The Great Unclogging

Breakdowns and delays have frustrated commuters to no end, literally the police described it as near riot conditions. The signaling system had totally imploded things were completely breaking down. It was a mess. Now, this is not just disgraceful and frustrating, it's dangerous and in many ways the worst

is yet to come.

“That mess, that summer of hell as you described it, that's what kind of enabled you to”

come back and push on congestion pricing again. Is that right? Governor Cuomo at the time appointed a task force and we had broad-based cross-sector agreement that we should revisit congestion pricing. We had two bites of the apple.

We tried it once and failed. We figured out a better mouse trap and went back in and were successful. For more than 40 years, Kathy Wilde worked at the partnership for near-accity, the influential non-profit organization that represents New York's business community. She spent more than two decades as president and CEO of that organization.

So when she retired this January, it was a big deal. Kathy Wilde retired after spending 44 years near the center of New York power, marked by a special lighting of the Empire State Building and a massive reception inside Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room, full of the biggest movers and shakers in New York.

Working with some of New York's most powerful executives may sound glamorous.

But Kathy also spent years working in the trenches on something much grittier, getting New York City to adopt congestion pricing.

“New York City's transportation authority says congestion pricing is not only crucial for breaking”

through all that gridlock in the city, but for future investments in the city's all-important transit systems. I've been here a long time seeing the city go through a lot of changes and have learned how resilient our city is. If you don't know, New York's congestion pricing program launched in early 2025 and

it charges cars nine bucks to enter Manhattan at 60th Street or below. That's everything from the theater district and Wall Street to Times Square, Chinatown and NYU. It was modeled after successful programs in London, Stockholm and Singapore, which have reduced traffic, lower pollution, and increased revenue to public transit.

But when Kathy first championed the idea 20 years ago, not everyone was on board.

There was profound dissentress, abjection, and dissentress.

“We think it serves as a regress of tax and it's going unfailing burden the people there.”

We also think that some of the arguments that have been floated as reasons to do this just won't work. In 2008, state lawmakers in Albany killed the first attempt at congestion pricing in the city. What you laid dormant for nearly a decade, that is, until the summer of 2017, when New York

faced a cascading series of disruptions to transit, it will be a summer of hell for commuters. You will have thousands of commuters looking for other ways to get into Manhattan. Turns out, although sweaty frustrated late to everything commuters wanted a more functional transit system and so did the right people in government. They got interested in it, where you shared our findings and they said, "Let's go for it."

But the road to get in congestion pricing across the finish line was anything but smooth. The effort spent years stuck in political gridlock, inching forward, stalling out, and sometimes slamming on the brakes entirely. A stunning change of events, New York Governor Kathy Hockel is hitting the pause button on Manhattan's congestion pricing plan.

The Kathy Wilde and the congestion pricing coalition didn't give up, and after several months of tweaks and negotiations, congestion pricing went into effect last January. And Governor Hockel loves it. Now, to all the nasirs, hopefully you now are seeing, so we can have a city that is not paralyzed by traffic and congestion that our air is cleaner, that our businesses are more robust.

I'm Andre Greenwald, I'm the Chief Policy Officer at via.

Welcome to the second season of Mochift, a show about the past, present, and future

of how we move. From ballot measures and the weirdness of parking to the rise of AI and autonomous vehicles, we'll dig into how transit and other policies are shaping our lives. In today's episode, we're taking a deep dive into one of the most impactful and controversial

When New York's congestion pricing program is only a year old, it's already shown that

systemic change is possible. Well, thank goodness, we made it through quite a few challenges, and we're still going and public opinion only continues to improve. 60 years ago, Kathy moved to New York for the same reason a lot of people do to escape. I spent the summer after my freshman year in college, working in a church day camp in

a basement in Brooklyn, and fell in love with the city. I came from Madison, Wisconsin, the Midwest. They say New York is full of people who didn't fit in where they grew up.

