NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- Many New York City residents were dismayed last month when Governor Kathy Hochul pulled the plug on the congestion pricing program that would have charged drivers $15 to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street. Once a public champion of the proposal, Hochul unexpectedly reversed herself, arguing that implementing the driving fees would inhibit the city’s recovery from Covid, with low-income commuters bearing a particular burden. (Others vehemently disagreed, accusing her of pandering to car-owning suburbanites who resented the policy.) Among those with dashed hopes included New Yorkers whose communities would have become cleaner and less car-clogged, the planners who had spent years pulling together the Big Apple’s proposal, and city leaders from Boston to Los Angeles who were considering their own congestion pricing initiatives modeled on New York’s.
But no constituency had more cause for complaint than the millions of residents who rely on New York City’s network of trains and buses. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the regional transit system, had planned to use $15 billion from congestion pricing to overhaul dilapidated equipment while simultaneously adding elevators, modernizing stations and extending a subway line. Without the billion dollars collected annually from vehicles entering Manhattan, the MTA board faced agonizing decisions. Should it favor overdue maintenance, or the shiny new projects that riders had been promised?
The MTA board has now made its preferences clear: Maintenance should be its priority, rather than flashy projects like the Second Avenue subway expansion in Manhattan and a proposed light rail line between Queens and Brooklyn.
Hochul, on the other hand, insists that those projects will still move forward, even without an identified funding source to replace congestion pricing. “There is no reason for New Yorkers to be concerned that any planned projects will not be delivered,” she said in a statement last month. That may sound reassuring, but unless the governor uncovers a new source of money, it’s hard to see how new stations could be built without sacrificing the modernization projects that the subway desperately needs.
American politicians have a bad habit of pressuring transit agencies to shun maintenance in favor of expansion projects, leaving core service to deteriorate as new transit stops and lines are added to the network. But Hochul claims that the MTA faces no such choice, promising New Yorkers that they can enjoy the cake of great transit without suffering the broccoli of congestion pricing.
That seems like wishful thinking. History and political realities suggest that tradeoffs between ribbon-cutting and basic repairs are inevitable.
Maintaining a transit system is a bit like taking care of a house: You may get away with ignoring leaky plumbing, janky wiring and clogged gutters for a while, but you’re inviting catastrophic problems down the road. Underfunding maintenance has been a longstanding problem among American transit systems, particularly those with rail lines that require major capital funding to build and sustain. In Boston, for instance, “chronic underinvestment” is cited as a cause for the MBTA’s myriad service and safety problems, which prompted federal intervention even as the agency expanded its Green Line and Silver Line.
Part of the blame for shortchanging maintenance falls on Congress, which provides far more generous financial support for system expansions. Transit leaders “have a choice,” said Jim Aloisi, a lecturer of transportation policy and planning at MIT who previously served as secretary of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. “You get no federal money — or you get federal money to build something new.” To attract federal dollars, transit boards may opt to build new stations or lines instead of maintaining their current system or expanding service frequency.
Politics also skews transit budgets, further tilting decisions away from low-profile system upgrades. “If you’re a political leader, you want allocation of funds to be transparent in the sense of, ‘Oh I can take credit for this,’” Aloisi said. “The new initiative is always going to be easier to explain and more visible than some nuts-and-bolts project happening on the tracks overnight. No one sees it. No one knows about it.”
Visible transit projects also earn political favor due to their reputation as job generators. A 2002 academic study of US transit subsidies documented widespread “perceptions by elected officials that transit capital investments bring significant local economic (and hence, political) benefit.”
In contrast, even the most crucial maintenance projects generally fly under the radar, seldom attracting the public attention of a new train station or even an elevator.
But that calculus changes if a transit network is so plagued with problems that it seems to be in freefall. “All of the things that you and I think of as maintenance are largely opaque to the rider,” Aloisi said, “unless you have a system in crisis where people on the train are actually thinking, ‘I wonder what the signal is doing today.’” He noted Bostonians’ current consternation about the T as an example.
For New York City, such a moment arrived during 2017’s infamous “summer of hell,” when subway riders endured seemingly interminable delays and service outages. That debacle helped prompt then-Governor Andrew Cuomo to embrace congestion pricing as a way to replenish the MTA’s overstretched capital budget.
