De-congestion pricing: Why New York failed where London succeeded
My micromobility keynote for MOVE 2024 in London
Hello and welcome back to Oversharing! I’ve been busy lately doing the rounds at transportation tech conferences: Micromobility Europe two weeks ago in Amsterdam, and MOVE this week in London.
Yesterday I gave a keynote at MOVE, “De-congestion pricing: Why New York failed where London succeeded.” Like any subway rider past or present, I was stunned and outraged when New York governor Kathy Hochul “indefinitely paused” congestion pricing on June 5, less than 48 before the end of the state legislative session. Congestion pricing was decades in the making and would have been a signature climate and urbanism initiative in a country known for neither. So much time, so many dollars have been wasted. New York lawmakers were blindsided, then sent home for the summer with a gaping $15 billion hole in the budget and no viable plan for filling it.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve thought a lot about the contrast between New York, a city I lived in for six years, and London, the city I live in now. New York failed to get congestion pricing over the finish line, allegedly fearing political blowback from suburban voters in the upcoming elections. London, by contrast, last year expanded its clean-air Ultra Low Emission Zone to all London boroughs over opposition from some suburban constituents and a fervent Conservative push to make the policy an election-defining issue. Ahead of the London mayoral election this spring, the prevailing political wisdom was that the Ulez expansion might doom Sadiq Khan and hand the mayoralty to his Conservative opponent. Instead, Khan, the Ulez’s staunchest defender, won a historic third term by bigger margins than before.
There are many reasons why Democrats may not win the House in November: Immigration, the economy, the war on Gaza, general disillusionment with Biden and an ageing and seemingly inept party. Congestion pricing is not one of them. I’m not a political analyst, but I find it hard to imagine that amid war, economic uncertainty, continued pandemic recovery, curtailed abortion rights, and effective minority rule by a hard right Supreme Court, the thing that will make or break voters at the ballot box is a charge on driving into the central-most part of Manhattan. New York needed a leader like Sadiq Khan, brave enough to usher in a transformative public policy despite the risk of political backlash. Instead it got Kathy Hochul, a profile in cowardice. The city will be dealing with the fallout for years to come.
With that, here’s my talk at MOVE. If you prefer to hear me read it, you can listen to the audio voiceover of this post.
Working on ambitious, transformative policies like congestion pricing is my jam. If you’re interested in having me speak at your company or event; need help with a policy position paper or research project; or generally are looking for high-quality writing, editing, and consulting on transport, tech, and sustainable urbanism, get in touch via my website or by replying to this newsletter.
-Ali
Hi, I’m Ali Griswold. I’m a journalist and urban policy expert. I’ve lived in London since 2019 and before that was in New York City for six years. When people ask me what the biggest difference between the two is, I always tell them: it’s the public transport.
London and New York both have world class transport systems, but within world class there is a world of difference. In London, I rarely wait more than 5 minutes for a train. When I lived in Brooklyn, my subway line routinely ran at 14-minute intervals during peak commuting hours—shoutout to the R train—or would sit in a tunnel for ages. I remember being on the Tube shortly after moving to London and hearing a British man tell his friend in horror how he been stuck underground for a whole 15 minutes. In New York, we call that a Wednesday.
Upgrading the subway is a multibillion, multi-decade project so overwhelming and politically fraught that for a long time it was just ignored. But in 2019 the political powers decided something had to be done and passed, for the first time in US history, a congestion pricing plan.
If you’re here, you probably know what congestion pricing is, but for the uninitiated: It’s a policy of charging road users more to enter the busiest parts of a city, usually during peak hours, in order to reduce traffic and improve air quality. You might notice I’ve titled this talk “de-congestion pricing.” That’s because a big challenge of these policies is communicating to the public how it will help them. The price is on congestion, yes, but the goal is de-congestion.
London has several forms of road pricing. There is the congestion charge, a £15 daily fee to enter the city center during peak hours that dates to 2003; and the Ultra Low Emission Zone or Ulez, a zone now covering all London boroughs that charges £12.50 to drivers whose vehicles don’t meet emissions standards. In its first year, the congestion charge reduced traffic by 30%. Since launching in 2019, the Ulez has cut harmful nitrogen oxide emissions by 46% in central London and 21% in inner London. The city now expects to reach legal pollution limits by 2025 that were previously projected to take 200 years.
Cities that have congestion pricing know the process follows an arc: at first, people are upset. It’s a universal truth that people don’t like being asked to pay for something they once got for free—one reason why charging the real price of on-street parking is so difficult. Then the policy takes effect and residents start to see the benefits—cleaner air, safer, quieter streets—and also to realize that, for the most part, the fees don’t affect them.
The tough part is before, when people haven’t yet seen the benefits, and are afraid of change. You have to grit your teeth and stay the course through that initial resistance, knowing that in time the policy will bear itself out.
