Episode 146: Trump v. Congestion Pricing 

Sarah Goodyear: This is The War on Cars. I’m Sarah Goodyear. With me is my co-host, Doug Gordon.

Doug Gordon: Hey, Sarah.

Sarah: Hey. I’m so glad you’re back, Doug, because you were gone and that was—I needed you here.

Doug: It was nice to be gone. However, it’s not bad to take a break from reality, given reality these days.

Sarah: And the reality is another emergency. This is our second emergency episode about congestion pricing. We’re gonna get to the Trump administration’s attack on New York’s tolling program in a moment. But first …

Doug: If you like what we do on The War on Cars, please support us on Patreon. Go to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. You can contribute today starting at just $3 a month. We are completely independent. We really depend on listener support. We will send you free stickers, a thank-you note—usually written by Sarah—and you will get access to ad-free versions of regular episodes, bonus content, all kinds of fun stuff. And our eternal gratitude. Seriously. Thank you.

Sarah: Yeah, thank you. So let’s get to it. With us today to discuss it all is reporter Dave Colon, who has been covering the congestion pricing saga for StreetsblogNYC. Dave Colon, welcome to The War on Cars. Finally!

Dave Colon: Hey! Thank you, guys. I thought I was gonna get to be here to talk about my efforts to box Brad Lander, but I guess that maybe that’s for a future episode.

Doug: If you do find yourself punching Brad Lander or being punched by Brad Lander, the comptroller—who we’re gonna get to in this episode—please, it’ll be like a pay-per-view event sponsored by The War on Cars.

Sarah: Yeah, we will.

Doug: We love Brad, so don’t let people get the wrong impression.

Dave Colon: I want your listeners to understand it’s not ideological, but …

Doug: Brad works out. He does kickboxing as, like, his big workout to stay in shape. So that’s the—that’s the reference.

Dave Colon: Right. So I’ve been boxing boxing. So, you know, your listeners should understand this is a very serious thing.

Sarah: Well, Dave, some people refer to you as “America’s beloved congestion pricing expert.” That’s why we have you here today, so that we can benefit from that expertise.

Doug: Some people being Dave.

Dave Colon: Me. I refer to myself as that.

Sarah: Well, fair enough. We’re gonna recap what has happened with congestion pricing, where we stand right now. And I am going to define right now for our listeners, because things are moving quickly. Today is Monday, February 24. It’s still before noon, so who knows what will happen next? But this is the state of things as it stands. Congestion pricing itself is an idea that’s been around for decades. There was a failed attempt by the Bloomberg administration to get it approved back in 2008 when I was working at Streetsblog. Back then, not only did it not get approved, but it wasn’t even brought to a vote.

Sarah: Okay, fast forward to 2019. Congestion pricing was passed into law under then Governor Andrew Cuomo. The motivation was, of course, to reduce congestion in Manhattan, but also to fund the MTA, which is the transit authority that keeps New York going with the subways and the buses and regional trains. And New York could not exist without the things that the MTA does. Then on June 5, 2024, just this past summer, with the cameras installed, set to start at the end of that month and charge drivers $15 to enter the central business district of Manhattan, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she was indefinitely pausing congestion pricing. Remember that?

Dave Colon: I don’t.

Doug: You blocked it out of your mind? No, we recorded an episode pretty much the next day after she announced her pause, and we were all apoplectic about the whole thing. I remember a lot of cursing and a lot of ranting.

Sarah: Part of the reason we were so mad about it was that the reasoning behind it just didn’t make sense. Her rationale was …

Dave Colon: Oh, man. I like—I struggle not because I don’t remember, but because the logic inherent in it was just contrary to everything that she’d been saying for two years. I know that you guys went over all this in your episode that you did, but yeah, her general thing was, oh, inflation is high and affordability is important, but it never really got much further than that. And so it also left a lot of smoke, I guess, for people to look at and go, what is some kind of electoral ploy to win an election, to make sure that Democrats win some House seats? You know, she kept going, “No, no, no, no, no. It’s not that.” And then it just started right after the election, and it was like, man, this looks pretty bad for you. I’ll take it, but it was all just like a really dumb dream. And then recounting it to people also feels like at this point, telling people about the dream you had, and they are just getting less and less interested in it.

Doug: I had a dream that Kathy Hochul was sitting in a restaurant across the street from Grand Central Terminal talking to people about driving to eat.

Sarah: Not a restaurant. This wasn’t a restaurant, Doug.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: This was a diner. This was the people’s restaurant.

Doug: It is funny. There’s a thing going on in politics right now with the Trump administration that if you say it out loud, you sound like a mad person, you sound insane. And I feel like back then that’s exactly how we all felt. Like, if you say this out loud, “She shut down a transportation initiative that would have benefited a region of, like, 20 million-plus people over conversations with, like, a dozen people in a diner across the street from Grand Central.”

Sarah: And then, as Dave mentioned, she did start it up again. Announced the restart after the election with a reduced price to $9 and a start date of January 5, in time to still be under the Biden administration—just barely. So the cameras turned on January 5. We’re gonna discuss what the effects have been. And then on Wednesday, February 19, Sean Duffy, the new US Secretary of the Department of Transportation, sent an email to Governor Hochul saying that he was rescinding the Federal Highway Administration’s approval of congestion pricing. Just rescinding it. In the aftermath of that, our president, Donald J. Trump, also posted what looked like an AI-generated image of him wearing a crown with the comment, “Long live the king.” People were pissed.

Doug: Yeah, it was heartening to see how pissed people were. Sarah, you went to a rally on Saturday in Times Square, and how was it?

Sarah: It was great. There were a lot of people there. There was a lot of chanting.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [chanting] Congestion pricing works. Congestion pricing works. Congestion pricing works. Congestion pricing works. Congestion pricing works.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [chanting] No kings! Fuck you! No kings! Fuck you! No kings! Fuck you! No kings! Fuck you! No kings! Fuck you!]

Doug: So Dave, Streetsblog has been covering this for years, and you’ve been on this beat for a long time. What was the reaction inside the newsroom when the news came down?

