New York is a hard place to live. You especially feel it after spending a little time somewhere else. Here you have to walk in all kinds of weather. The crowds are relentless. The subway is an undependable fright. The other day I missed watching a friend conduct a show because of signal problems — any New York straphanger dreads the term — due to the system’s antique equipment.
But if you need a car, as I do, then none of that holds a candle to the hassle of driving in Manhattan. Unless you have the option of doing your motoring at 2 in the morning, it’s a tedious and frustrating misery. Endless putt-putting, dodging buses nosing out of their lane, getting stuck behind massive, roaring trucks (with the big wheels spraying snow salt on your windshield), sitting in a line of vehicles so long and stalled that you’re lucky if four at a time get through a green light. There are just too many damned cars.
Or were. On Jan. 5 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority instituted congestion pricing: $9 for most vehicles to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.
It worked. Tens of thousands fewer cars now enter the congestion pricing zone daily. Let me be one of the sources social historians decades hence quote on what this feels like: Suddenly, traffic in New York is more like traffic in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., than I have experienced in my 23 years here.
Congestion pricing has even solved the traffic crisis on roads and bridges beyond the heart of the city. A friend told me she has been shocked by how fast she can now get to Queens from Warwick, a town 60 miles to the northwest. I noted that a trip between Queens and lovely New Paltz — a world away from Midtown — is 15 minutes shorter than before. If I’m doing something in Manhattan at night and take a taxi or Uber home, the trip is now often 15-ish minutes instead of 30. I hear it no longer takes buses the better part of a midday hour to get across the tiny island.
These differences matter. This is quality of life.
Plus the program is making real money for the city: $48.6 million in its first month. The funds raised will be used in large part to fix those famous signal problems and all else that ails the ancient subway system.
The program is a success on every level. And President Trump wants to kill it.
I doubt Trump has to put up with much bumper-to-bumper traffic. I assume most of the time, he gets to fly over the rest of us in his cheeseburger comfort. But his objection is purportedly the financial burden for commuters who have to drive into Manhattan. You know, his aching concern for the little guy.
I’m not sure how little I am. But millions of us are “screaming for space,” as Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote in the song “New York! New York!” And we are talking ever more about a new urban experience we hardly expected to happen so fast.
I sympathize with people who have found this hard to pay for, but we need to mend rather than end. In Melbourne, Australia, the EastLink toll road system, designed to thin traffic, has a hardship policy for people who fall into financial crisis, and that kindness has helped the system gain public acceptance. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority offers a toll discount for those of limited income, but perhaps it could do more.
At the end of the day (as well as the middle of it), however, with congestion pricing, for many New Yorkers, the living is easier. It should stay this way.
Public approval of the policy will rise apace, as it often does after anti-congestion projects show their worth. In Stockholm, only 36 percent of poll respondents approved of congestion pricing as a proposal — until it worked. In a referendum after a seven-month trial, 53 percent of people supported keeping the system. In 2008 public opinion on the Melbourne project was generally negative. But only a year into operation, 67 percent of drivers polled said they approved. When Minneapolis changed the high-occupancy vehicle lane on a notoriously trafficky stretch of highway to a high-occupancy toll lane, about three in four car pool and bus drivers disapproved. A few years later, approval among drivers reached 91 percent.
In New York, residents — drivers and nondrivers alike — must rally in defense of such a beneficial and even common-sense project. First, let’s give it a better name. Might we call it New New York? Gov. Kathy Hochul, redeeming herself after initially, unwisely deep-sixing the project, will lead the way, along with the suit that the M.T.A. has filed against Trump’s order.
But if congestion pricing in Manhattan is as increasingly popular as seems likely, we need to greet the president and his henchmen with something more visceral than a lawsuit. We need a sustained hue and cry, an implacable gnashing bark. We need to push back with the collective horsepower of all those liberated vehicles. Let’s tell Trump we’re not going back to an eternally noisy and smelly gridlock that he doesn’t have to experience.
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