By mid-year, all things considered, including the disposal of threatened legal action, New York will implement a congestion charge on nearly all vehicles entering Manhattan below 60th Street. This will extend as far as the Financial District on the other side of the city, encompassing such heavy tourist areas like Times Square, Broad-way, Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Build-ing, and the World Trade Center among others too numerous to mention.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) board in early December last year approved what is in fact a novel event for the United States and announced that the daily charge will begin at US$7.50 (for motorcycles) all the way up to US$36 (for large trucks). Cars will be expected to pay US$15 with the exception of taxis and ride shares like Uber and Lyft, which will face surcharges of US$1.25 and US$2.50 per ride respectively.
The objective is multipronged. The money raised, expected to be millions of dollars per annum, will be used to improve and extend the city’s public transport system. The hope is that it will reduce the number of vehicles using the designated streets, therefore easing traffic congestion. Ultimately, it will also reduce pollution as fewer vehicles translate to cleaner air. It is well known that vehicle tailpipe emissions (from the exhausts) are a huge contributor to air pollution, a major cause of global warming and constitute a massive risk to human health. In the final analysis, fewer cars will make the identified area safer physically for cyclists and pedestrians.
So far, the MTA has not announced an official start date; this is not a transition that will occur smoothly. It would not be New York, in fact, it wouldn’t be the US if the congestion charges plan did not face push back. Some NY residents have moved to the court in a class-action lawsuit, while courting public opinion through social media posts. In addition, the governor of New Jersey filed suit months ago, hoping to halt the process, which he described as a “brazen money grab”, since drivers traversing between the two states already pay tolls to enter NY.
Will it ever succeed? Well there is global precedent. In 1998, Singapore became the first city in the world to introduce congestion pricing. In 2003, London imposed a daily congestion charge on vehicles using public roads in central London between 7 am and 6:30 pm on weekdays. Initially, the plan faced significant opposition. Though vilified, then mayor Ken Livingstone pushed ahead with the plan. He had even said back then that he was sure Manhattan would have followed suit if the NY State Assembly was not controlled by Republicans – turned out he was right. Today, the London congestion charge which is £15 a day (it was £5 when it rolled out in 2003) is widely popular. Similarly, Stockholm (Sweden’s capital) faced opposition to its congestion charges in 2006, but since 2007 there has been widespread public acceptance.
Today, Paris is considering such a scheme. And lest there be an assumption that this is a mostly European or first world approach, Bengaluru (Bangalore) in India is mulling a congestion tax. Clearly, what the metropolises of the world have come to realise through trial and error is that expanding road networks is not what reduces traffic congestion. Time and again it has been proven that the more roads and highways that are built and expanded, the more vehicles traverse them. One can really only deal effectively with bumper-to-bumper traffic by implementing efficient and evenly priced mass transit, which offers commuters a better option to spending hours a day virtually crawling along gridlocked roads to get to and from work, school, the airport, medical emergencies and leisure activities.
Where are we? This country has never recovered from the drastic error made in ending the public train and bus services, and no government to date has really made a serious effort at reviving mass transit. Attempts by private individuals at implementing big bus services – Eddy Grant’s foray into this area many years ago comes to mind – did not receive the needed support. The death traps (read minibuses) that are referred to as public transport fall far short.
In the city and its environs, a journey of a few miles can take hours at certain times of the day because of congestion. The response to this has been to not learn from other countries’ mistakes and to reinvent the wheel with an expensive road expansion project. Not only is this costing billions of dollars, but it is also taking hundreds of lives. Traffic deaths last year, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs, were 76.8 percent higher than 2022. From all indications, given January’s fatal crashes, this year is likely to surpass that. To crown it all off, there is no monitoring of vehicle emissions being done here, even as their importation skyrocket and our leaders pay lip service to preserving the environment. That’s where we are.
