New Jersey Makes One Last Desperate Attempt at Sabotaging Congestion Pricing in New York City
Charging drivers a price for using congested, currently free roadways is near-universally accepted as the only surefire way to eliminate gridlock traffic.
The endless drama over New York’s implementation of “congestion tolls” to be charged to drivers entering lower Manhattan is a case study of how a good policy in theory can be undone by broken regulatory processes and toxic practical politics.
Late on New Year’s Eve, New Jersey asked a federal judge to stop New York from moving ahead with its plan to start charging motorists $9 congestion tolls starting January 5 while its federal environmental lawsuit challenging the policy plays out.
New Jersey’s filing claimed the state would suffer irreparable harm from increased traffic and reduced air quality if the tolls were allowed to go into effect as scheduled, reports The New York Times.
The move potentially endangers the tolling scheme that was first approved by the New York Legislature in 2019 and was initially supposed to go into effect in January 2021.
Since New York’s plan involved tolling federal-aid highways, it needed federal sign-off, which in turn requires arduous environmental review mandated by the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
NEPA requires federal agencies to study the environmental impacts of the discretionary actions they make as well as collect public feedback on potential environmental impacts. Third parties are empowered to sue agencies for conducting insufficient environmental reviews.
The law frequently invites lawsuits from third parties whose main motivation isn’t securing a more thorough environmental review but rather delaying a disfavored project for as long as possible.
New York’s NEPA review of congestion pricing—which involved dozens of public hearings, the collection of 28,000 pages of public comment, and some alleged foot-dragging from the Trump administration—was finally completed in June 2023.
Throughout this process, everyone from truckers to teachers unions argued th
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