Uber's Josh Gold on congestion pricing and how to fix New York City's garbage problem
Uber's Josh Gold on congestion pricing and how to fix New York City's garbage problem
If you’ve lived in New York, suffered a subway delay, or wondered why trash in the city is a literal hot mess, this is for you
This weekend I’m excited to be running a delightfully wonky interview with Josh Gold, senior director for policy and communications at Uber. Gold has been at Uber for seven years working on a variety of regulatory and legislative issues. But more importantly—and the reason why I invited him for this interview—Gold is a lifelong New Yorker with a deep knowledge of city politics and passion for urban planning challenges like congestion pricing, public transport, and the hot mess that is New York City garbage pickup.
New York is the most congested city in the U.S., with approximately 700,000 vehicles entering central Manhattan each day before the pandemic. From 2010 to 2018, average vehicle speeds in central Manhattan slowed 23%, from 9.1 miles per hour to 7 mph. In 2019, the state approved the first phase of a plan to charge drivers entering the busiest part of the city, with revenue going to fund local and regional public transport. That first phase introduced a congestion surcharge on taxis and for-hire vehicles (FHV) like Ubers and Lyfts, but has yet to levy congestion fees on other vehicle types like personal cars and delivery trucks.
Gold and I chatted about why New York City desperately needs congestion pricing, what the holdup in implementation has been, and why Uber spent $2 million to support a policy that makes its rides more expensive. Plus garbage! If you’ve ever lived in New York, suffered a subway delay, or wondered why one of the biggest cities in the world leaves mountains of trash all over its streets, this is the interview for you.
Oversharing interviews with smart people like Gold are available exclusively to paid subscribers. To access this transcript, upgrade your subscription, or use this link to purchase a discounted group subscription. This interview has been condensed, edited, and links added for clarity.
Oversharing: I wanted to talk to you about congestion pricing because you do so much on transit policy, and you’re also a lifelong New Yorker. So I think to start, how long has New York City been trying to get congestion pricing done?
Honestly I think for quite a long time. Mike Bloomberg tried a long time ago when he was mayor, and I don’t know if anybody tried before that. But look, New York’s been trying for a very long time. Other cities have clearly beat us to it. You can look at Stockholm, London, Singapore. And even after New York passed it, we still haven’t implemented it.
Why is it taking so long? What’s the holdup?
There are different opinions. Politics is one of them. I think congestion pricing, although more popular than it was a few decades ago, is still controversial, even though the vast majority of people who come into the Central Business District, the Manhattan core, are not using their personal vehicle and would benefit from improvements to public transit that a good congestion pricing program brings. Congestion pricing that doesn’t increase public transit access is not the best type of congestion pricing. You want the resources to go to public transit. But even with that, in the big push that Uber was a part of a few years ago, it was really important to make sure voters and constituents in the state knew that the money was going to transit improvements and that’s what really made it at least somewhat popular. Because otherwise it’s a 50-50 issue or a 40-60 issue. That’s part of the reason it’s taken so long.
But if you asked policymakers today, why hasn’t it been implemented, they’ll tell you forget the politics, the real reason is there needs to be an environmental study. Which, if you ask an environmental advocate, is a joke, right? Congestion pricing is one of the main tools that cities can use to reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile, an environmental study by the federal government is holding up the implementation. So, that’s really unfortunate. And I’m sure politics played a role. But we’ve seen recently the governor and the secretary of transportation, the mayor, all come out forcefully for this. And we’ve seen a lot of people change their minds. Governor Cuomo, when he was governor. Mayor de Blasio was an opponent but eventually became a strong supporter. You see Governor Hochul now being a strong supporter.
I think that we will see implementation in the next year or so, once we get through that federally mandated environmental study. And I will say, politics aside, there are going to be opponents and making sure that the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed by doing what you need to do for the environmental study is important so that when it’s implemented, someone can’t sue to block it. So I do think that’s a critical step. And so, while I like many others who worked on it, would love to see it implemented as quickly as possible, we all want to make sure that it withstands any future court challenge and is a robust program that succeeds when implemented.
When did you get involved with congestion pricing?
