Ray Delahanty of CityNerd dug into the automobile-age-old dilemma of traffic congestion and New York City’s efforts to implement congestion pricing to decongest streets and address the growing issue. Briefly the pandemic offered a respite from traffic across the country, but it has come roaring back, squashing early hopes that the public health crisis would push policymakers to overhaul transportation policy to overcome congestion on a more permanent basis. New York City has led the way on traffic rebound, with authorities saying traffic delay has reached the highest level since they started tracking issue more than a century ago.
That’s where congestion pricing comes in. After a program delay triggered by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, New York City launched its congestion pricing system on January 5. Early reports are that pricing has reduced gridlock in Lower Manhattan, where a $9 toll is in force during peak hours. And whether or not pricing succeeds at decongesting streets over the long-term, toll revenue will help pay for a whole slate of needed improvements to New York’s aging subway network. Transit ridership has also jumped since pricing went into effect.
Seattle has flirted with its own congestion pricing system. In 2018, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan announced the City would study a downtown cordon tolling scheme, and she boasted the city might have even beat New York to the punch. That didn’t happened. The study dropped in 2019 and her administration continued to drag its feet and insist that the program would need a public vote before it could be implemented. Generally, cities that successfully implement congestion pricing implement it as a pilot program so the public can see the benefits before facing a vote.
By the last year of her term, Durkan dropped congestion pricing and pivoted to an “electrification blueprint.” The policy has remained off the menu under her successor, Mayor Bruce Harrell, who has preferred a still loosely-defined “low-pollution neighborhood” concept under a slow implementation timeline.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.