Almost All the Critics Love It in New York - The American Prospect

[justaprogressive]

Since February, New York has been on the receiving end of blunt missives from Washington about the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s first-in-the-nation congestion pricing program. In an April 21 letter, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that “the State of New York risks serious consequences if it continues to fail to comply with Federal law.” New York, Duffy said, would forfeit an alphabet soup of regulatory authorizations and approvals, as well as federal highway dollars, if it did not respond to a USDOT order by May 21 and shut down the three-month-old congestion pricing program by May 28. He also pointed out that the state had ignored a Federal Highway Administration notification to end the program by March 21—which had been extended to April 20.

There were other perplexing pronouncements in the letter. Duffy contended that the Biden administration encouraged spending on transit over highways. In fact, even under Biden’s infrastructure plan, state departments of transportation prefer to spend federal dollars on highway projects over transit. Duffy also warned that DOT would hold back on National Environmental Policy Act approvals (safety projects excepted), even though NEPA requires a federal agency to undertake specific actions and can’t be used as a tool to compel compliance.

Another claim, that tolls can’t be used for transit, is dubious, as states do flex toll revenues to transit projects. Ten days before Duffy’s letter was signed, sealed, and delivered to Hochul, several Justice Department attorneys in the Southern District of New York came to a similar conclusion on that point in an April 11 letter sent to a senior USDOT attorney. Congress had allowed “states and localities to enter into cooperative agreements with FHWA in connection with value pricing pilots and explicitly exempted them from the general prohibition on the use of tolls on federal-aid highways” (emphasis added).

But that wasn’t the only point where they differed with Duffy. It was just one of an absolutely astonishing set of conclusions that ground the administration’s case into very, very fine dust. They would have remained ensconced in the deepest reaches of cyberspace if not for the fact that some unfortunate individual made the analysis to the official—and public—record before someone, too late, snatched it back.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2025-04-25-critics-love-it-new-york-congestion-pricing/