The Death of Congestion Pricing: A Uniquely American Tragedy
The shutdown of Manhattan’s congestion pricing plan in early June, dictated at the final hour by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, will have severe consequences for the New York City metropolitan area and for urban centers all across the nation who follow New York as the national urban trailblazer. In New York at least, many of the immediate casualties are well-known. The ambitious MTA 20-Year Needs Assessment, outlining proposed capital improvements to New York City transit infrastructure from 2025 all the way through 2044, may unfortunately read as an obituary of projects that were killed on arrival by Hochul’s decision to halt the program that was projected to contribute upwards of $15 billion to the MTA. Widely popular projects — such as the 2nd Avenue Subway Phase 2 extension up to 125th St in Harlem, the Inter-Borough Express (IBX) train linking transit-desert areas in Brooklyn and Queens, and system-wide accessibility and resiliency improvements to hundreds of stations, track sections, bridges, tunnels, and pedestrian walkways — are now definitively on life-support.
Such outcomes will impact stakeholders all throughout New York City’s ecosystem. Transit-demand models have been widely implemented to analyze the impacts of congestion pricing models across the world, such as with the very successful examples of London, Milan, and Singapore. In these cities, congestion pricing programs consistently generate vast amounts of revenue to be reinvested back into transit systems which are today widely acknowledged to be among the world’s best across metrics such as metro coverage, headway speed, safety, and cleanliness. Such improvements, over time, entice residents to abandon automobile usage as a means of reaching the central business district (CBD), which in turn spawns an increase in revenue-trips for the system, “paying for itself” in this way and cultivating a city-wide culture of transit usage. Materially, this change in rider modal preference reduces NOx emissions within key commercial areas, enticing foot traffic, public space usage, and overall benefiting citizen health and happiness. Further investments into clean transit within these districts bring even more pedestrians into the congestion pricing zones to enjoy new-and-improved business districts with less pollution, less cars, less noise, and more aesthetic, dynamic streetscapes and plazas. These case-studies reveal a harmonious, self-perpetuating cycle of investment and reinvestment which congestion pricing programs can uniquely create.
But it may now be yet a pipe dream for NYC, which was poised to join the ranks of these global cities through the implementation of the United States’ first congestion pricing program. The city now predictably faces the fate of public under-investment shared by most American cities. NYC, often heralded as the shining exception to the rule of car-centric, unwelcoming American cities, may yet still fall victim to this national characteristic, that of the ‘car-brained’ Fordist idolization of the automobile as a vessel of freedom and domination over the environment, both built and natural. This reality proves a challenge for many to accept, because, undoubtedly, American cars played a large part in the establishment of the country’s international gravitas. The 20th century ascension of the United States into the role of international economic, military, and geopolitical hegemon was driven forth — figuratively, literally — by the automobile. Ford’s conception of the assembly line sent millions of Americans to work, and other industries quickly appropriated the assembly line to maximize productivity and profit. But as the foundations of the modern U.S. economy were built by the booming automobile and manufacturing industry over the course of the 20th century, so too were the physical spaces of the American population constructed by this same force.
Mass production drastically reduced the price tag of cars, and, as a result, the automobile suddenly became a feasible, essential purchase for the average American. Scars from the industrial age — wherein labor was concentrated heavily in dense, polluted, crime-ridden urban areas — sent middle and upper class Americans flocking to the ‘suburb’, an entirely new domain of human settlement made possible only with the development of the automobile. Driving one’s Model-T into the city for work became a romantic expression of Americana and of the thriving economic landscape of the time. Suburban towns all across the country sprung up as direct products of the automobile and its ability to connect laborers with labor centers over unprecedented distances.
Cities, which now began to see mass arrivals of suburban car commuters on a daily basis, were obliged to accommodate the presence of the car. The grid system, cross-city highway, and swollen street replaced the cobblestone sidewalk and open plaza. In Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs describes these accommodation efforts, as ‘downtowns and other neighborhoods that are marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support are casually disemboweled.’ Such inconsideration by city planners facilitated a disillusionment of residents from their own environments, destroying sensibilities of local culture and community. As Jacobs foretells, ‘city character is blurred until every place becomes more like every other place, all adding up to Noplace.’
Decades later, American cities still suffer from the hangover of this car-obsessed era. Traffic congestion, filthy carbon-filled air, and unwalkable streets have rendered many of America’s largest cities into wastelands, only traversable through the use of a car. The majority of U.S. metropolises have been built — not for citizens — but for mass-produced metal boxes, which shuttle the industrious American to and from sites of capitalist production and shelter them from their own built environments. Though New York is certainly an improved outlier in this regard, the tragedy of Hochul’s decision on congestion pricing lies in the further perpetuation of this dehumanizing planning philosophy that New York truly has the potential to break from.
Perhaps, the profound helplessness, or even lack of ability to process reality, which many Americans endure regarding their subservient relation to the car traces its roots to the foundations of American psychology. We feel ourselves to be a self-determining people and believe that such a quality renders us exceptional and uniquely-liberated amongst other nations. The proliferation of the car was a truly American event in the sense that the car provides a promise of ultimate freedom. The open road serves as a paradigm of the American dream, of open vistas and a new world. To approach the evident crisis of our automotive-designed environment with any national unity hence requires an internal reckoning which cuts much deeper than just acknowledging the negative effects of the issue itself. New theories — and exceptional case studies — of human-centered urbanism are desperately needed to synthesize this American character with the need to develop our cities in ways that are distinctly relevant to our time of 21st century urbanization. There is no better — and really, no other feasible — city in the country to push beyond this regressive car-centric milieu than New York City. The urgency of congestion pricing’s revival must thus be viewed not only in the immediate economic fallout but also in this philosophical battle to win back the right to self-determination over the built environment itself.