Recently, Danna’s grandma, a retired nurse from Jamaica, called. Once a subway commuter for 40 years and now living carless, she worried congestion pricing would harm low-income New Yorkers of color.
After transportation policies worsened injustice in our city, a point hard to overstate, how could congestion pricing remedy past wrongs? Yes, congestion pricing will pay for transit upgrades, cut traffic, and improve air quality — but for whom?
Mistrust is understandably widespread. Had we, having struggled to win congestion pricing, not ensured people who look like us, our families, neighbors, know what it offers us?
After a century of disinvestment, driven by racism against our communities, New York’s public transit system desperately needs upgrades: Following maintenance cuts, subway delays tripled in the five years before state leaders passed congestion pricing.
Even now, trains are late and infrequent far more than in cities from Paris to Hong Kong. When our trains don’t run regularly, we lose pay and miss out on jobs, education, health care and other opportunities.
At the same, the subway is shamefully inaccessible to people who can’t climb stairs. Danna’s grandma has not ridden for years. Our city is aging (and having kids) and we all deserve the freedom to ride the subway. Elevators are a must.
Congestion pricing will raise billions to make the subway more reliable and accessible for us, our families and communities. Four million people take the train each day. More than 70% of subway riders are people of color. More than two-thirds of frontline workers, who showed up throughout the pandemic, and two-thirds of transit workers, who keep the city moving 24/7, are people of color. Investing in transit invests in us.
Congestion pricing’s benefits are coming to our communities: East Harlem is getting a new subway line on Second Ave. In Brooklyn, elevators are slated for stations in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Crown Heights, East New York, and Sunset Park. In the Bronx, elevators are coming to Kingsbridge, Mott Haven and Wakefield; in Queens, to Jamaica, Ozone Park, and Sunnyside. Signal and structural modernization will make A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, M, and Z trains more reliable across Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens.
Congestion pricing will also improve bus service. With America’s slowest buses, New Yorkers need faster and more reliable service. Nearly 80% of bus riders are people of color. The time that buses lose in traffic is our time.
Most drivers will pay $15 to enter the core of Manhattan south of 60th St. Drivers living inside the congestion zone and earning less than $60,000 will get their tolls back as a tax credit, a major benefit to NYCHA tenants. Drivers outside the zone who earn less than $50,000 will get a 50% discount after their first 10 tolls each month.
For every low-income worker who might pay the toll, 50 workers ride public transit. The large majority, 85% of commuters to the congestion zone, use transit. In every neighborhood, most people take the train to Manhattan. All of them, plus those drivers who decide to switch to transit like their neighbors, will benefit from the new investments, saving valuable time without having to pay.
As part of a long federal review, many thousands of pages of environmental studies considered how congestion pricing could impact driving habits and affect our communities.
Because in the worst case, some neighborhoods may see additional traffic, the MTA committed to spend $200 million to improve local air quality for communities that have been historically overburdened with air pollution and may see increases in tailpipe emissions.
The biggest community-based investment will be at the Hunts Point food markets in the Bronx, where regional food distributors are concentrated and rely heavily on diesel trucks. Congestion pricing will help electrify the market and replace up to 1,000 of the trucks serving it, reducing nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides levels and benefiting everyone living nearby.
Additionally, funds are available for communities near highways or truck routes across the city and New Jersey that may experience more truck trips. Without congestion pricing, critical transit upgrades won’t be paid for and communities breathing dirty air will continue to suffer from the same pollution.
True, congestion pricing won’t fix every transportation problem facing New Yorkers of color. But the program will begin to remedy the underfunding and disinvestment in public transit service that allows our families and communities to survive and thrive.
At the end of the day, congestion pricing is a transformative policy that will invest crucial resources in the infrastructure we depend on.
Dennis is senior organizer at Riders Alliance. Garcia is transportation planner at New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.
