Kate Cohen
Today at 7:30 a.m. EST
A sign over the Henry Hudson Parkway announces that New York City's congestion pricing program is in effect. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
Make a note for December’s year-end roundups: A remarkable thing has happened in 2025. Yes, already. After 75 or 18 or five years, depending how you count, after a last-minute seven-month delay, and years after Singapore, Stockholm and London led the way, New York City has implemented congestion pricing.
Cars entering Manhattan below 60th Street pay a $9 toll during peak hours, once per day. Buses and trucks pay more; low-income drivers pay less; emergency vehicles, school buses and vehicles carrying people with disabilities pay nothing.
It’s complicated enough to address some complaints — you get a credit if you’ve already paid to enter the city via a tolled bridge or tunnel — but simple enough to work.
“Work” in this case means two things: (1) reduce the congestion that plagues New York — birthplace of the term “gridlock” — where traffic crawls at a historically low 7 mph, by discouraging people from driving. And (2) use funds collected from undeterred drivers to repair, improve and expand New York’s transit network.
Fewer cars, better public transport. Who could argue with that?
Donald Trump, for one. The governor of New Jersey for another. Also, the New York Post, the United Federation of Teachers, the Trucking Association of New York and assorted representatives from the suburbs surrounding New York. Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican from commuter areas north of the city, shared a video of a toll sign being unveiled with the caption, “Imagine being such an a--hole as to celebrate screwing New Yorkers out of their hard-earned money just for the privilege to drive to work.”
Imagine!
Look, I know this new toll is a burden to some and an inconvenience to many, and I know it will take some getting used to — like cigarette taxes and paying for grocery bags (imagine!) — but to the extent that it nudges people to ride rather than drive, I’m all for it. To me, “car-free” is one of the top freedoms, along with (and related to) “worry-free” and “debt-free.” And that makes New York City the freest place in the country.
The other day, I was staring at the subway map on the platform of the F and M lines headed uptown and a man asked me, “Where are you trying to go?” I said, “Oh no, thank you, I was just marveling.”
New York City has 423 separate subway stations. Parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn are so densely served by trains that it’s like having a personal chauffeur trailing you as you walk down, say, 7th Avenue. “Would you like to rest your feet now?” the 1 train offers at 18th Street and, then, at 14th, it discreetly clears its throat again: “What about now?”
The city also includes its share of transport deserts; it would be hard to live on Staten Island or in parts of the Bronx without a car. And even in relatively well-served Manhattan, I had time to marvel at the subway map because ... my train was late.
But even in desperate need of the upkeep that congestion pricing will help fund, even though some aging trains and infrastructure are held together with “rubber bands and paper clips” and “chewing gum and twine,” the New York public transit system is a wonder. Its subway cars run on 665 miles of track, 24 hours a day; 5,800 buses travel more than 300 different routes among the five boroughs. Six million passengers use it a day; half of all New Yorkers use it to get to work.
I remember visiting my cousins in Manhattan when I was a young teen. Though just a year or two older than I, they seemed impossibly grown-up. The source of their authority, I see in hindsight, was neither their school ties nor their easy chatter with the doorman. It was the Metropolitan Transit Authority, known simply as the MTA.
They rode the bus to school — the city bus — two city buses. They headed out every morning among strangers and got themselves where they needed to go, barely noticing this magical feat of independence.
Back home in Virginia, I got my driver’s license when I turned 16 and relished my ability to park a 16-foot Buick, and the freedom from always asking for a ride. But those pleasures — to me — never matched my cousins’ casual urban confidence, their tokens and their transfers, the transit map they carried in their heads.
I could drive a car, yes. But they could drive a city.
Source (Archive)
Today at 7:30 a.m. EST
A sign over the Henry Hudson Parkway announces that New York City's congestion pricing program is in effect. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
Make a note for December’s year-end roundups: A remarkable thing has happened in 2025. Yes, already. After 75 or 18 or five years, depending how you count, after a last-minute seven-month delay, and years after Singapore, Stockholm and London led the way, New York City has implemented congestion pricing.
Cars entering Manhattan below 60th Street pay a $9 toll during peak hours, once per day. Buses and trucks pay more; low-income drivers pay less; emergency vehicles, school buses and vehicles carrying people with disabilities pay nothing.
It’s complicated enough to address some complaints — you get a credit if you’ve already paid to enter the city via a tolled bridge or tunnel — but simple enough to work.
“Work” in this case means two things: (1) reduce the congestion that plagues New York — birthplace of the term “gridlock” — where traffic crawls at a historically low 7 mph, by discouraging people from driving. And (2) use funds collected from undeterred drivers to repair, improve and expand New York’s transit network.
Fewer cars, better public transport. Who could argue with that?
Donald Trump, for one. The governor of New Jersey for another. Also, the New York Post, the United Federation of Teachers, the Trucking Association of New York and assorted representatives from the suburbs surrounding New York. Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican from commuter areas north of the city, shared a video of a toll sign being unveiled with the caption, “Imagine being such an a--hole as to celebrate screwing New Yorkers out of their hard-earned money just for the privilege to drive to work.”
Imagine!
Look, I know this new toll is a burden to some and an inconvenience to many, and I know it will take some getting used to — like cigarette taxes and paying for grocery bags (imagine!) — but to the extent that it nudges people to ride rather than drive, I’m all for it. To me, “car-free” is one of the top freedoms, along with (and related to) “worry-free” and “debt-free.” And that makes New York City the freest place in the country.
The other day, I was staring at the subway map on the platform of the F and M lines headed uptown and a man asked me, “Where are you trying to go?” I said, “Oh no, thank you, I was just marveling.”
New York City has 423 separate subway stations. Parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn are so densely served by trains that it’s like having a personal chauffeur trailing you as you walk down, say, 7th Avenue. “Would you like to rest your feet now?” the 1 train offers at 18th Street and, then, at 14th, it discreetly clears its throat again: “What about now?”
The city also includes its share of transport deserts; it would be hard to live on Staten Island or in parts of the Bronx without a car. And even in relatively well-served Manhattan, I had time to marvel at the subway map because ... my train was late.
But even in desperate need of the upkeep that congestion pricing will help fund, even though some aging trains and infrastructure are held together with “rubber bands and paper clips” and “chewing gum and twine,” the New York public transit system is a wonder. Its subway cars run on 665 miles of track, 24 hours a day; 5,800 buses travel more than 300 different routes among the five boroughs. Six million passengers use it a day; half of all New Yorkers use it to get to work.
I remember visiting my cousins in Manhattan when I was a young teen. Though just a year or two older than I, they seemed impossibly grown-up. The source of their authority, I see in hindsight, was neither their school ties nor their easy chatter with the doorman. It was the Metropolitan Transit Authority, known simply as the MTA.
They rode the bus to school — the city bus — two city buses. They headed out every morning among strangers and got themselves where they needed to go, barely noticing this magical feat of independence.
Back home in Virginia, I got my driver’s license when I turned 16 and relished my ability to park a 16-foot Buick, and the freedom from always asking for a ride. But those pleasures — to me — never matched my cousins’ casual urban confidence, their tokens and their transfers, the transit map they carried in their heads.
I could drive a car, yes. But they could drive a city.
Source (Archive)