I was at Uber. There were dozens of groups that met regularly—weekly, daily at certain points—to lobby the legislature to devise a campaign, both a lobbying campaign and a public pressure campaign, to get congestion pricing done in New York. Actually Uber, we made a TV ad in December 2017. At the time, the subway system and the train system were on the cover of the tabloids every couple of weeks for a meltdown. I was an L Train commuter at the time, which, by the way, had the new signal system. The L train didn’t have problematic headwinds and still the Bedford stop at the L, I was waiting, you know, two, three trains to get on.
But you had a situation where because of a lack of upkeep and investment, because of a lot of use, you had derailments with the commuter trains at the time at Penn Station. And so you had a big public cry for investment in public transit. And you had the real estate industry and others who at the time depended on workers being able to commute into the Central Business District really come together with advocates, with the League of Conservation Voters, with environmental advocates, with a company like Uber. It was a very strange bedfellows sort of situation where everyone thought the best thing to do would be to message improvements in public transit are going to come from congestion pricing.
Would it be fair to say that the subway meltdown was what made congestion pricing politically palatable?
I think that’s pretty close to fair to say, and I’ll tell you a story. He’s no longer governor, but we had an ad that we put up. It was something like, “Disaster below ground. Congestion above ground.” The governor’s office called me, like, what is this, get this off the air. And then I knew we were onto something. Once we got in trouble for putting an ad, we knew that if you were poking legislative leaders and executive leaders about the connection between that funding source and improvements in public transit, that we could get somewhere. But this large coalition of folks who normally don’t agree on things coming together, taking advantage of what was a bad situation in terms of the train system melting down, pushed it across the finish line.
As you said earlier, the key to this congestion pricing plan is that it will fund public transit. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) says that after operating costs, 80% of congestion pricing revenue will go to improving New York City transit, which is the subway and buses, and 10% each to Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad. The MTA needs this money more than ever after covid, which decimated both ridership and fare revenue. How crucial is it that this funding stream come through?
Getting this funding stream up and running completely is extremely important. I say completely because the first phase of congestion pricing was on FHVs and taxis. You already have a surcharge on taxis and FHVs whenever they cross into the Central Business District. MTA estimates it to be around $385 million a year. So you’re getting phase one. Obviously, and the pandemic made this clear, if you’re just road pricing one road user, you are earning some money for the MTA, but you’re not really doing anything in terms of congestion. Because you take one Uber trip off the road and just add an Amazon delivery truck or a personal vehicle—what happened was those FHV and taxi trips were just replaced by personal vehicles.
I thought we learned about induced demand from Robert Moses!
It’s exactly that. It’s like the conference room problem we have here in an office building. You build more conference room spaces, no matter how many conference room spaces you have, they’re always going to be filled. When you look at road pricing, if it’s not comprehensive—if you start to exempt New Jersey drivers or you start to exempt people who have blue cars instead of yellow cars—you’re just going to free up space for the car that’s exempted. If you look at the pandemic, you can clearly see that bridge-and-tunnel traffic congestion is back up to pre-pandemic levels. But certain modes like taxi and FHV are not there yet. What happened was we just got replaced with personal vehicles and e-commerce.
When they do implement congestion pricing in New York or anywhere else, it’s critically important that, number one, the money goes to alternatives so that people can use public transit—if there’s no public transit alternatives, what’s the point—and number two, that all road users are charged. It has to be comprehensive. You have to look at negative externalities a little bit differently. Maybe there should be, like London has, some sort of incentive for EV adoption. Perhaps there’s an equity goal, so a wheelchair-accessible vehicle may need to have some sort of reduction or exemption, which for paratransit users there is in New York City’s program. But it’s critical that those exemptions be as limited as possible if you really want it to work.
I think it’s hard to argue that congestion pricing money needs to go to improvement in public transit. That’s the way to get people out of personal vehicles. When you have a 25-minute headwind on the subway, you’re going to think about investing in a personal vehicle. And once you buy that personal vehicle because you weren’t comfortable on public transit, for whatever reason, now that’s a sunk cost if you don’t have road pricing. And now it’s sitting in your driveway, or sitting on the street in free parking—valuable curb space being used for personal storage of private goods—and instead of taking the train to wherever, you’re taking your car.
How do commercial and delivery vehicles fit into this?