Dave Colon: I mean, you know, everybody just kind of dropped everything and went right to it. I’ve been doing a lot of stories about the lawsuits about congestion pricing, so I’ve developed some great sources who are smart about NEPA and environmental law, and the way that these things are supposed to work. So yeah, after a brief moment of being, like, hugely depressed, I just kind of went, “Okay, I guess I’ll call the lawyers and I’ll ask them about this letter that doesn’t really talk about the law and the reasons for this thing happening.” You know, everybody dropped everything and just did congestion pricing stories. My boss did one, you know, kind of just throwing everything together that happened. We sent somebody out to the subway, and he got quotes from subway riders who were really pissed off. So it just turned into this whole, oh, is other stuff happening? Well, now nothing else is happening because an atomic bomb got dropped on funding public transit.

Sarah: I will say that our Governor Kathy Hochul, who has not exactly been as on it perhaps as she should have been in some other political ways during the first weeks of the Trump administration, when this happened, she did react pretty quickly.

Doug: Well, sort of like Dave was saying, it’s almost like the Kathy Hochul that existed from June 5 to January 5 never really existed. And that the Kathy Hochul who existed prior to pausing congestion pricing, standing up with advocates and saying that she was in favor of cleaner air and less asthma and things like that, that’s who reappeared in the wake of this news. Let’s play some of the press conference tape from the press conference she gave the day after this news dropped.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kathy Hochul: At 1:01 pm today, the New York—the US Department of Transportation emailed us a letter from Secretary Duffy announcing their attempt to end the congestion pricing program in the state of New York. At 1:58 pm, President Donald Trump tweeted, “Long live the king!” I’m here to say New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years. [cheering] And we are not—we sure as hell are not gonna start now. The streets of this city where battles were fought, we stood up to a king and we won then. In case you don’t know New Yorkers, we’re in a fight, we do not back down, not now, not ever. [cheering] Because what are we fighting for here? We’re fighting for our residents, our commuters, our riders, our drivers, our emergency personnel. Life has gotten better. Those who have asthma, people with illness, that’s who we’re fighting for. And the six million people who use the MTA to get to their jobs and their lives and their doctor’s appointments, nurses, doctors, EMTs, all that need to get to their jobs in a reliable way, they’re now gonna be affected.]

Doug: So yeah, Kathy Hochul reborn. Instead of worrying about people going to their appointments by car, she’s worried about them going by subway, which is how the majority of people actually do go to those things.

Sarah: What do you think, Dave? What do you think accounts for this change in Kathy Hochul’s demeanor on this topic?

Dave Colon: You know, you never try to do long range psychology on people after such rapid changes really ever. But I think that she probably understands to some degree that being the person who is directly responsible for congestion pricing dying a kind of ugly death is not a great thing to have for your legacy. And there also is just the purely—”selfish” is the wrong word, but just the staring down the barrel of not only what is now a $35-billion hole in the capital plan that is upcoming for the MTA, but also having to go back and replace the $15 billion that congestion pricing is supposed to raise for the capital plan that congestion pricing was passed to fund. That would light a fire under my ass if all of a sudden I was on the hook for $50 billion instead of even $35. And I think to some degree she does understand that there’s a large base of activists and people who will fight for this with her.

Dave Colon: But yeah, I mean, it’s unfortunate that we had just spent the past six months hearing her saying the opposite, that she’s fighting for low-income commuters who are driving here. “And I’m a driver and I understand all this.” And it’s—you don’t want to do like friendly fire, like, right in the middle of the fight, but it’s a little jarring. But also, I’ll take it. It’s—you know, it’s like a really rapid heel to face turn in pro wrestling, and I try not to argue with those stories when I see them. So I’ll just—I’ll take it. Just let’s—okay, let’s go. We’re on the same side here.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: That’s where I am on this. You know, you can’t look back. We are in an emergency right now, and if the person extending a hand to you to get you out of the burning building is the person who set the fire, you can yell at them after you’re out of the building.

Sarah: Yeah. And also to me, it was just reassuring to see any Democratic politician in this country seize on the most obvious red meat political moment that you could possibly have, which is the president literally saying, “I am the king” and putting a crown on his head. You know, how could you not seek to win this political moment? We live in a country that was defined by its opposition to a king, so it just for me was very nice to see that there is at least one Democratic politician who would like to make something out of that politically.

Doug: Yeah. Kudos to Kathy Hochul for just going straight to like, “I’m not throwing away my shot,” and quoting Hamilton, essentially. So pretty good.

Sarah: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Doug: So speaking of Hamilton, because she does actually quote some Hamilton in here, I don’t know how much credit we want to give her, but let’s play the next part of her speech.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kathy Hochul: I don’t care if you love congestion pricing or hate it. This is an attack on our sovereign identity, our independence from Washington. [cheering] And this is—we are a nation. We are a nation of states. This is what we fought for. People like Alexander Hamilton and others fought for to set up a system. We are not subservient to a king or anyone else out of Washington. So this is the fight we’re in. It’s all about our sovereignty.]

Doug: Right. State of our nation. Are we a nation of states? To quote Lin Manuel. So pretty good stuff.

Sarah: Yeah. No, it’s got a little poetry to it.

Doug: What do you think, Dave?

Dave Colon: It’s one of these things, you know, I saw people doing. They’re like, “Oh, what are states’ rights? I thought the Republicans—” and yeah, it’s like, weird and hypocritical, but also at the end of the day, she’s right, and the people who talk about this in terms of federalism, there are obviously parts of federalism—and let the states be, you know, a laboratory of whatever that are bad. Like, when they go like, “Oh, transgender people, they’re illegal.” You know, the things that are like an affront to human dignity. You don’t really want to throw out to be like …

Sarah: Reproductive rights.

Dave Colon: Yeah, Reproductive. Like, you don’t want to be like, “Well, we’re letting people be a laboratory for some of the really things that trample human rights.” But on something like New York City, the place that is different than everywhere else in America in terms of how people get around—and I think that we’ll probably get into this a little bit with the Sean Duffy appearances and the things that he said about this—yeah, you need to let New York City do things differently than they would do them in places where there is not the biggest public transportation system in the United States of America. So philosophically, she’s right, but also just kind of the on the ground facts. Like, there’s a reason that we do things here one way and that other people don’t.