“What about those of us who grew up in New York City like myself, Kathy?”

I don't know. What do we do with us? We're just weird. I don't know. You're why we came.

You're why we came. Come on. Soon after moving to New York, Kathy got interested in housing policy. This was in the late '70s when much of the city's infrastructure and housing was falling apart.

Sometimes, literally, Kathy joined an organization called the Partnership for New York City, which played a big part in rebuilding the city, and while there she advanced policies they created 40,000 homes, and then she moved up the ranks to become president and CEO. As a New Yorker, Kathy was no stranger to horrible traffic jams, but it was on a trip to Stockholm in the early 2000s when Kathy started thinking about congestion pricing as a possible

solution. As it turns out, Stockholm's center city is an island, and it's kind of easy to see the comparison to Manhattan Island in terms of all the choke points and everything that contributes to traffic and the limited options for widening streets or creating new streets. If you're on an island, you don't have those choices.

“So you have to reduce the number of vehicles.”

Kathy hired a team of consultants to run some numbers on the impact a similar plan could have on New York. In the results, we're shocking. The result of that first study in 2006 was that excess congestion cost the city in the region

over $13 billion a year in loss productivity over time, exit fuel costs, health impacts,

environmental impacts, and we were able to quantify that. So it was a pretty convincing case, and that's how we got started. Starting in 2006, she began working with a broad coalition of transit advocates, environmental groups, labor unions, and elected officials. Along with Mayor Bloomberg, they pushed for state legislation to create a congestion pricing

program. But lawmakers and Albany weren't on board. Our elected officials were very used to driving around the city for free. One could argue that they should have been on the subway, but that's another point.

“I remember an important legislator screamed at me, "You're going to cost me $8 a day."”

That first attempt to get congestion pricing failed in 2008. And it wasn't until the 2017 summer of hell. The one the Kathy mentioned at the top of the show, the congestion pricing became a topic of conversation again. That's when Kathy and the coalition geared up for round two.

They put together a huge bill that lawmakers finally approved as part of the state budget

in 2019. It felt like a massive victory, but New York still needed to get some approvals from President Biden's administration, and applying wasn't simple. It was literally thousands of pages, bigger than a New York telephone book that went to the feds.

After Governor Hoekle temporarily hit the brakes, the plan finally went into effect on January 5, 2025. The first of its kind in US history. I wanted to hear more from Kathy about how this all played out, and what it might mean for other cities.

So we sat down for a conversation about the program's impacts, why the business community has supported it, and the coalition that made it possible. I want to go back to when you came back from Stockholm, and you decided that you wanted to try to bring congestion pricing to New York City. It's one thing to see, you know, a cool policy in Europe somewhere, but pretty different

thing to get it implemented here, right? Well, that was the same moment that people were waking up to the impact of climate change. A few years later, we had super-sourm Sandy in New York, where all our buildings flooded, but we were beginning to see extreme weather, and we were beginning to understand what we were doing to the planet.

A number two, our mass transit system, was aging out in not very good shape, trains breaking

to higher levels of asthma in communities that had heavy traffic activity. So it was those combination of reasons that there was a decision made that we should support it. So like for the general public, the idea of why the environmental community would support congestion pricing is quite straightforward, but I don't know that it's as intuitive

to people, why the business community would be so behind it. Because the business community depends on public transportation to get the vast majority of their people to work and back.

“New York City, our secret sauce is we are the most productive workforce in the world.”

Traffic, excess traffic, was reducing our productivity, and reducing our competitive edge and every business leader saw that. We had over the years added bus lanes, which further complicated traffic congestion because they were restricted bus lanes, we had added bike lanes, which made less room for cars and trucks.

And we have seen a huge increase in freight activity because of the online commerce activity that depends on adding lots of trucks for less mild delivery. So it was just the city, was at a choke point, and that was costing a lot of money.

Okay, so that first attempt fails in 2008, it gets put on hold.

