Trump's on a mission to make NY's Dems look bad to the state's voters who incidentally HATE congestion pricing. This goes along with his outreach to outraged NYC minorities who don't like new illegals stealing all their gov support money.
NYC congestion pricing axed as Trump’s DOT pulls approval of hated toll
By Jon Levine and Chris Nesi
Published Feb. 19, 2025, 12:02 p.m. ET
Congestion pricing, we hardly knew ye.
New York City’s spectacularly unpopular congestion pricing scheme is on death row as the Trump administration announced Wednesday it is pulling its approval of the toll — slamming it as “backwards and unfair” — in a major blow to Gov. Kathy Hochul, The Post has learned.
The US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration terminated the approval of the controversial program, according to a letter Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent to Hochul on Wednesday afternoon
The intersection of the Queensboro Bridge exit and entrance where tolling has been installed effectively making it impossible to enter into Queens without paying the congestion toll or the RFK toll if you chose to enter queens from that direction.
“New York State’s congestion pricing plan is a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners,” said Duffy, noting that commuters entering NYC have already financed the construction and improvement of city roadways through their taxes.
“But now the toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways. It’s backwards and unfair,” he said, blasting the program as harmful to small businesses in the Big Apple that depend on customers from New Jersey and Connecticut.
The department will officially rescind the Nov. 21 agreement signed under the Value Pricing Pilot Program (VPPP) that imposed a stiff $9 surcharge for drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street starting in January.
“Every American should be able to access New York City regardless of their economic means. It shouldn’t be reserved for an elite few,” it said.
Duffy said the FHWA will work with the New York State Department of Transportation on an “orderly termination” of the tolls, but it was not immediately known when the $9 tax would cease being collected.
The MTA wasted no time and filed a federal suit aiming to stop the feds in their tracks.
Hochul, who was said to have been having high-powered talks with Trump over congestion pricing in recent weeks, didn’t comment.
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump, who previously vowed to kill the toll, posted on Truth Social.
The DOT said the congestion pricing toll runs counter to the federal highway aid program, which prohibits tolling on roads built with federal funds unless Congress grants an exception.
Duffy’s letter further outlines the justification for terminating the pilot program, including that it fails to provide a toll-free alternative for drivers who have no choice but to traverse city roads by vehicle.
It also claims the toll rate — which instantly made NYC the most expensive city in the US to drive in — was established to be a revenue generator for the MTA, rather than set at an amount actually designed to reduce congestion in accordance with the plan’s stated purpose.
“Even if improving the transit system may eventually affect roadway congestion, there is no indication that the tolls were ser in order to achieve these attenuated effects,” he wrote in the letter to Hochul.
“The pilot runs contrary to the purpose of the VPPP, which is to impose tolls for congestion reduction — not transit revenue generation.”
Duffy added: “To be sure, the termination of the program may deprive the transit system of funding, but any reliance on that funding stream was not reasonable given that [the FHWA] approved only a ‘pilot project.'”
He also pointed out that “any reliance interests cannot overcome the conclusion that FHWA’s approval was not authorized by law.”
MTA cameras on a light pole with the Empire State Building in the background.
The toll hike was initially slated to begin last June, and at an even higher rate of $15, but Hochul stepped in at the zero hour and unilaterally put the new pricing scheme on “pause,” claiming it would be too burdensome for New Yorkers and commuters.
Critics of the governor blasted the move as a “bait and switch,” and accused her of bowing to political pressure from Democrats to delay implementation until after the 2024 election.
Like clockwork, Hochul announced a week after voters re-elected Trump that she was reviving congestion pricing with a $9 base toll, prompting even more criticism for her double-reversal.
At a press conference last month, The Post asked Hochul how the MTA — which is tens of billions in arrears — or the state planned to determine the efficacy of the toll scheme, which aimed to raise billions to fund the transportation network’s $15 billion 2020-2024 capital improvement plan.
“There’ll be more data than you can imagine. Today is the first day, I wouldn’t count today’s data. Let’s give it a few days to sink in and get a trend,” Hochul said at the time.
The toll scheme was so unpopular that NYC drivers began implementing stealthy methods of ducking the surcharge within days of its Jan. 5 implementation.
But the MTA hailed data it said showed traffic had gone down in the congestion zone, counting an estimated 553,000 vehicles entering the area below 60th Street on an average weekday in January, a dip from a three-year average of 583,000 vehicles.
A well-placed source familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking suggested to The Post that Duffy’s letter is meant more as a negotiating tactic than a final move on congestion.
The strategy could be that Hochul might go along with canceling congestion pricing — even holding back on filing a lawsuit — in exchange for Trump chipping in federal money.
The governor has said publicly since speaking with Trump after the election that the pair have discussed federal funding to overhaul Penn Station.
Hochul is set to again meet with the president during the upcoming National Governors Association meeting in Washington, DC, which runs from Feb. 20-22.
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