Doug: I wonder, Dave, if you could answer this question for our listeners, which is there was a long process of approving congestion pricing with lots of approvals needed along the way, lots of environmental review. And one of the final steps was that the Federal Highway Administration had to sign off on congestion pricing and say, “Okay, you’re good to go. The cameras can turn on.” And Duffy is basically saying, “No. Sorry, that’s rescinded.” Why, from a legal perspective or a constitutional perspective, is that wrong?

Dave Colon: Well, I guess there’s a couple things. I mean, one, the literal agreement that the MTA and the federal government signed that established congestion pricing does say—and it’s a contract—it says that the MTA has the authority to, if they want to stop this, they can stop it. But there’s nothing in there that says the federal government can just do this on a whim at all. It just doesn’t say that. So that’s one.

Dave Colon: The other, I guess, reason why they can’t do this is they haven’t really—Sean Duffy in his letter, didn’t really make any case for, “We have gone through and considered the way that this program is working, and the evidence that we have shows that it sucks, and actually the air quality is terrible everywhere and traffic is higher.” Agencies need to have a logic behind the way that they do things. Maybe sometimes we get frustrated with how slowly that can work. Certainly in the case of congestion pricing, it felt like it was taking forever, but it was because they were putting everything in a big box and studying it, and which is what federal agencies are supposed to do.

Dave Colon: It is pretty difficult to make the case that in less than a month being in charge of the US government, that Sean Duffy and the USDOT and the FHWA managed to study everything going on with congestion pricing and said, “Oh, we have actually a number of reasons why this isn’t working, and why you’re failing the things that we set out for you to do.” I think anybody who has done bike lane struggles in New York City is very familiar with the Article 78 lawsuits that happen where anytime somebody sues to stop a bus lane or a bike lane in the city, they point to something called Article 78. It’s a piece of the law—I’m sure other states have things like this, too—where you say a city—a government can’t do something that’s arbitrary and capricious when they’re making their decisions. And certainly when you look at the letter that Sean Duffy sent to the MTA and Kathy Hochul, this seems really arbitrary and extremely capricious. So those are just a number of the reasons, and we’ll see what the FHWA says in court if they try to back things up a little bit more. But the MTA has already filed a lawsuit, so it’s nice that they’re the plaintiffs. And they’ve laid it all out saying, “You don’t get to do this.” And actually, ironically, they said, “You have to follow the steps set out in NEPA.” The same thing that took them 18 months to get this all up and running.

Sarah: Could you unpack that acronym for us, NEPA?

Dave Colon: The National Environmental Policy Act.

Sarah: It’s environmental review. It’s this way you always hear about environmental review, environmental review. And that held this up for many, many years.

Dave Colon: Yes. In this instance, there’s some dramatic irony to the whole thing.

Sarah: What’s interesting to me is how quickly the Trump administration picked its transportation targets that it was going to hit. And there are ideological and political reasons for both of their first targets, one of which was high-speed rail in California. Sean Duffy also went out to LA and announced that they were gonna be looking at that. There’s a sense to me that what’s happening in New York is personal for Donald Trump because he’s from New York, and also because he knows how politically New York is one of the few places that can make a stand against him that does have some strength. And so weakening New York, I think, is important to him.

Doug: Let’s set up, I think, exactly what you’re saying here with Kathy Hochul making that point.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kathy Hochul: It feels like the commuters of our city and our region are now the roadkill on Donald Trump’s revenge tour against New York. [applause] And I have to say this too, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. It’s not the real world, Sean. [laughter] It’s real life for New Yorkers, and don’t you forget that.]

Sarah: Gosh, Kathy. You should be like this more often.

Doug: Yeah, it is interesting that Democrats are finding their footing this late. You know, they should have been a little more prepared. However, we knew this was coming, and Kathy Hochul knew this was coming because Trump said that he was gonna kill congestion pricing in his first week.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Now he didn’t do it in his first week, but we knew that it was gonna happen. So here’s what she said.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kathy Hochul: Within seconds of us getting this notification, our MTA was prepared—we knew this could come. Filed a lawsuit within minutes. I’m very confident we’ll be successful. And I also want to say the cameras are staying on. We are keeping the cameras on. [cheering] Lights, cameras, action. They’re staying on. Last thing I’ll say: If in some world that they are successful, the next time you’re stuck in traffic, the next time your train is delayed, the next time you’re in a flooded station because infrastructure repairs were not made, I want you to think of this. Think about this next time you’re stuck in traffic. [booing]]

Doug: I will say it’s so interesting because if we remember from the summer, what were we all saying? “The next time you’re stuck on a train, the next time you’re stuck in traffic, who do you want to blame? Kathy fucking Hochul.” That’s what we were saying. So maybe she internalized some of that language from the advocates and is like, I don’t know, through some process of her own trauma, is transferring it onto Donald Trump. So good for you, Kathy Hochul.

Dave Colon: And she’s right. This is also—I mean, again, it’s something, I guess, in the big rebirth of mass transit politics, I think that you have seen people manage to go—when the MTA was falling apart in the summer of hell, everybody was. Riders Alliance was bringing cardboard cutouts of Andrew Cuomo on the bus and on the subway. You know, people have come to understand you can just blame this one—not the mayor, but you can blame the governor, you can blame, in this instance, the president. And you’d be right. In this instance, you’d be a hundred percent right that it is all Donald Trump’s fault. When you are leaning on your horn on Canal Street and just losing your fucking mind, it is literally the President of the United States’s fault, which is a weird thing to consider, I guess.

Sarah: But it’s not just Donald Trump. And she calls out—I mean, it is just Donald Trump in terms of the buck stops with him, and he’s the one who did this, but speaking of governors, there’s another governor who very early on, as soon as Trump got inaugurated, was pushing Trump to do this, and that is New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy.

Doug: Yeah, and I don’t think we need to play the tape, but I don’t know if you heard his interview, Dave, where he basically said something to the effect of, “Well, look, it took us different approaches to get there, but I’m glad congestion pricing is over thanks to Donald Trump.” That’s what Democrats are saying. Murphy making common cause with the fascists is not a great look for Democrats.

