On Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York announced that she was indefinitely halting a project that had been decades in the making: congestion pricing in Manhattan’s core business district. Ana Ley, who covers mass transit in New York City, and Grace Ashford, who covers politics in New York, discuss why New York hit the brakes on congestion pricing.
Daily producer will reid here in New York.
It's about 850 and I'm on my way to meet michael barbaro and.
Oh, there he is.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
Thank you.
It's beautiful here.
It is.
So where are we going?
We are going to my car, I confess.
I have a car in Brooklyn and we're going to use it to commute into manhattan, which is not a thing I normally do via car, but there's a journalistic rationale, which we will get to.
You're gonna sit here.
Okay.
I'm gonna open the windows.
Just get a little air in here.
So, michael, why are we driving into New York today?
We are driving into Manhattan in order to study, observe, lay eyes on what was supposed to be this first in the nation tolling system for cars entering a downtown.
It's an anti traffic program that says if you want to be part of traffic, then you have to pay for it.
It's been in the works for years.
So we're just gonna go basically do a dry run through the infrastructure of this tolling system known as congestion pricing.
We're now on a ramp taking us off the FDR at East 61st street.