They’re not exempted under the legislation that passed. There’s a review board that’s supposed to set rate schedules, supposed to determine if there are any credits awarded to people who are paying for East River or Hudson River crossings, supposed to determine whether or not it’s dynamic. In an ideal world, you’re encouraging some of those commercial users for happening between 10pm and 5am. Perhaps they’re paying less during those hours than they are during other hours. Going back to the Bloomberg administration, the Department of Transportation has tried to run voluntary programs that are less incentive-based on getting off-peak commercial deliveries. But with that MIT piece, with a big report that the Times did a couple years ago about a million packages a day coming into New York, we’ve got to think about how to move some of that to off-peak hours.
Why is Uber on board with congestion pricing? It seems counterintuitive that Uber supports a policy that makes its trips more expensive and might even discourage people from taking ride-hail over alternatives like public transit. But Uber put $2 million behind congestion pricing and has remained a big proponent of it.
It sounds counterintuitive, but if you think about it a little bit more, Uber does extremely well in places where people don’t own a car. The way to make sure that happens is by making sure that folks have access to good, reliable public transit. The best way to prevent car ownership is not for someone to take an Uber for every single one of their journeys. It’s to be about a basket of a multimodal experience. Take a bike one day, walk another day, but have public transit be the backbone of your transit needs. And that’s the customer that’s going to use us the most. Someone who takes the subway to work every day, takes the subway home, but one day they go out after work with colleagues to have dinner and they say, look, it’s a little hot or it’s raining, they’re the ones who are going to call an Uber, not the person who drove to work and has that personal vehicle. Like I said earlier, once you buy that personal vehicle, there’s a sunk cost, especially without road pricing. And you’re going to end up using that for most if not all of your transit needs.
In cities where Uber has flourished, cities like London and New York, the vast majority of people aren’t car owners. They rely on public transit. And in order to continue to do so, they need public transit systems that work well. If they have a subway meltdown, if they aren’t comfortable getting into the city on the commuter rail, they’re going to buy a personal vehicle and they’re going to be one less of our customers. It’s also critical that someone who does request an Uber ride is able to get from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time. So less congested roads help us too. Those first meetings with that coalition that I talked about, people were looking at us a little sideways, because you automatically think like, why is Uber so keen on having their trips be more expensive? But if you look at studies, and just common sense, people who don’t own a car are more likely to use our service, or people who are coming to New York City and visiting as a tourist or business traveler and don’t feel the need to rent a car because they can rely on public transit for most parts of their journeys, those are the ones who are going to take an Uber.
Another of your passions is New York City garbage services. Anyone who’s lived there—me, you—knows that garbage in New York is a literal hot mess. Why is it so bad? And how could we fix this?
Honestly, I don’t know why the mayors of the past decades have not tried to fix it. We throw our garbage out in the same way we did 500 years ago in New York City. The garbage system is they put it in a plastic bag—but the plastic bags only came about after a sanitation strike in the ’60s—it was metal containers before that. Since the 1960s we put them in plastic bags, and we put the plastic bags on the sidewalk, where people walk, where people enjoy now open-air dining. Where I push my stroller.
And we’re not talking a single garbage bag. We’re talking dozens of garbage bags piled up on the sidewalk, heaps on every block.
We have nice color-coded systems. We’ve got blue ones for bottle recycling and clear ones for all the Amazon delivery boxes and cardboard, and then black ones for just plain old garbage. We have some small organics programs. But everything is just there on the sidewalk, every day. And as work-from-home has become a thing, as e-commerce has expanded even before the pandemic, the piles of garbage just grow and grow and grow.
And they smell! They make the whole city smell like garbage.
Not only do they smell, they feed a massively growing population of rats. Rat complaints are up. Smell complaints are up. Rats carry diseases, and restaurants are relying on outdoor dining more than ever, and the smell makes people not want to do that. And then on top of that, bags break. Especially when sanitation workers are picking them up and throwing them. And by the way, sanitation workers, the rate of injury is much higher than most professions because they have to lift those things up and then throw them into the back of the sanitation truck, and the bags break.
Then that requires more street cleaning. We have alternate-side of the street parking in New York City where you have to move your car twice a week in order to make room for the cleaning. Your free car that’s being parked for free on the city streets, you’ve got to move it and then just sit idling on the other side until you move it back. Which is horrible for the environment. But then we now have torrential downpours and flash flooding and that broken bag creates garbage, which then blocks the sewer and creates more flooding. So you have all these downstream problems from putting our garbage just there on the sidewalk. We’ve solved it in New York, but most cities in the world have figured out a way to do this.