Dave Colon: I feel like Mike Francesa saying it like this, but Phil Murphy is a disgrace. Like, it’s just unbelievable to watch this guy take L after L in court, and to just refuse to understand or accept the reality of who drives into Lower Manhattan, and to sit there and complain about tolls when you run the Garden State Parkway. You’ve just whined and moaned and begged Donald Trump, of all people. And there’s just this idea that Phil Murphy is some environmental champion that I think that people have gotten into their heads. And I mean, legacy kind of doesn’t matter. You know, it doesn’t exist. You know, history barely exists. But, like, always remember that Phil Murphy is the guy who devoted the entire second act of his governorship in New Jersey to destroying congestion pricing for some reason.

Doug: And expanding a highway and reducing funding for New Jersey.

Dave Colon: You throw everything else in there. Yes, he said he was gonna fix New Jersey Transit. He’s not come up with a single idea to ever do it. I have taken New Jersey transit, and it was just the goddamn worst, you know? Yeah, he’s expanding a highway that goes into Manhattan. He’s a real goddamn disgrace. And I don’t want to do psychology about it, because I especially don’t know what’s going on with him, but it’s just one of these things where it’s like, he has to understand how this works. People say he’s a smart guy. So what his whole thing is with this has never been very clear to me, but I don’t even want to understand it.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, to me, if you sort of broaden out to the national perspective, it’s just emblematic to me of what so many other Democrats have done and are doing. And so it’s incredible to me that we have so few people doing what Kathy Hochul is doing. But another reason to sort of give Kathy Hochul support in a way, regardless of what you think of on congestion pricing, to just stand up for the person who’s willing to say the simple thing. We’re not ruled by kings.

Doug: And dishonorable mention to Representative Josh Gottheimer, because he also has put out statements basically saying, you know, like, “Look, you gotta hand it to Trump.” No, you don’t gotta hand it to Trump. You don’t actually have to hand him anything. And we’re not gonna defeat him if that’s how you operate.

Dave Colon: That’s his—his whole thing is, “I’m in the Problem Solvers Caucus.”

Doug: Right.

Dave Colon: It’s like, what?

Sarah: You know who actually has to go out every day and solve the problem of how to make the MTA run is Janno Lieber, who is the CEO of the MTA. He’s in the Problem Solvers Caucus of one sometimes. But he had some things to say about this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Janno Lieber: Simple—simple situation. New York ain’t going back. We tried gridlock for 60 years. It didn’t work. It cost our economy billions. But you know what’s helping our economy? What’s making New York a better place? Congestion pricing. [cheering] So as the governor said, let me just take you through what’s happened in the month and a half since tolling began. Traffic was down nine percent in January. 1.2 million fewer vehicles entered the central business district. And that meant bus speeds and all speeds went way up, particularly express buses, people coming from areas where a lot of people drive. The cross streets, the cross streets, which are the death zone for drivers in Manhattan. Anybody knows that. Canal Street, 34th Street, 57th Street, speeds are up, up, up. The streets are safer. Half as many crashes, and that means pedestrians are not getting injured and killed. [cheering]]

Sarah: Dave, you’ve done all the deep reporting on this. What have been the effects? I mean, because they’re showing up really quite quickly after this began.

Dave Colon: Maybe this will be the last time I say something mean about Kathy Hochul on this appearance.

Doug: [laughs] Probably not.

Dave Colon: It’s unclear, but there are things that we don’t know. I do want to say that if this had been going for six or seven months already, we would know the exact impact that it’s having on the economy, and we would know about some of the traffic spillover impacts. But what we do know is that traffic has gone down kind of dramatically. I mean, I think that maybe when you hear something like, oh, nine percent less traffic in Manhattan, it can be hard to understand what that means. But I work right off of Canal Street, which is stuck between the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge. And the cars don’t move on that every day, all day. And now it’s clear, people can drive and they don’t block the box at every single red light. You can certainly see—I mean, there’s been some reporting that foot traffic in the areas, in the neighborhoods where—again, where congestion pricing exists south of 60th Street, foot traffic is up compared to last January. And so January to January, it’s still cold, but more people are there. Broadway is doing fine, even though everybody from a number of producers were freaking out and saying, “Oh my God, no one’s gonna drive here to see our Neil Diamond jukebox musical,” which I think there are other reasons why maybe people would not have driven or taken the train.

Doug: I didn’t see that one, so I can’t tell you.

Dave Colon: Yeah. No, but so far, it’s one of these things where it’s worked really well right out of the box. And it can be surprising. I was surprised, and I’ve been writing about this for five and a half years. But it is working. It’s doing the thing that it’s supposed to be doing. Crashes and pedestrian injuries are down. You know, it really is—when you think about it, it’s cool to say, “Oh, man. Holy shit, this is working.” I was on Canal Street on Friday night a couple weeks ago with a friend of mine, and we were crossing the street and I just went, “Look at this!” And he said the same thing.

Doug: Yeah, it is remarkable. We live in a world and you’re seeing it now with the attack on federal workers, where the atmosphere for decades has been that government is the problem, government can’t do anything. And, you know, I think Democrats need to do a better job of pushing back against that narrative. Government does a lot of stuff behind the scenes to keep you safe, to keep our food safe, to keep, you know, nuclear materials from being smuggled across borders, like, things like that. That’s really important. Just a few things that people who might be listening to this who’ve now been fired by Elon Musk, like, have been doing to keep us safe. But, like, congestion pricing amidst all this madness that we’ve been seeing in Washington, like, it’s been really surreal to feel like here is this unalloyed good. It’s really rare to see a policy in Washington or in state politics or in local politics benefit so many people in so many different ways with so few actual losers, if that makes sense.

Dave Colon: And so quickly.

Doug: And so quickly. Yes, exactly. And Dave, to your point where it would be so much better had this been in the ground for eight months as opposed to eight weeks, you were seeing the polling starting to change. And I think it’s another way in which congestion pricing has followed the pattern of other cities. You know, I think in Stockholm, it went from a net negative approval in the three months leading up to installation to a net positive approval in the three months after. It was something like 75 percent approval within three to six months. And we were starting to see that here. Here’s what Janno had to say about the polling.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Janno Lieber: There was one poll, major poll done, and it found that six out of ten voters say President Trump should allow us to keep congestion pricing. And interestingly, seven out of ten drivers, the people who regularly drive to Manhattan are saying this is good, this is a good deal. And they are saying keep congestion pricing. So it’s mystifying that after four years of environmental study, a 4,000-page environmental review, that the US DOT would seek to reverse course.]

