New York City is set to become the first in the US to implement a congestion charge (a form of road pricing). I first wrote about this back in 2018, and then again in 2019, but now it is looking more and more like it may actually happen sometime next year.

I think all urbanists agree that this is an important step in the right direction. But some are now worried that New York isn’t going about it in the right way. Here is an excerpt from a recent Vice article by Aaron Gordon:

With all these plans, you could be excused for thinking New York is doing congestion pricing—a potentially transformative policy that would be a first in the nation—right by not only charging drivers to access some of the densest, most valuable land in the world, but also giving them alternatives. Unfortunately, New York isn’t doing that, and in fact looks set to completely screw up congestion pricing so badly it may discredit the policy in a way that makes it harder for other cities to adopt it. Rather than approaching it as a lynchpin to a wide-ranging effort to reshape Manhattan’s relationship to the private car, congestion pricing has become solely about money—specifically, paying off enough of the credit-card bill New York has run up with a variety of ill-conceived and poorly-executed projects that it can get more credit cards.

You can rightly say that this is decades in the making. Mayor Bloomberg first proposed the idea back in 2007, and I’m sure there were others before him with a similar idea.

So Gordon raises a valid point: It’s important that NYC gets this right. Otherwise, it’s going to be that much more difficult for other North American cities to even think about implementing road pricing.

For the full Vice article, click here.