We’ve solved it?
We’ve solved it in certain pockets. If you look at Roosevelt Island, they’ve got a pneumatic system that they’ve had since the ’70s. Just last week, the New York City Housing Authority and the city announced that they started construction on a pneumatic system for the Polo Grounds, which is a large housing authority in Harlem. In Battery Park City we have community compactor programs, so if you walk in Battery Park City you don’t see any garbage.
So those work in those two areas, but connecting this to the road pricing and congestion conversation we were having—we’ve got to manage our curbs better. Right now curb space is for free storage of large personal property. It’s free storage of cars. That’s what we use our curbs for in the vast majority of locations throughout New York. We could take some of that curb space and put, in my wildest dreams, we’d put the underground trash containers that Amsterdam has, or some parts of Spain have, or other parts of Western Europe have. Wildest dreams we do that. But even if we had an above-ground container where people could put their garbage instead of a parking spot or two or three, we could help solve this problem.
We have a pilot in New York that [mayor] Eric Adams started a couple months ago. We’ve got a new sanitation commissioner who I know is motivated on this issue. That’s a very simple solution, but we have to be able to give up our parking. We have to say, look, there are 3 million parking spots, by some estimates, in New York City. Let’s take away 10% of them and put a bin—a uniform bin, that then mechanically can be lifted up. It’s not so complicated. This is happening all over the world. Maybe we don’t have a one-size fits all solution in New York. We don’t need pneumatic everywhere. We don’t need community compacting like we have in Battery Park City everywhere. We could better manage our curb. And if we’re better managing our curb for garbage pickup, we could better manage our curb for e-commerce delivery. We could better manage our curb for bike use.
Yeah! I wrote a couple months ago about a London program to install cycle parking units in street parking spaces.
We have a company called Oonee that’s kind of the same thing here in New York, and of course it’s better use of curb. You have so many options to better use the curb space from e-commerce delivery, to pick-up/drop-off zones for vehicles like Ubers, for this garbage problem. You have all these opportunities that I actually think will be helped when we implement congestion pricing. Because I do think that will lead to less personal car ownership and weaken some of the strong opposition to taking away some of those parking spots. And it’s not even taking away all the parking spots. I talked about alternate-side of the street parking. If the streets were cleaner because we threw away garbage properly, you would have to clean the streets less, and people would have to move their cars around less, and there’d be less emissions.
I get excited about this because in theory and in practice, it shouldn’t be so difficult. We talked about road pricing and look, tying it to transit improvements is how Stockholm got it done, how London got it done, how New York got it done. It was hard. It was difficult. This shouldn’t be so difficult. Anybody who walks the streets in New York will know that we shouldn’t throw our garbage out where we walk. I get excited because I think this is something that really speaks to Eric Adams, our new mayor, who famously had a press conference about how to get rid of rats when he was borough president of Brooklyn. There’s more council members who are interested now in this than ever before, there’s more Twitter conversation about it than I’ve seen before. And so I’m hopeful that people can say, let’s give up a few of our parking spots and let’s have some uniform garbage collection. And maybe in a few years we won’t use our sidewalks as litter receptacles.
I love how you’ve tied all of this together—congestion, public transit, trash, the general habitability of our urban spaces.
I think a lot of these things are connected. I think it’s all about making our cities liveable. We saw some flight from New York City and some cities during the pandemic, but the vast majority of people want to live closer together, they want to live where there’s good public transit. They don’t want to live surrounded by garbage. They want to have open-air dining. And so, as pessimistic as I am about how hard it was to get road pricing passed and how long it’s taking to implement it, as pessimistic I am about how we currently throw away garbage—I feel and I talk to people and I see around the city in New York, and I hope it’s the same way in other places, that people want that community, they don’t want the single-zoned suburban houses as much as they may have 30 or 40 years ago.
I’m hopeful that congestion pricing will get implemented on most road users, and that will improve our transit system over time. I’m hopeful that we will figure out a way in this administration, with this mayor—who, this is the type of problem I think he wants to take on—to better dispose of our garbage. And that when you move back to New York or come to visit in four or five years, things will be on the right path. So I’ve got some hope.
👏Josh Gold. Insightful, encouraging and decidedly not wonky!