Dave Colon: Yeah. And I just—you know, something to that that I think has been interesting is, you know, we had a couple other people at Streetsblog doing this. I was very fortunate—I felt fortunate that it didn’t have to be me but, you know, trawling TikTok and Instagram, and looking in the early days of congestion and pricing to see people’s reactions. And there was a lot less, “Oh, I hate this,” than you would think. And you can see out in the world, people who have never once uttered the phrase “urbanist” or “livable streets” are out there and they’re going, “Oh, you know, this works.” You know, there was—do you guys know The Lox?

Doug: No.

Dave Colon: Do you know?

Sarah: I do.

Dave Colon: The rappers, Jadakiss and Styles P.

Sarah: Sure, sure, sure.

Dave Colon: They—on their podcast, they had a whole thing where they were like, “Yo, congestion pricing is great, actually. I thought it would be bad, but there’s all these people in the neighborhood who’ve never left the corner and they’re going, ‘Oh, you heard about congestion pricing? It’s so bad.'” And they’re going, like, “What do these guys care? Like, they don’t have a car.” Some guys from Barstool Sports.

Sarah: Yeah. This guy, Eric Nathan from Barstool said, “Here I was thinking the only joy I had in life was the Capitals and playing poker. Turns out I’m an urbanist now, too. Ban cars.”

Dave Colon: It was certainly interesting to see people—you know, the Barstool people get into it. But also in some way it should have been like, don’t tell them they’re urbanists. Just let these dudes just go, “I think congestion pricing is good because I’ve been experiencing it and it’s enjoyable to me.” Like, you don’t have to immediately start tweeting at them and going, like, “You guys are urbanists now.”

Sarah: Right.

Dave Colon: Just let them be normal fucking people who—because that’s what this needs more than anything is, like, you don’t need somebody to be like, “Okay, now we’re gonna introduce you to that essay, you know, the social ideology of the motorcar.”

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: Right.

Dave Colon: No, you’re just gonna fucking, you know, watch sports and gamble and whatever, but also be like, “Yo, actually, my cab was a lot cheaper, or even just—or faster, rather.” Or, like, “I take the subway and I want the subway to work.”

Doug: Let’s talk about somebody who is not speaking up, and that is our mayor.

Sarah: Oh, him.

Doug: Eric Adams. Have you heard about this guy and what’s going on with him lately, Dave?

Dave Colon: A couple things here and there.

Doug: Yeah. Yeah, the news is not good for him.

Dave Colon: No, he’s having a bit of a tough time.

Doug: So he said absolutely nothing since this has dropped down. No news, no comments about congestion pricing that I’ve been able to find. He’s only ever since it launched, distanced himself from it and said, “This was not my idea. That’s Albany. Don’t blame me.”

Dave Colon: Which he can do that, and it’s easy for him to do because I think that people have short memories, and so maybe you forget things like Eric Adams campaigned for mayor as a guy who said, “Of course I support congestion pricing.” When he first got into office, and it was the post-pandemic stuff, and what are we gonna do about the future of the city and the urban death spiral or whatever that thing was called, they had—him and the governor got a bunch of people who love being on panels, and they put together a panel and they came out with a report: The New New York Report. And this is what we were gonna do to reinvent the city after the pandemic. And it said we’re gonna do congestion pricing because congestion pricing is very important for the region. And so there’s a big paper trail of here’s a guy who supported it, but yes, at some point, I think that he made the wrong calculation that this wouldn’t work and it would be really unpopular, and he didn’t want to be associated with it. So at this point, if he doesn’t want to be associated with it, I guess that it’s better for everyone because he’s just as much associated with obstruction of justice as he is this guy who left a long trail of statements in favor of mass transit and cycling and all sorts of safe streets things.

Sarah: Yeah. And to be fair, he’s not answering questions about anything else, really.

Doug: Nothing. Nothing.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: Well, like, yes, six out of ten people want congestion pricing kept, but you will not find six out of ten people who want Eric Adams kept as mayor.

Sarah: No, I don’t think so.

Doug: One person who is speaking out is the person, Dave, who you would like to get into a boxing match with, that’s our comptroller, Brad Lander, who is our former—in this neighborhood where we’re recording, he’s our former city council representative. I really like Brad. I think he’s very competent and qualified. He’s running for mayor. He was interviewed, and here’s what he had to say.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: The federal government rescinded its approval for congestion pricing. We know Governor Hochul is taking legal action to try to counter that. But what will it mean for New York, not only for congestion, for the MTA, concerns around the budget if this isn’t reinstated?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brad Lander: Well first, we still have it. It doesn’t need to be reinstated. It just needs to continue.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: I mean, on a permanent basis.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brad Lander: Donald Trump does not have authority to stop it. So I just want to start there. I mean, congestion pricing is working. Traffic is down. Crossing times for the tunnels and bridges from Jersey and Brooklyn into the city are down 30 to 50 percent. More people are on mass transit. There’s actually more foot traffic in Midtown than there was. And we’re getting hundreds of millions of dollars for our subways and buses.]

Dave Colon: Brad also has a long track record and a paper trail of supporting congestion pricing. And I do think that he’s not just saying this because he’d be obviously boxed in by the fact that everybody could point to things and go, “What were you saying for the last 10 years, buddy?” But he believes in it, and I think also he’s the numbers guy, the comptroller. He certainly understands the value of the money. He understands the value of it as a policy to keep the streets safe and keep people moving. And so it’s nice that someone in city government is saying all of this, and it’s nice that a guy who yeah, might be the next mayor is saying all of this, because it leaves you—it’s going, okay, so maybe he’ll work within the strictures, the confines of a world where congestion pricing exists. And also, it is nice for him to go out there and to point out congestion pricing is still going. It’s on. They are collecting money as we speak. No one has turned it off yet. And it’s good that he said, “Oh, by the way, this still exists.”

