New York congestion pricing

Congestion pricing in New York City is a proposed traffic congestion fee for vehicles traveling into or within the Manhattan central business district of New York City. The congestion pricing charge was first proposed in 2007 as part of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to improve the city's future environmental sustainability while planning for population growth, entitled PlaNYC 2030: A Greener, Greater New York.

If Bloomberg's plan had been approved and implemented, it would have been the first such fee scheme enacted in the United States. However, the proposal did not succeed, as it was never put to a vote in the New York State Assembly. Since then, there have been several similar proposals.

In the early 1970s, the office of New York City Mayor John Lindsay experimented with limiting and banning private cars in downtown Manhattan following federal pressure to improve city air quality. His original proposal, to ban noncommercial midday traffic in the financial district, was reduced to a parking ban at the request of business executives. The parking ban, announced in September 1970, affected a triangular 50-block area below Fulton Street and upset truckers and merchants. A later transportation commissioner said that the plans were fashionable and unfeasible due to unexamined commerce relationships and lack of preemptive buy-in from merchants. Lindsay's future proposals were restricted in scale.

In 1970, the government enacted new federal air pollution regulations. Since New York City was in violation of these new regulations, it was given until 1975 to be compliant; this was later pushed back to 1977 after the state was given a 2-year delay in implementing the standards. Mayor Lindsay and the federal Environmental Protection Agency developed a plan to collect tolls on twelve free bridges across the Harlem and East Rivers, banning midtown parking, and significantly reducing the number of parking spaces south of 59th Street. They also proposed to retrofit air filtering devices on cars entering New York City's main business districts. The successive mayor, Abraham Beame, refused to implement the plan, even after federal order in 1975, but environmentalists received a court order in 1976 to proceed with implementation. Yet as the federal legislature forbade the bridge tolls and taxi restrictions went into effect, the parking ban remained the most controversial and consequential aspect of the act, and its forced implementation was poorly executed. In April 1977, Beame's administration released a report that opposed the addition of tolls, a proposal that future Mayor Michael Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan would address thirty years later. The report supported a bill in the New York State Legislature that, if passed, would permanently ban tolls on the East River bridges. Although such a plan would generate revenue for the city, the administration concluded that tolling the free crossings would cause congestion and pollution without enticing drivers to use public transportation. The state departments of environment and transportation concurred with Beame's position, and in a May 1977 report, recommended that tolls not be enacted, despite the fact that the pollution standards had yet to be met.

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