New York has been working since 2019 to design congestion pricing under state law, and trying to get a policy in place much longer. More than 700,000 vehicles enter central Manhattan every day, and congestion costs the city an estimated $20 billion a year in lost time and productivity. The plan was to charge drivers $15 a day to enter the Central Business District, raising $1 billion a year in desperately needed funding for the MTA, the city’s transport authority, and backstopping up to $15 billion in bonds for capital projects like accessibility improvements at stations and modernizing train signals.
Everything was ready. $500 million of fancy enforcement cameras were in place. And then on June 5—two weeks ago today—the governor announced congestion pricing would be “indefinitely paused.”
This was a stunning failure. If congestion pricing is a marathon, New York ran 26 miles, then dropped out in the final stretch and blew a $15 billion hole in the city’s budget. Governor Kathy Hochul was roundly pilloried in the press for her decision, and her claims that congestion pricing would hurt New York’s economic recovery, including by the city’s business community. She claimed to have axed the policy after speaking with owners of her favorite midtown diners about their New Jersey customers, and said at a news conference that congestion pricing would cause the cost of a slice of pizza to rise, to which I can only say: even Pizza Rat takes the subway.
Autopsies are still being done, but the consensus at this point is that congestion pricing was a victim of politics. Hochul and perhaps her colleagues in the US House were anxious about losing suburban voters who disliked the policy and would be most affected by it.
This brings me to the first thing that went wrong in New York: the structure of the transport system. Many people don’t realize that the MTA is controlled not by the city but the state. In other words, the people in charge of the city’s transit system are neither its primary users nor accountable to its voters. Hochul and most state legislators are drivers. A 2017 public information request by the New York Daily News found that most MTA officials barely used the subway. The MTA is also jointly funded by the city and state, and the state often has other priorities. In 2016, former governor Andrew Cuomo used $4.9 million of MTA funds to—this is all true—bail out upstate ski resorts that were suffering from the effects of global warming.
The second thing that went wrong in New York was that the plan had no champion. Even before Hochul flipped, the support was at best tepid from the same people who are now outraged over the policy’s suspension. Congestion pricing needed a Robert Moses or a Jane Jacobs—let’s be honest, Moses would hate it—and instead it got only bureaucracy.
The final way New York failed was in its communication with the public. Perhaps because it lacked a champion, the public instead heard about the plan mostly from critics or in tedious public hearings that routinely ran for hours and got bogged down in dry and confusing details about state highway codes. If people were scared or anxious about the policy, the MTA was at least partly to blame.
Public communication, by contrast, is exactly where London has excelled. Transport for London, led by the mayor, has run a remarkably consistent public messaging campaign around both the congestion charge and the Ulez, taking every opportunity to remind people that these policies result in cleaner air, safer streets, and better public transport. These are great, compelling messages to an urban public, but the MTA never seems to have understood that. In London, on the other hand, the Ulez enjoys broad public support.
The second advantage London has on New York is in the structure of its transit system. Unlike the MTA, which is torn between city and state, TfL is controlled by the mayor. That means London transport strategy is set by someone who is directly accountable to the voters who use that system. The mayor sets fares on public transport and is also in charge of road policies like the Ulez. The political system ensures that it is in the best interest of the mayor to act in the best interest of public transport, because voters are taking notice. It’s no coincidence that Sadiq Khan has been the biggest champion of the Ulez throughout his mayoralty.
Finally, when it comes to the politics of road pricing, London did it better. This might be surprising coming from the nation that produced The Thick of It, but New York politics is also a shambles. What most people seem to agree on is that New York scuppered congestion pricing after the start date ran up too close against several impending elections. That was never supposed to happen, but red tape and delays ensured that the policy took years to get to the finish line from its initial passage in 2019. London did the opposite. Last year, the mayor extended the boundaries of the Ulez to include all boroughs, a decision that was understandably unpopular in the outermost parts of the city where public transit is less comprehensive and residents are more reliant on cars. The city took various measures to mitigate these effects, like a scrappage scheme for people willing to give up their polluting vehicles. We can argue over whether those measures went far enough, but another thing they did was to have the Ulez expansion happen as far out from the mayoral election as possible.
In July 2023, conservatives narrowly won a by-election in Uxbridge, a suburban west London town whose seat was previously held by Boris Johnson. Conservative Steve Tuckwell ran a single issue campaign opposing Sadiq Khan and Ulez expansion. Tories subsequently seized on automotive rights as a rallying cry, with Rishi Sunak saying he was “slamming the brakes on the war on motorists.” In the lead up to the London mayoral election in May, political analysts and the media suggested that Khan might lose, in no small part because of backlash against his clean cities campaign. That didn’t happen. Khan won a third term as mayor, by bigger margins than before. At the end of the day, it turned out that anti-Ulez sentiment was either less broad or less potent than the conservatives had hoped.
New York should learn from London, but instead they’ve preempted themselves: Turning away from an ambitious, generational policy for fear of what might happen in an upcoming election. They failed to convey the benefits of congestion pricing and in doing so failed themselves. They never found a champion for the policy, and still haven’t. Congestion pricing needs a people’s president, who understands the needs of the average New Yorker. If I could suggest a candidate: I think Pizza Rat is up to the job.