Work-Bites Reader Spotlight: Support the Fight for Congestion Pricing in NYC
“Even if congestion pricing were bad public policy, it would still be troubling that union leaders are moving at this late date to stop it without once consulting with the transit advocates.” -- Charles Komanoff.
Editor’s Note: The following letter from Charles Komanoff, a NYC safe-streets activist and mathematician whose traffic modeling has been influential in congestion pricing advocacy, comes in response to last week’s Work-Bites story about labor opposition to the MTA’s congestion pricing plan.
To the Editor:
You reported last week (NYC Unions Reject MTA Congestion Pricing, Call for Ending Stock Transfer Tax Rebate Instead) that most of the 102 unions making up the Municipal Labor Committee were joining the federal lawsuit against the MTA’s congestion pricing (CP) program filed last month by United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew and Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella.
Even if congestion pricing were bad public policy, it would still be troubling that union leaders are moving at this late date to stop it without once consulting with the transit advocates whose fierce organizing has brought the policy close to the finish line. Perhaps working together we could have been able to square the CP circle of raising the requisite $1 billion a year in new net revenue, reducing spirit-sapping, bone-crushing, lung-poisoning excess traffic in Manhattan and beyond, and meeting concerns about tolling municipal workers to drive their vehicles into the city’s Central Business District.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but none of the unions ever reached out to us advocates ― not after the enabling legislation was enacted in Albany five years ago, not when the MTA released its 4,000-page Environmental Assessment eighteen months ago, not when the members of the toll-setting Traffic Mobility Review Board, two of whom were labor leaders, were selected around the same time. In fact, the boisterous presence of TWU Local 100 countering anti-CP legislators when they tried to rally at the Manhattan entrance to the Queensboro Bridge in March 2019 suggested that labor appreciated the importance and unique value of congestion pricing in revitalizing New York’s transit and transportation.
And if labor hasn’t subsequently been a vocal CP proponent in the manner of the venerable Community Service Society, it has seemed at least to acquiesce. The prospect of $15 billion worth of transit capital improvements financed by the toll revenues was, it seemed, inducement enough to labor to outweigh their objections ― especially given the 60,000 or more jobs it would create. (I derived that figure by inflation-adjusting a 2018 rule-of-thumb of 6,300 jobs per $1 billion in capital spending)
My experience with the NY Taxi Workers Alliance could have served as a template. I listened to NYTWA members protesting Gov. Hochul’s appearance at a pro-CP rally at NYU last June. Their desperation compelled me to reconsider my dogged insistence that taxicabs be additionally surcharged as part of congestion pricing. A month later, when I set about preparing my own congestion toll plan, I urged that yellow cabs be exempted from any additional toll. Though the TMRB/MTA toll plan didn’t go that far, it did go halfway, making the new taxicab trip surcharge 50 percent less than the new surcharge for Uber rides. Perhaps similar rapprochements might have been possible had labor ever reached out to congestion pricing advocates.
I say “might have been” possible rather than “might be” because, in my view, it’s mighty late in the game to seek changes to congestion pricing. Yes, I suppose that if labor and transit advocates jointly devised a solution to the three-sided CP problem conundrum I outlined at the top, it might make its way into the actual toll design; though as I write these words I’m mindful of the extraordinarily confining bureaucratic process that congestion pricing has to navigate. The start of the final public comment period is just a few weeks away, and as TMRB chair Carl Weisbrod was rightfully fond of saying, the policy is so keenly balanced that any changes will inevitably ripple through, provoking new opposition and probably requiring further environmental review. That’s a risk that neither my fellow advocates nor the MTA, with billions in shovel-ready transit-improvement projects dependent on congestion pricing bonding, is likely to deem acceptable.
