In April 2019, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Chairman Patrick Foye and New York City Transportation (NYC DOT) Commissioner Polly Trottenberg visited US Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s offices in Washington and asked whether New York City’s congestion pricing policy, which would levy charges on motor vehicles entering Manhattan south of 61st Street as soon as January 1, 2021, would require an environmental assessment (EA), or a more comprehensive environmental impact statement (EIS).

In October, the MTA finalized a contract with transportation-technology company TransCore to build out much of its congestion-pricing infrastructure. By January 2020, the federal government had all the materials it would need to make a call on the environmental review. The program requires federal review because some roads affected by congestion pricing receive federal funding or are considered part of the interstate highway system. In July, the MTA’s President of Construction and Development Janno Lieber said, ​“We’ve literally hired the consultants. We’ve designed the systems - the cameras and so on that are going to be implemented.”

Today, the MTA still has no answer from the feds on congestion pricing. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the division of US DOT which would make the call, is asleep at the wheel. ​“We just can’t move forward without the Trump Administration’s action,” the MTA’s Leiber said. The nation’s first congestion pricing program, poised to reduce car traffic, improve air quality, and raise money for mass transit in the country’s largest city where these issues have been magnified by the pandemic, is now delayed as its paperwork blows in the Washington wind.

This echoes the Trump administration’s response to other high-profile infrastructure projects in the region. The Federal Railroad Administration has been sitting on a draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Hudson River Tunnel project for 885 days, almost two and a half years, and counting. (By contrast, the new Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River received a Record of Decision for its EIS in nine months. ) In February, the Army Corps of Engineers abruptly and indefinitely paused its study of a storm surge barrier in New York Harbor after the President described it as ​“foolish” and ​“environmentally unfriendly” on Twitter.

Around the same time, President Trump banned New Yorkers from participating in Trusted Travelers Programs over his disagreement with New York’s Green Light Law, a policy that allows undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses, and which largely prevented the state Department of Motor Vehicles from sharing information with federal immigration authorities. The Department of Homeland Security admitted it made false statements in a lawsuit over the issue, a red flag suggesting due diligence and by-the-book behavior are not goals of the Administration’s approach to New York programs.

The US Department of Transportation regularly determines what kind of environmental review is required for dozens if not hundreds of highway and transit projects each year. Preparing the materials for an environmental review will take the agency some time, but learning what kind of review your project needs is supposed to be routine. Both steps of the process are part of guidelines established by the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) in 1970, and further clarified in 2011.

For the most part, the MTA and NYC DOT will install the infrastructure to toll drivers on pieces of the existing streetscape in New York City, like street lamps, traffic lights, and tunnels. The technology will be comparable to EZ Pass, and wouldn’t require new toll gantries. It’s unlikely the implementation of congestion pricing will result in adverse environmental impacts. If anything, it’s much more likely to produce and catalyze positive effects for the natural, built, and social environment of New York City. According to NEPA guidelines, this type of action probably warrants an Environmental Assessment (EA), a much shorter and streamlined type of review, if not an outright categorical exclusion. A US DOT study found that it typically took 18 months to process a finding of no significant impact, a conclusion that would be reached through an EA.

The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) Process

There’s a third option for infrastructure projects under NEPA besides environmental assessments and impact statements - a categorical exclusion. ​“Many projects clearly do not significantly impact the environment and as a result do not need to be subject to all of the rigorous reviews of the NEPA process,” we wrote in 2012. ​“When one of these projects is proposed, the agency need only prepare a categorical exclusion, which completes the required environmental review process.” It typically takes six months to document a categorical exclusion. If widening the Staten Island Expressway from six lanes to 10, a project that clearly increased greenhouse gases and criteria pollutants, qualified for a categorical exclusion from the NEPA process in 2016, a congestion pricing program to reduce emissions could likely qualify, too.

“It’s paradoxical to me that congestion pricing, central business district tolling, which is a huge environmental, social good, reduces congestion, funds mass transit and reduces emissions is being held up,” MTA spokesperson Aaron Donovan recently told City & State NY. The MTA has met at least 20 times with the USDOT and FHWA to end the stonewalling and move the process forward.

Since the halcyon days of congestion pricing’s passage, the coronavirus has created an existential crisis for the MTA. The collapse in ridership, while temporary and necessary, is nonetheless devastating the agency’s revenue. It’s losing $200 million a week in operating expenses and faces a $12 billion budget deficit. The agency recently announced it may soon slash service, layoff staff, and postpone capital projects as part of a raft of cuts that would render the transit system unrecognizable and cripple the city’s chances for sustained economic recovery. Meanwhile, such cuts would barely affect the unprecedented deficit.

Congestion pricing would raise enough annual revenue to bond $15 billion for the MTA, money originally reserved for the agency’s capital plan but which can now be spent on operating expenses as part of a frustrating but unavoidable adjustment by the state. At the same time, people are returning to cars more quickly than trains and buses as the economy reopens, worsening the very conditions congestion pricing was meant to address.

The fate of the tri-state area, the nation’s largest regional economy, is intrinsically bound up with the fate of the United States as a whole. Ravaged by the coronavirus, our region’s economy will require a transportation system that’s firing on all cylinders in order to make a full recovery. Congestion pricing is fundamental to this goal. ​“As reopening across the region continues and more people use their own cars to get into the city,” RPA President, Tom Wright, recently told Curbed NY, ​“we need to make sure that the benefits of decreased carbon emissions, less traffic, and generated revenue for our mass transit system remain a priority.”

By stalling New York City’s congestion pricing program, the Hudson River tunnel project and the New York Harbor resilience study, the Trump administration appears to be acting out some vendetta against NYC or, in his words ​“Democrat cities.”