Hochul’s congestion-pricing fails reveal incompetence — or a long con

If congestion pricing, now less than two months away from its new January start date, ever dies for good, it will have been tortured to death — by Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Hochul’s botch of the toll to drive into core Manhattan is so epic, you must wonder: Is she this bad at politics, or is she doing it on purpose?

Last Thursday, five months after her June “pause” on congestion pricing weeks before it was set to start, Hochul unpaused the toll.

She now wants to start collecting cash from drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street on Jan. 5.

She’s made superficially good changes: The $15 toll car toll is now $9, and the 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. overnight toll is $2.25, not $3.75.

But this concession to concern about the insane cost of living that is helping to drive people from the state has pleased no one. The toll will phase in to the full $15 over six years.

And the governor hasn’t proffered an antidote to the poison pills that may yet doom congestion pricing.

First, she still plans to charge New Jersey drivers a toll.

Yes, including an interstate credit, she’s lowered the Jersey toll from $10 to $6 since the June plan.

But: New Jersey drivers already pay a hefty toll to enter Manhattan — and much of the money goes toward subsidizing mass transit along the same route.

The E-ZPass toll to come through Jersey tunnels to the West Side is $13.38 — $2 extra during rush hours. This peak-hour surcharge is already a form of . . . congestion pricing.

These Jersey tolls collect an annual surplus, above the cost of maintaining the tunnels, of $100 million — money that pays for PATH and bus transit to Manhattan.

In other words, Jersey drivers are already doing their part, and more, to fund subways and buses to New York City.

It thus makes no sense to levy an extra charge — especially since, for 103 years, all bi-state transportation decisions have been made by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, not by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which alone would control the revenues from congestion pricing.

Second, Hochul still insists on an overnight toll.

No congestion pricing program in the world — not London, which charges from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.; not Stockholm, 6 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. — levies an overnight fee, for the obvious reason that there is no congestion overnight.

Not levying a fee overnight isn’t just principle. It’s also politics: Allowing people to drive in for free at, say, 6 a.m. provides a safety valve for some workers, such as police officers and union construction laborers, who might choose to drive in earlier to avoid paying.

Third, Hochul insists on congestion pricing as a revenue-raising measure.

If this were about congestion and not money, she’d offset the congestion-pricing revenue — several hundred million dollars annually, even at the lower rate — with a cut to an existing tax.

Why not, for example, lower the sales tax in the Manhattan zone, including the sales tax on meals, so that Manhattan businesses can partly offset any lost business due to the fee with new business due to the lower sales tax?

Because this was always about raising money — under the old plan, $1 billion a year — for the MTA.

But even with congestion-pricing revenues, the MTA faces multibillion-dollar gaps to replace and repair train cars and build more of the Second Avenue Subway.

Like the state itself, it has a cost problem, not a revenue problem.

Why didn’t the governor spend the five months’ pause addressing these issues? 

That would give congestion pricing a better chance of succeeding, and not falling to a ruling by a judge in a lawsuit — for example, the suit brought by New Jersey.

Perhaps she wants congestion pricing to fail — while pretending to support it, to shut up the transit advocates who launched an ad campaign against her in recent weeks.

Her “pause” in the first place was designed to avoid election-year responsibility: It allowed her to be for congestion pricing in theory, just not in practice, quite yet.

Her revived congestion-pricing plan may be bad because she wants it to be bad — allowing the New Jersey lawsuit or another outside force to delay it again, past Inauguration Day.  

That would allow President Trump to swoop in, as he has said he would, and kill the toll before it starts — saving Hochul from voters’ wrath at having to pay it.

And she could still tell congestion-pricing advocates: She tried.

Or, maybe not: She may really just be this bad at governing.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.