And then the 2017 summer of held revives it. Huge effort to get the New York legislature pass it, and your part of the governor's team, their committee that gets appointed to sort out the details. Finally get the federal approval, and then a couple of weeks before this is all going to

“go live in June of 2024, I believe, Governor Hokell says, nope, not happening, like, in”

definite pause. Can you just, I don't know, just take me behind the scenes there, what was Governor Hokell thinking? Well, honestly, I was very annoyed at the time. I spoke with the governor, and she said, Kathy, it's a pause, it's not forever, it's a pause.

But the fact was that our panel that was charged by the legislature with recommending the fees, we had come out with a $15 a day toll on cars, because the way the numbers

had crunched, it looked like, in order to meet the funding goals of about a billion dollars

a year, we would have to charge, it trucks more, but passenger cars, we would have to charge them $15 a day to come in. And the governor basically said, that is a hard nut to swallow, to go from zero to 15. And so during the delay that she required, the MTA went back to the drawing boards and figured

“out a way that we could, remember, the goal we had to achieve was a billion dollars a year”

in revenues to support debt. So the $15 billion in debt. So the MTA went back to the drawing boards and Marabilly dick to came back saying, we can actually do this for $9 a day. And the governor said, Bingo, and she was able to be a hero having heroine, having gotten

the fee from $15 to $9. We had simultaneously got through a congressional election where many seats were on the line for, and particularly Democrats were on the line for having been the party that supported past congestion pricing in the suburbs, not in the city. Condition pricing has now been in effect in New York City for over a year.

And the sky hasn't fallen, despite initial fear mongering from its critics. Buses are moving 20% faster. Traffic is down and transit ridership is up. CO2 emissions are down nearly 25%.

And the program is going to unlock $15 billion to improve and upgrade New York City's

aging subways and buses. And your mind would have been the most significant impacts of the congestion pricing in New York. Well, the most significant impacts have been that what people worried about hasn't

It had no negative impact on Broadway sales, retail sales, all those have gone up.

It had no negative impact on foot traffic in the city. Foot traffic is up. So all the things that people were concerned about didn't happen. The drivers coming in from New Jersey are all happy that they can save half an hour on their day from sitting in the tunnels because of the traffic.

And the same with people from all in Ireland. I mean, I've had senior executives who were not 100% on board. I've had them call me a few weeks after it went into play and say, "You were right. It worked." they've cut down the vehicle traffic into the Manhattan Central Business District substantially.

“I think it's something like, I'm not sure what it is today.”

It was like 67,000 fewer vehicles a day despite the fact that we've increased our bike

lanes. And we've increased our bus lanes. And so there's less room for cars on the streets of the city. Despite that fact, we still have seen an increase in average traffic speeds in the city. One of the groups that was most concerned about this was our very well-organized yellow

taxi business. We don't charge taxis or for higher vehicles for coming into the district. They don't pay the toll. But there's a fee that's tacked on to their charge to their passengers. That fee for taxis was set at $1.25, the fee for higher vehicles was set at a higher

rate, I think, to $2.25 or $2.50. And as a result, the taxis have been doing very good business. Their business is up and they are all of a sudden our biggest fans. So they're getting around and being able to collect many more fairs because they can get around the city faster.

So that's been fun to see. Before it was implemented, critics, some critics were arguing that congestion pricing would disproportionately impact low-income New Yorkers and small businesses.

“Has that proved to be the case at all or what evidence do you have that's not the case?”

Well, honestly, the only evidence I have is that there haven't been complaints. People seem to be with the program, as I say, we've had a substantial decrease in the number of vehicles coming into the city, every day, both trucks and private cars. Those people have evidently found other ways to do their business.

And in terms of the low-income community, that was always kind of a fake concern.

