The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has settled on an exact date for the start of congestion pricing, according to multiple outlets.
June 30 is when cameras mounted on gantries will begin charging drivers at least $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, a plan that has been moseying through government bureaucracy since 2017.
The MTA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The MTA placed June as a ballpark start date in March, when the agency’s board approved the Traffic Mobility Review Board’s recommendations for the toll. The plan will levy between $24 and $36 on most trucks entering the congestion zone and most standard drivers $15.
Activists who have been pushing for the toll were keeping their fingers crossed that any of the various lawsuits from detractors would fail to stall the program.
“On June 30, barring any last ditch court interference, congestion pricing will become reality,” Riders Alliance policy and communications director Danny Pearlstein said in a statement. “Congestion pricing will be a win-win-win for all New Yorkers, commuters and visitors and bring better public transit, cleaner air, and freer moving traffic. It cannot happen soon enough.”
Congestion pricing goes back to the earlier years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. But its present form dates from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who brought forth a different proposal for the purpose of raising money to replace antiquated infrastructure in the subway system, which was experiencing endemic meltdowns at the time and partly led in 2017 to what Cuomo called “the summer of hell.”
Former New York City Transit president Andy Byford illustrated how expensive those upgrades would be when he proposed a five-year plan in 2019 and 2020 for rehabs which would cost about $5 billion — an almost impossibly heavy lift for the agency at the time. Congestion pricing is expected to bring in about $15 billion over the next five years.
Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.
Robert Khodadadian has long had a simple philosophy about selling real estate. The way he sees it, there are approximately a million buildings in the city, and the broker that gets to sell any one among the multitude that will hit the auctioning block at a given moment is, sometimes, simply the person who happens to pitch their services to the right seller at the right time.
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