A federal judge has now ruled, again, that the administration cannot simply cancel a program that is funding real subway improvements
NEW YORK – In a 149-page decision issued in March, U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman ruled that the federal Department of Transportation could not unilaterally terminate New York’s congestion pricing program simply because a new administration had changed its mind about a legally binding agreement. It was the second time New York had prevailed in court against a Trump administration effort to kill the tolling program, and the ruling reaffirmed what transit advocates had been arguing for over a year: that congestion pricing is legal, that it follows the rules, and that the federal government cannot simply walk away from an agreement it does not politically like.
The stakes here go well beyond an abstract legal principle. Congestion pricing has generated roughly $550 million in its first year of operation, revenue the MTA has used to back $15 billion in bonds for capital improvements across the transit system, including signal modernization on the A and C lines, new accessibility upgrades at nine stations, and continued construction on Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. During the same period the administration was fighting the toll in court, it separately moved to freeze billions of dollars in previously committed federal funding for the Second Avenue Subway extension and the Gateway rail tunnel project under the Hudson River, a maneuver transit advocates describe as capable of killing a project outright simply by running out the clock on contracts and letting costs balloon through inflation and delay.
The results the program has already delivered are not abstract, either. Bus and subway ridership rose 7 percent in the toll zone’s first year, Long Island Rail Road ridership rose 9 percent, and Metro-North ridership rose 6 percent, according to figures released around the program’s first anniversary. Traffic entering the tolled zone has fallen, emergency response times have improved, and the MTA has continued approving new contracts, including a design-build agreement to modernize signals on the A and C lines and accessibility upgrades at major stations serving well over a hundred thousand daily riders. This is what actually funding public infrastructure looks like when the revenue stream is allowed to function as designed.
It is worth being blunt about what the federal opposition to this program actually represents. Congestion pricing charges drivers, disproportionately wealthier drivers who can afford to bring a private vehicle into Manhattan’s core, a modest fee that funds a transit system used overwhelmingly by working New Yorkers who cannot afford that alternative. Opposing this arrangement in the name of drivers’ rights, as the administration has repeatedly framed its objection, is in practice an argument that a small number of car owners should retain a subsidized right to clog the most transit-rich square miles in the country rather than pay a fee that funds the system everyone else actually depends on to get to work.
The legal victories matter, but they should not obscure how precarious this funding remains. A federal government willing to freeze billions in already-committed funding for the Second Avenue Subway and Gateway tunnel, without a change in law, purely through administrative discretion, retains enormous power to slow-walk and starve projects even after losing in court on the underlying legal question. Every month of delay on Gateway or the Second Avenue extension is a month of rising construction costs, a month closer to expired contracts, and a month in which the working commuters this system is built for continue enduring overcrowded platforms and unreliable service that better-funded projects could address.
It is also worth registering how much political will it took just to reach this point. Governor Hochul, the MTA, and the city’s congressional delegation have now defended congestion pricing through multiple rounds of federal litigation, at real political cost, because the alternative was letting a functioning, revenue-generating program get killed by executive fiat rather than by any actual legal or economic failure. That defense has held so far specifically because it was contested loudly and repeatedly, not because federal hostility to the program has meaningfully softened.
The financial mechanics here deserve one more beat of attention, because they explain why the stakes go beyond a single tolling zone. Bonds backed by congestion pricing revenue are already funding signal work and accessibility upgrades under construction today. If a future administration succeeded in killing the toll outright, those bonds and the projects behind them would not simply pause; the entire financing structure the MTA built around this revenue stream would need to be unwound, at a cost measured in years of delay and untold additional expense passed straight back to riders.
The lesson from this fight is not that the courts will simply save public transit from federal sabotage indefinitely. It is that a hostile federal government requires sustained political pressure and legal vigilance at the state and city level, sustained specifically by the coalition of riders, unions, and elected officials who have shown up in court and in public to defend a program that is, by every available metric, working. Congestion pricing is not a finished victory. It is a program under continuous siege that happens, so far, to be winning, and that distinction matters for how seriously New Yorkers need to keep treating this fight.
For related commentary on the political theater surrounding infrastructure fights, see What are the Types of Satire and Political Comedy, along with further analysis at Political Humour.
Additional reading at Satire And Politics.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/