Statement attributable to Kate Slevin, Executive Vice President of Regional Plan Association (RPA).
I am Kate Slevin, Executive Vice President of Regional Plan Association. RPA is an urban planning non-profit, civic organization that works to improve quality of life for all of the region’s 23 million residents. Fundamental to our mission is a reliable, adequately funded transit system, cleaner air, and less traffic.
Today, I am here to ask the MTA Board to do all it can to advance the congestion pricing program, and to support the program as is which has already been heavily vetted by the public, by city, state and federal government and studied in the environmental assessment.
At this point, congestion pricing should not go back to the State Legislature to be further debated, nor should changes be made to the program that require it to go back through the NEPA environmental review process.
Just this morning, RPA and PCAC released a new report that explains in more detail why the Governor, MTA and this board need to keep the future pricing program intact, without adding additional toll exemptions or large changes.
Specifically, we looked at the effect of excluding municipal workers from congestion pricing tolls, a suggestion made by various elected leaders. We found that excluding municipal workers would lead to a revenue loss of about $140 million, or 14% of the legislated revenue target. To make up the loss, the $15 base toll would have to be increased to $17.45. It wouldn’t be fair or right to increase tolls for everyone else to make up the difference.
We also find that municipal workers drive at a substantially higher rate than other categories probably because of existing parking placards and other privileges - giving additional perks could jeopardize traffic reduction goals and would be unfair to other categories of workers such as retail employees or hospital workers. It’s also worth noting that municipal workers are still much more likely to be on transit - 75% take transit versus 25% driving-- thus they will benefit from the capital improvements enabled by the congestion fee.
Exemptions in other categories could have similar negative results to an overall program, so we call on you today to advance congestion pricing and do it with the proposal already studied.
You can find the report here. Thank you for your time.
