains the real damage is that it will
set back the development of climate-friendly cities and rapid transit infrastructure in the United States for years if not decades. And it will deter other American cities from implementing the kind of time-saving, pollution-averting, anti-gridlock measure that the country desperately needs.
There is nothing good to be said for this decision. It is bad politics, bad economics, bad governance, and bad for the climate.
He also notes the damage this has done to the political coalition that was carefully built to gain passage of congestion pricing in the New York state Lege, and adds that politically, it may help Republicans more than Democrats — now Rs can praise Hochul’s “wise decision” even as they run on a promise to kill congestion pricing forever.
And then there’s that billion-dollar-a-year budget hole Hochul just created for the MTA, which is apparently on the verge of officially adding the words “cash-strapped” to its name. The money would have enabled the MTA to “secure $15 billion in bond financing for desperately needed improvements to the transit system.” What’s more, the MTA has already spent some $500 million building infrastructure that would have been used to make the program work, which seems like not a great thing to abandon.
Hochul has floated, in theory, the possibility of other tax increases, maybe a tax on businesses in the city, or maybe a payroll tax, either of which would need approval from the Lege, which doesn’t seem to be in the mood.
Some critics argue that the decision violates state law that was passed to enable congestion pricing in the first place, which directs that
the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which is part of the MTA, “shall establish the central business district tolling program,” referring to the congestion pricing program.
“The way the law is written is very important,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “Here, the word ‘shall’ looks mandatory.”
If a (so-far-purely-speculative) lawsuit on those grounds doesn’t restore congestion pricing, will Hochul’s “pause” become permanent? It’s anyone’s guess. Hochul may decide she’s stepped in it and roll back the decision, especially if there’s no support for alternative funding for the MTA, which could really cause a transportation crisis.
For that matter, Hochul may simply tire of being mentioned in the same tone of voice as “Joe Manchin.”
[WNBC News / NYT (gift link) / Heatmap News / Bill McKibben on Substack / NYT / Photo: Jim Griffin, Public Domain]
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I want to make one little point simply because I live in the area of Manhattan where the not wealthy live. It's ok people forget we exist all the time. Northern Manhattan is basically part of the Bronx.
The congestion zone was not the entire island, it is just the lower part of it, below midtown.
I go to NYC about once a year, and every year the traffic gets worse and worse. The current trajectory is unsupportable. This was a really dumb backtrack by Hochul and delays any sort of meaningful fix.