New York’s congestion pricing plan would have covered more than half the MTA’s $28 billion capital budget, allowing the agency to invest in various projects that help the system achieve what transit professionals call “a state of good repair,” such as replacing hundreds of aging subway cars, upgrading power systems and refurbishing tracks. Critically, the money would also allow the MTA to modernize its decades-old train signaling on lines like the A and C, installing a technology known as communications-based train control that enables trains to operate safely with shorter headways.
“The thing that's really exciting about upgrading signals is that it allows you to run more capacity,” said Eric Goldwyn, an assistant professor at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. “You’re getting more volume — up to 30 trains per hour, so every two minutes. It’s kind of like an expansion, but it’s not extending the geographical reach of the subway.”
At the same time, the influx of dollars from congestion pricing would also have enabled the MTA to undertake the kinds of visible enhancements that politicians love to showcase. Phase 2 of the Second Avenue subway, for instance, would connect East Harlem to the Q Line. (This February, Hochul proposed extending the subway line to the west, creating a crosstown route along 125th Street.) Hochul has also touted the Interborough Express as a new light rail service that would allow New Yorkers to move between Brooklyn and Queens without diverting into Manhattan.
To summarize, the billion dollars collected annually from congestion pricing would have allowed New York politicians like Hochul to grab shovels at media-friendly groundbreakings, while transit riders would enjoy faster and more reliable service as MTA worked its way through its maintenance backlog. The sense of optimism about the subway’s future was palpable.
But those plans went up in smoke when Hochul quashed congestion pricing. With its capital budget suddenly halved, the MTA board decided last month to freeze $16.5 billion in projects, including the Second Avenue subway extension, while acknowledging that even some planned maintenance would be deferred. Improvements for 92 stations across the system are on hold. “We have to prioritize the ‘state-of-good-repair’ work that assures the safety of our transit system — the basic stuff to make sure the system doesn’t fall apart,” MTA board chair Janno Lieber said.
Hochul herself has rejected any pause in system expansions, even without new funding. In a press conference in June, the governor claimed that with some “creativity,” the MTA’s budget could be rearranged to obtain “the billion dollars that is required to allow projects like the Second Avenue subway to go forward.” Details about how to do that have been notably absent.
Now straphangers are enduring rising delays and bracing for another potential summer of commuting hell as maintenance projects are paused. Hochul, perhaps aware of the fury directed at her from New Yorkers fearful that her reversal on congestion pricing will cripple their commutes, has smothered the transit system in a very public bear hug, declaring “I am joined at the hip with the MTA” and using a photo of her standing in a subway car for her current Twitter profile. When she joined a Pride march wearing a shirt emblazoned with the MTA’s logo atop a rainbow-colored heart, one observer commented on social media that “this is like if O.J. Simpson wore a shirt of his wife.”
As Hochul scrambles to position herself as the MTA’s champion rather than its villain, members of the MTA’s board — especially those she has appointed — could feel pressure to green-light high-profile projects like the Second Avenue subway, even at the cost of urgent maintenance. It’s no mystery why. When a transit line expands, said Goldwyn, “you have a ribbon cutting, and you have a shiny new train station. You can have a gala like Andrew Cuomo did for the opening phase on the Second Avenue subway” on New Year’s Eve in 2016. Replacing outdated equipment or fixing a broken elevator seldom elicits such public jubilation.
Goldwyn expects pressure to mount on Hochul and the MTA board if projects like the Second Avenue subway and the Interborough Express remain in limbo. “If people in East Harlem are continuously asking the governor about the Second Avenue line, I think that does force her to do something — to figure out how to fund it,” he said. “Things can ultimately go into a very political place.” Already, Congressman Adriano Espaillat, whose district includes Harlem, is pushing the MTA to restart construction work on the Second Avenue extension.
If maintenance is reduced to finance pricey expansion projects, subway-reliant New Yorkers will ultimately pay the price. Ridership would likely fall, too, as times between train arrivals lengthen and delays worsen. “Boosting frequency and greater reliability are sort of the hallmarks of ridership,” said Goldwyn. “Expansion is great, no doubt about it. But if you run poor service or infrequent service, you’re just not going to get the outcome that you anticipate.”
For the moment, the MTA’s board must strike a precarious balance between politicians’ desire for splashy construction projects and the urgent but hidden needs for system upgrades.
If only there were some way to avoid pitting maintenance against expansion. Like, for instance, collecting tolls from vehicles entering Manhattan.
David Zipper is a Senior Fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, where he examines the interplay between transportation policy, technology and society.