We did set it up so that low-income New Yorkers could apply for a deep discount and if they were coming in regularly and had to have a car, we set it up so that they wouldn't be double-build if they were on a night shift that crossed a, you know, started 11pm one day and went into the next day, they wouldn't get a double-tole. The thoughtfulness that went into design of the program very much had in mind and the federal

approvals all had in mind that we had to affirmatively demonstrate that lower-income people would not be disadvantaged by this. And I think that that was accomplished. There was a study just a couple weeks ago. One of the big concerns came from the South Bronx, which has a high asthma rate, has severe

truck traffic problem and there was concern that more trucks would be diverted there because they wouldn't want to pay the toll. That has, in fact, not turned out to be the case. There, I mean, you can count on two hands, the number of additional trucks going there. It's not, it has not made any substantial impact.

So it's been a matter of paying attention to those concerns doing everything possible in the plan to mitigate them. And then monitoring the results to make sure nothing bad is building up that could threaten the sustainability of the program. There's another big city in the United States that is starting to think about the possibility

of congestion pricing in their community.

“What advice would you give having gone through this?”

Many years effort to get it successfully passed and that successfully implemented? Well, I think that there has to be broad public understanding of how the proceeds are going to be used, very specifically how they're going to be used and a clear commitment

So I think you have to start there.

“And then I do think you have to build a coalition of these diverse interests, environmental,”

public health, business, civic bicyclists, riders, transit riders. You have to build that broad coalition and have an organized approach to what we're talking about where it goes. In some places, like in London, they provided residents of areas that were fringe areas to the pricing district where people might dump their cars during the day.

So they institute a residential parking permits. We have not done that in New York and it's unclear we need to do that. I mean, there's no street parking available on the borders of our congestion pricing district.

So that was always kind of a false concern here.

“And there's been no evidence whatsoever of an increase in traffic.”

In fact, traffic in the areas around the gateways to the congestion pricing district has reduced. As I said earlier, the worst fears about what could happen as a result of the pricing district have not happened. And is there anything looking back now that you would have done differently or you

would have advised that the broad coalition to do differently having now gone through this?

When I'm asked about how can we improve it, we should have dynamic pricing so that you're

priced on the basis of the traffic. So if somebody's coming in on Yom Kupur and there's no traffic and they're paying nine dollars, they get pissed.

“If we had dynamic pricing, the cost would have been 50 cents if anything on a low traffic”

day. And at the time that the system was being developed and installed, the professional view was we didn't have the technical capacity to develop a dynamic pricing system. The other big warning that I didn't mention before to cities doing this, we really allowed very few exemptions except for like city snow plows, city vehicles on business,

police cars, etc. Very few exceptions. This drove everybody nuts. We had like 140 requests for major institutions and into a groups to be exempt from the fee because they needed their car and the fee was an imposition.

So the more exemptions you give, the more it creates opportunities to game the system and to not pay your fair share, it creates a lot of potential fraud. There's a big effort to game the system with fake license plates or covers on license plates and that was a good lesson because we've had very little of that and we've had very active enforcement of literally police lined up at the tunnels and bridges pulling

over people that have the fake license plates or the license plates that were the numbers covered. So that's another piece that has to be built in and the big argument against when somebody can for exemptions if we do that, we really cannot effectively monitor that system. Kathy Wilde, thank you so much for being here today.

I really appreciate your time. Well thank you for having me and I hope congestion pricing or as we call it, the congestion relief zone is a policy precedent that other cities across the country can use to help finance their transportation needs, particularly since it looks like they may be getting less federal funding.

Kathy Wilde is the former president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City. Modeshift is produced by latitude media and partnership with VIA. The show is hosted by me, Andre Greenwald. The show is produced by Max Savage Levinson and Bailey and Stephen Lacy. Sean Marquan makes the show and wrote our theme song.

It's also produced by me, Andre Greenwald, Francis Cooperman and Karina Salin from VIA. You can listen to Modeshift at ridewithvia.com or anywhere you get podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.