Sarah: Yeah, it does not need to be reinstated. And I think that is something that is good to hold onto and it’s good to reinforce. And it is exciting to me that the people who could have turned it off, theoretically, the governor and the MTA, immediately said no. And that kind of made what Adams said or didn’t say kind of irrelevant in a way. And also, there’s this effect of, you know, policies that are just in place, and they just are going along and doing their thing. The longer that is the case, the more strange it seems if then suddenly they get reversed. And so, you know, every—I really do think every day counts.

Sarah: And anecdotally, I’m sure you guys have heard this kind of thing, too, but I mean, I was standing on the corner of Union Square the other day, and I saw these two guys who were wearing sort of fleece vests and stuff that just indicated they might be kind of tech or finance guys. And one of them was saying to the other, like, “Yeah, this congestion pricing thing, I’ve really noticed, like, my Ubers are going faster these days. I think I like this.” And the other guy’s like, “Yeah, I, like, didn’t even know about it, but, like, it’s definitely good. Like, yeah, I like this.” And, you know, I think we’ve all heard those people, those people who maybe weren’t even against congestion price, and they just didn’t know that it existed or it was gonna happen or anything, and they’re finding about it kind of after the fact, but they’re finding out about it in a way that they’re like, “Hey, this is cool!”

Doug: People have to experience a thing firsthand before—that’s always—the smoking ban, Obamacare, bike lanes. They have to see it, and only until you actually put it in place do you start to see. Just like with the Republican effort to overturn Obamacare during the first Trump go round, you saw the people laying their bodies on the ground saying, “Hands off my Obamacare.” So I think it’s really simple. And I think getting back to Brad, just stating clearly, Donald Trump does not have the authority to stop this is something that has been missing from a lot of Democratic messaging. A lot of it is like, “Yes, there’s a lot of inefficiencies in government, but this isn’t the way you go about it.” No, firing federal workers is illegal. There is a process for going about this that they are not following, and Congress has the power of the purse, et cetera. This is unconstitutional. This is wrong. So again, hats off to Brad for just stating it clearly.

Doug: Okay, so we’ve been talking about the Democratic response to this news. This all put Sean Duffy on the defensive, and he did an interview on CBS where he talked about his rationale for rescinding the approval for congestion pricing. And Dave, you and the team at Streetsblog put together a video dissecting—or dismantling, I should say—Duffy’s arguments. I wonder if you could recreate some of that response here, because I thought the video was excellent. We’ll put a link in the show notes. People should go check out the whole thing.

Dave Colon: Yeah. No, happy to.

Doug: So here we go.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: Why can’t New York City determine what it wants to charge for people to come in and out?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sean Duffy: So we give them the authority, number one. And so the American taxpayer, the New York taxpayer funded those streets. And the way the governor set this up is she said, “Even though you already paid for these streets, you can’t use those streets unless you pay an additional toll.”]

Dave Colon: So—and this is something I didn’t mention in the video that we did at Streetsblog but was bothering me: This thing is that you can’t go in unless you pay an additional toll. Almost no one pays a toll to drive into Lower Manhattan, and that is one of the reasons that this was all going on to begin with. There are so many free ways to get into Lower Manhattan that it was kind of a crisis. So it’s just one of these, like, you know, you’re making these people pay a second toll. And I think it gets to—and he’ll really, further into the interview, I think, shows the way that he looks at everything. But it shows very clearly that he just does not understand the way that people in New York City get around and our transportation set up to say, “Oh, you’re making people pay a second toll to get in there.” No one’s paying a second toll.

Sarah: But is he even saying a second toll? I guess this is just a kind of a technical point, but isn’t he sort of saying, like, you paid through your tax dollars to build these roads, not through tolls? I mean, and that in which case, like, the idea that anyone ever—and I think you say this in the video, like, yeah, so we built a subway. So why do I have to pay a subway fare to go on that?

Dave Colon: Yeah. Well, I think that what he’s trying to do is not be really wonky and get in the weeds on the news, which I a hundred percent understand why you’re trying to speak in this shorthand, because yeah, the idea is you are not allowed to toll a federally-assisted highway. And that’s an old, old law, but instead of saying anything like that, it’s just kind of like, “Well, you know, the road taxes, the gas taxes, they pay for the roads.” And it’s like, well sure, they pay to maintain the roads, but, like, someone has to pay to maintain the roads. So yeah, this idea that there’s some new horrible thing going on with that is kind of weird. And yes, to your point, no one has paid for the construction of—no one alive has paid for the construction of any road in lower Manhattan—possibly the entire borough. Like, I’m willing to maybe take a look at some later date, but I’m going to go out on a limb there and say in the year 2025, there’s not a single living person who has paid taxes to build a single block in New York City in Manhattan.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sean Duffy: Well, if I’m the taxpayer, I’m like, “I already paid for the street. Why am I paying an additional toll to the taxes I already paid?” There’s no free pathway into the cordoned area.]

Dave Colon: It’s “cordoned.”

Doug: [laughs]

Dave Colon: I was worried because I was like, I don’t know, this guy is the transportation secretary. But no, it’s “cordoned.” So we were—somebody suggested in the office, they were like, “This is the first time he has seen this word and nobody told him how to pronounce it.” Whatever. It’s a cheap shot but, like, I don’t care. It’s “cordoned.”

Sarah: Take those shots.

Doug: But also the logic there that there’s no free pathway. Well, first of all, walking and biking, totally free.

Dave Colon: Right.

Doug: Second of all, that logic, there are plenty of places in this country where you have to pay a toll to get over a bridge and there’s no other way to get over the bridge. I think people around the country can point to places that are completely inaccessible by driving unless you pay a toll. So that logic doesn’t even hold up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sean Duffy: If you’re a middle-income or lower-income shopper or worker, you can’t access public roads by any means into this area? That’s flat out wrong.]

Dave Colon: I don’t know if he’s pretending not to know this. For all I know he does know all this and he’s just being an asshole, but this really does suggest to me someone who does not understand how things work in New York City. If you’re a lower-income or middle-income shopper, you just are not driving south of 60th Street to pick stuff up. There’s no big parking lot that’s free for you to put your car. It’s $45 a day to park. So just this idea that they’re walling off the city because they don’t have the money to pay for a congestion pricing toll is just ridiculous on its face.

Doug: Right. No one’s driving to Macy’s at 34th Street just to pick up a pair of jeans.

Dave Colon: No.