But even if no apple-carts would be upset, we CP advocates would still be loath to reconsider the toll design. For one thing, the toll rates, unlike “hard” infrastructure, can be tweaked later on. Labor could give CP a chance and, if it’s found wanting, demand concessions. But more importantly, we advocates want to be done with congestion pricing politics and debates. It’s not just that we’re tired of having to swat away debating points we view as parochial or overblown, such as the canard from a guest on your reporter Bob Hennelly’s WBAI show today that congestion pricing will somehow worsen vehicular traffic and pollution in much of the region. Rather, we want to be able to devote all of our hearts and minds to the multiple other fronts in our fight for better transit and a better city.
We transit advocates toil on so much — from redesigns of bus routes, to big campaigns like the one last winter that made the governor and the legislature raise the Payroll Mobility Tax rather than subject riders to fare hikes and service cuts costing them a billion dollars a year. We fight against mayoral caving to donor interests that, just in the past six months, killed the vital Fordham Road bus lane and watered down the equally vital McGuiness Blvd traffic-safety redesign. We do this not solely from the comfort of our offices but on and in the streets, where we gather petitions, wave signs and make memorials. In short, we don’t just analyze and hob-nob, we organize.
So yes, we’re fed up with what looks to us, for the most part, like self-serving, bottom-of-the-ninth objections that deter us from our ‘round-the-clock work of making our transit better and our streets safer ― work for which, I say in all frankness, labor never seems to show up.
At this point I think it’s fair to ask: By what process did those municipal unions elect to join the Mulgrew-Fossella lawsuit? It’s my understanding that UFT president Mulgrew embarked on the lawsuit without consulting the union membership. Talk about irony! Work-Bites, along with the entire labor movement, rightly cheered the UAW’s brilliant “rolling strike” last summer and subsequent breakthrough contract under the generalship of president Shawn Fain — who of course owed his early-2023 election victory to membership voting replacing delegate voting. But last week, on a question that strongly affects the quality of transit service, the safety of our streets and the future of our city, the municipal union heads didn’t consult their members?
My question goes beyond gotcha politics. It speaks to the fact that people who drive a personal vehicle into the Manhattan congestion zone are more affluent on average than those who take transit to the same destinations. I daresay that if CP actually did fit Work-Bites’ lazy stereotype of policy weaponized against the working poor, not a single person in the congestion pricing community would be supporting it. We actually ride the trains and buses and are in position to observe that the working poor who take transit to the congestion zone, and thus stand to benefit from congestion pricing’s financing of subway improvements and higher bus speeds, overwhelmingly outnumber the working poor driving cars there ― which the Community Service Society’s analysis confirmed in spades in 2017 and again in 2022.
Judging from your Work-Bites story and conversations I’ve had with Bob Hennelly, you folks evidently feel that congestion pricing needs to take a back seat to unlocking the stock transfer tax and unifying New York’s duplicative transit fiefdoms. Hey, I share your frustration on both counts (though “if I ran the world” I would dedicate transfer tax revenues to municipal needs even more dire than transit: schools, libraries, migrants, housing, parks).
You do know, however, that your vaunted transfer tax revenues would do nada to reduce constant, excessive traffic volumes that make walking, biking and breathing unnecessarily brutish and short for the millions of New Yorkers who don’t regularly drive in or to or near the congestion zone. (Improved transit alone won’t cure traffic gridlock, owing to the “reserve army” of vehicle owners who will fill up unpriced streets.) And, pragmatist that I am, I believe it would be nuts to give up congestion pricing’s myriad benefits to pursue London-like municipal control of transit and traffic. “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”
Like any good organizer, I keep my eye on the sky but I believe in going for the big wins within our reach. My transit compatriots and I have fought all these years for congestion pricing, not from an ivory-tower mentality or commitment to market fundamentalism but because we see its promise to make New York fairer, healthier and more affordable and accessible.
Work-Bites writes, ceaselessly and urgently, about power. But not every power struggle is bosses against workers, or Wall St. against Main St. There’s been a century-long power struggle of cars vs. people and, for too many decades, of a coddled carriage class vs. over-burdened pedestrians and straphangers. Not every person who drives into the congestion zone is privileged, but their choice to do so creates inescapable harms. I believe with all my heart that Work-Bites is on the wrong side here. Brothers, please join us.