Doug: I want to play the next part because it was sort of my favorite part of his logic, if you can call it that.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sean Duffy: She never did a study to say, I really care about congestion. I want to reduce congestion, so I’m gonna look at how much money should I charge in a toll and how much will that reduce congestion? That analysis was never done. So instead of paying $9, could someone pay $5 and reduce congestion or $3 to reduce congestion? She didn’t do that. She set a pricing, and so maybe the question is: Why did you set it at $9? What was the purpose of—of setting a $9 toll if it’s not for congestion? Was it to raise money for public transportation? I don’t know.]

Doug: So Dave, to your point, I think he’s doing that conservative “just asking questions” thing, where he knows the answer to this, but he’s not gonna say it out loud because it would undermine his argument. So he’s just asking questions. This is maddening because we started the episode by saying originally the toll was supposed to be $15. There was a range of studies for, I think, up to $23 or even $30.

Dave Colon: $23, yeah.

Doug: $23, of how that would affect congestion and how that would affect revenue. And there’s sort of two levers at play here, right? Raise the toll and you get fewer drivers, great, but you might also get not the right amount of revenue that you need to hit the mandatory billion dollars a year. Lower it, you get the revenue because you get all these drivers coming in, but you’re not reducing congestion. So he’s just being completely disingenuous here. And talk to us about the 4,000-page study that they did do to discuss not just the toll and the congestion effects, but also the environmental effects.

Dave Colon: You know, this shit drives me totally up the wall in part because it’s not as if Sean Duffy is the first person to have said, “Oh, this wasn’t studied enough.” It was studied a lot, and I know that there’s a whole debate within the getting things done wing of the United States of America about, like, oh, environmental review, it takes so long and da, da, da. But if you do step back for a second and you find the environmental assessment for congestion pricing, it’s cool in the sense that we did maybe the biggest socioeconomic transportation study in the tri-state area ever done. You have an answer to just about every question that you would have about not just transportation in the city, jobs. You have answers about who drives to what job. I mean, this level of specificity, everything, every question that you could ever have about congestion pricing was in this study.

Dave Colon: And so what’s very frustrating—and Sean Duffy is not the first person to do this. Every lawsuit that was brought had people saying, “Well, you know, they just didn’t study it enough.” And by the way, when you look at this study that the MTA did, this is what they said about where traffic impacts will be. And it’s like, if that’s good enough for you, then the study has to be good enough also.

Doug: Right.

Dave Colon: There is a huge study, and you can probably even make arguments about why certain things should not have been done based on the things that are inside that study. But to say that it wasn’t studied enough or studied at all is just this ridiculous statement by idiots. It’s crazy. The amount of transportation modeling they did and dumping all these things into computer and figuring out what people are going to do in response to a toll and in response to various levels of tolling and what they’re gonna do in places as far away as, like, South Jersey and in Connecticut, you know, it’s in its own way a very inspiring story of how much and what the government can study. It’s just unfortunate that it took as long as it did.

Doug: What it could study before they shut all the studying mechanisms down.

Dave Colon: Yes, also.

Sarah: Right. And then that gets to the really pernicious attitude that this administration has that is gaining traction in this country for a long time is just to say when there is a knowable answer, to just say, “Well, I just don’t know. Who knows?” And it’s just the idea that, you know, these huge amounts of knowledge are being generated, have been generated by people with incredibly deep expertise, and then it’s just all getting lit on fire. And we’re just gonna do what the big guy says. Because I don’t know, I think it’s part of a systemic gestation of ignorance that’s—that’s happened in this country and that is being used as a political tool by the Trumpists, but not being effectively countered by the Democrats.

Dave Colon: Yeah. And it can be hard. I mean, again, it’s a very large study. They looked at so much and, you know, it’s like, Sean Duffy, the US DOT and FHWA can’t go to court, by the way, and say, “Well, you know, we think actually this wasn’t studied.” They’re not gonna say that in their court papers. That would be deranged.

Doug: All right, I’m not gonna play the rest of the interview, but I will play this one part just, Dave, because I think it will—I’m very sorry, I think it will trigger you a little bit. So let’s play it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sean Duffy: But again, that’s the analysis I think the taxpayer would expect. And if we’re gonna give approvals, I want to make sure the public can access this cordoned area.]

Doug: Yeah, that was the part I wanted to play.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: What’s the word? How do you pronounce it?

Dave Colon: Cordoned.

Doug: Yes. Yeah. Rhymes with “Gordoned,” let’s just say. Pretty easy. Yeah. I think it gets to the heart of the conservative battle against an entitlement program, right? Once it’s entrenched, is very hard to take away. And even worse, it might expand. That’s their biggest fear, right? That was their fear with, like, “Oh, first it’s Obamacare, next it’ll be Medicare for all.” From my mouth to God’s ears, but that was their fear. If this works in New York, what other cities might want to do it? And that’s the fear. Boston, San Francisco, other places, it’s like if we really start challenging the fundamental nature of you-get-to-bring-your-giant-metal-box-anywhere-you-want-to-for-free-and-now-we’re-gonna-say-you-might-have-to-pay-for-it, that’s a threat to the order of things. And so he’s talking to the larger audience, not to New Yorkers. He doesn’t care what we think.

Dave Colon: I understand obviously that other cities have been watching New York, and they maybe want to do this, too. I don’t understand necessarily the way that every piece of transportation politics in LA or Chicago or these places that are a little bit more sprawly and that don’t necessarily have the mass transit setup that New York has, but I don’t want you to just take this out on us. When LA or Chicago starts talking about how they want to do congestion pricing, you figure out then what’s going on. Maybe—yes, maybe the bartenders there all drive to work and you have to figure out some way to do things there.

Dave Colon: But here you can’t just say shit like that. It just is not how it works. The way that Manhattan is set up—and you can even look at it on just a map, it is an island city with very few ways to access it by car. And so through the miracle of tunneling, we have made trains that go all the way there. And the reason that you can’t fit—you can’t fit that many cars there, it’s extremely narrow. You can walk across it in 20 minutes. So in the sense that if you wanted to create the perfect place where you were going to do something like cordon pricing, it would be a small, narrow island that is jam packed with people that cannot fit another fucking car. And so we did that. And so if Sean Duffy is worried about everywhere else trying to do that, that is something that you deal with on a case-by-case basis in all of those places, and you can have those arguments. But we had that argument here and we settled it. And there’s a reason that we settled it the way that we did.

Sarah: Yeah, but I mean, they don’t want places like New York or California to be able to make their own decisions because that means they don’t have the control that they want over the nation’s major economic centers. I mean, I do think that that’s part of why we are seeing the fight over fascism coming to 60th Street and the cameras that are set up there to collect this congestion charge. It seems to me what our elected officials here have to do, and some of them as we’ve said are doing it better than others, is to use our economic significance as leverage. So it’s a very delicate position. And I mean, I keep thinking of West Berlin, where when I was a college student, I went to West Berlin when it was still inside East Germany. And it was understood that you kind of had to let that exist for a variety of political and economic reasons. You know, I wonder if that’s gonna be what it’s gonna be like being in New York. But I think our politicians have to be very, very smart about the way that they exploit these advantages that we have and defend the autonomy that we have still to this point.

Doug: So Hochul, she was in Washington over the weekend on Saturday appealing directly to Trump. And I think one of the arguments she has been making, Sarah, is pretty much that: You made your money here in New York, you know how important it is. And she brought him some sort of deck or book with I’m assuming pictures and very simple words.

Sarah: I was hoping the very large font size.

Doug: Yeah, maybe it rhymed like a Dr. Seuss book. So Dave, have you heard any about, like, what her approach is to the federal government?

Dave Colon: Yeah. I mean, I know that she did the pitch deck. Right now, the move is just defiance, but almost in the sense of—it’s not like defiance in the way that we are doing something we are not allowed to do. Even in Sean Duffy’s letter saying, “Well, I’m revoking approval,” at the end of it, it said, “And I’ll be in touch about how to do an orderly winding down of this program.” Because they know they can’t just turn the camera—like, they can’t just order cameras turned off. So in that sense, she’s very smart to kind of go, “These are on and they’re staying on because we’re allowed to keep them on.” And I think that’s all you can do.

Dave Colon: I mean, the best you can do is give the president the pitch deck that says this is going pretty well. There was a Politico story about, you know, the partnership for New York City. They’re like a business group, the larger businesses in the city getting—you know, they’ve always supported congestion pricing because of the economic effects that traffic has on people’s bottom lines. You know, they were going around and they’re still trying to appeal to Republicans and, you know, some various, like, bus magnate guy—even in New Jersey—who runs, like, a private bus company, who was like, “No, this is good for me. Like, I like it, and I’m trying to convince the president.” You can keep trying to do that. It seems in some way a lot of this is just well, New York seems to like this, so we’re gonna get rid of it. So in that sense, I don’t quite know how the appeals will go. Janno said a million times before this all happened, “Well, you know, Donald Trump’s a real estate guy in New York City, and he understands traffic and all that.” For all the good that that did us. The question of will appealing to facts and logic and reason help? I don’t know, but it’s good to see that there is also a fuck you, we are doing this still side to it because I think you do have to get your back up a little bit.

Doug: I think that’s a really great place to end our discussion. But I want to end the episode by talking about what people can do because I think as goes congestion pricing, so goes the nation, let’s say. What should people do? Number one, call Kathy Hochul and thank her. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but I really do think that when you see elected officials standing up in the way that she has—they hear from people complaining all the time. They need to hear, “I like what you’re doing. Do more of that.” The next thing I would suggest is talk to your friends. A lot of people don’t know what’s going on. We are all terminally online, we’re following this religiously, and a lot of people just don’t have direct experience with congestion pricing and what it means. So talk to people about the benefits. I would also say support the Riders Alliance, Transportation Alternatives, all the groups that are leading the charge. And the last thing I’ll say is support independent journalism like Streetsblog, because you guys are crushing it on the coverage here. So Dave, thank you so much for coming on.

Dave Colon: Oh, thank you, guys. I really appreciate it. I just wanted to add one thing to your action, Doug.

Doug: Yeah, please.

Dave Colon: I mean, obviously there are other elected officials who are—you know, Jerry Nadler’s been great on this. The congressman, if you live in his district, you should probably tell him that you appreciate what he’s doing. Or if you live in Hakeem Jeffries’ district in Brooklyn, you can call him and you can say, “Where the hell you been, man?” Some of this is a little bit way outside of regular people’s hands, but you can at the very least tell your local elected official beyond even the level of the governor, like, the lower level people do need to hear we want to continue to see this happening and we want you to speak out about it.

Sarah: And I just want to sort of say something that I’ve been feeling, which is that being involved with a fight like the fight for congestion pricing that is really getting to the heart of the fascist takeover of our country, gives me a sense of purpose and agency that is hard to come by these days. And even if congestion pricing isn’t the issue for you out there, I really encourage people to find these issues that they can get involved in local organizing, because these are the coalitions and advocacy groups that are gonna be able to provide you with trustworthy allies to face what we are facing right now, which is something that none of us can fully understand the implications of what the next few years are gonna be like.

Doug: Amen. Okay, so that is it for this episode of The War on Cars. Dave Colon, thanks once again for joining us.

Dave Colon: Oh, thank you for having me.

Doug: You can find Dave’s excellent reporting at Streetsblognyc. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Sarah: The War on Cars is supported in part by the Helen and William Mazer Foundation, and by listeners like you.

Doug: You can go to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod and sign up today for exclusive access to bonus content, ad-free versions of regular episodes, pre-sale tickets for live shows, free stickers and more.

Sarah: A big thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon, including our top contributors, Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund and Virginia Baker. Also, we’ve got a show coming up in Minneapolis April 24. We’re doing that with Our Streets, which is a great local transportation advocacy organization that you can get involved with if you live in Minnesota. So we will be out there. You can find all the details in the show notes.

Doug: This episode was edited by me. It was recorded at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio by Walter Nordquist. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. I’m Doug Gordon.

Sarah: I’m Sarah Goodyear. And this is The War on Cars.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [chanting] Congestion pricing works. Congestion pricing works. Congestion pricing works. Congestion pricing works. Congestion pricing works.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police: You need to get onto the sidewalk. Onto the sidewalk. [siren] On the sidewalk!]