Portside

Here is what the indefinite pause on New York City’s congestion pricing program, if it sticks, will cost: 120,000 more cars daily clogging Lower Manhattan’s bumper-to-bumper streets, according to a New York State analysis, and perhaps $20 billion annually in additional lost productivity and fuel and operating costs, as well as health and environmental burdens and a practically unbridgeable budget shortfall for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that will straitjacket an already handicapped agency and imperil dozens of planned necessary capital improvement projects for the city’s aging subway system.

Here is what it gains Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who announced her unilateral decision about the suspension last week: perhaps slightly better chances for New York Democrats in a couple of fall congressional races. According to reporting, these are especially important to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who may still be somewhat embarrassed about his state’s performance in the 2022 elections, when surprise victories for several New York Republicans kept the House of Representatives out of Democratic control. It has also handed the governor several news conferences so bungled, they have made reversing a policy unpopular with voters into a genuine political humiliation.

In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.

In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

Robinson Meyer, a contributing Times Opinion writer, wrote for Heatmap that delaying the plan will be “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States,” adding that “it is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.” He called it worse than the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Willow oil project in Alaska — not just because of the direct effect on emissions, though that would be large, but what a pause means for the morale and momentum of any American movement toward a next-generation, climate-conscious urbanism.

For years, the country’s liberals have envied the transformation of London by its Ultra Low Emission Zone, which generates hundreds of millions of pounds annually and quickly cut nitrogen dioxide air pollution in central London by 44 percent from projected levels. And liberals practically salivated over the remaking of Paris by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose policies have significantly reduced the number of cars in the city center, cutting nitrogen oxide pollution by 40 percent from 2011 levels, and turned huge swaths of the urban core into a paradise for pedestrians and bikers.

Similar programs have been carried out in Stockholm and Oslo, proving remarkably popular, and while it didn’t exactly seem likely that all the world’s cities were on the verge of leaving behind the car, the fact that any American city was taking the leap looked like a sign that change was possible. There aren’t many places in the United States that could plausibly hope to take even a few steps in the direction of the 15-minute city. But the New York City metro area — which has higher public transportation ridership than the next 16 American cities combined and whose residents account for 45 percent of U.S. commutes by public transit — was the obvious place to try. At least until last week.

To enthusiastic reformers, the reversal was all the more painful because the obvious hurdles had already been cleared. Especially after the Inflation Reduction Act kicked off a frenzied real-world spending spree, progress-minded Democrats have argued about the difficulties of building things at anywhere close to the necessary speed, taking aim at a bundle of obstacles to more rapid development and build-out of green infrastructure — rampant NIMBYism, burdens of environmental review, permitting and zoning challenges, social justice litmus tests. It had taken a few decades, but congestion pricing had jumped through all the necessary hoops. The everything bagel had been slathered with cream cheese and was ready to serve. And Hochul put the kibosh on it anyway.

The cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority has spent $500 million developing the system and installing its hardware, and the inevitable shortfall now means a much less ambitious future for the agency, to trust its spokesmen, which is now probably incapable of extending the Second Avenue Subway or undertaking the Interborough Express project, which promised to revitalize huge corridors of Brooklyn and Queens and give more than 100,000 New Yorkers more viable public transit commutes. (Hochul says the pause won’t imperil those projects.) The pause may even be illegal, as State Senator Liz Krueger argued last week in The Daily News.

But for all its inscrutability, Hochul’s reversal follows a recent partisan pattern, a sort of centrist backlash among establishment Democrats and their supporters against left-wing causes and their supporters in the run-up to the November elections, partly as a matter of electoral strategy and perhaps as part of a pre-emptive blame game in anticipation of Republican victories, possibly including Donald Trump’s re-election.

The backlash is perhaps most visible in commentary from liberal pundits, who in recent weeks have tried to blame the party’s left wing for President Biden’s dicey re-election prospects, though the most obvious drags on those chances are his age and voters’ perceptions about the cost of living. At the national level it is best embodied by Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who rarely speaks at length but happily seizes opportunities to punch left, particularly toward those protesting the war in Gaza. More locally, it is embodied by Mayor Eric Adams, who won election in 2021 as a kind of centrist backlash candidate — hailed at the time as a political counterweight to progressive candidates like Maya Wiley and progressive forces like the Black Lives Matter movement and perhaps even as a future face of the Democratic Party — and whose approval ratings are now lower than any other New York City mayor in decades, even as the city has inarguably bounced back from its pandemic trough on his watch.

Hochul has been a less visible and less polarizing figure than Adams. But every time she has poked her head up and made national news lately, it has been in the same spirit, to roll her eyes at or pick fights with those to her left. In February she mocked critics of Israel’s war in Gaza by saying, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day.” (She later apologized.) In March she suddenly deployed the state’s National Guard to patrol the subways, on the same day that Adams boasted about rapid declines in subway crime. And now on congestion pricing, just weeks after bragging she was proud to stand up to “set in their ways” drivers, she reversed course out of apparent deference to those drivers and their outsize political clout. The state government and the transit authority have hard-earned reputations for ineffectuality, and faced with an opportunity to do something big, the governor chose to retreat and do nothing instead.

“It makes me think about the fight for progress, and how any real progress in the moment seems impossible,” wrote Cooper Lund in a melancholy reflection he called “Who Gets to Be a Constituent?” Nine times as many people ride public transit into the central business district each day as take cars there. There are 11 times as many people living in Manhattan who breathe the air polluted by automobile exhaust each day as there are who drive there for work. And those who work in the greater New York area lose 113 million hours each year to traffic, at an estimated cost of nearly $800 for each commuter. “With N.Y.C.’s reputation you’d think that the Democrats would be eager to uphold the city as an example of what a liberal, multicultural society is capable of, and to foster it,” Lund went on. “But both the mayor or the governor proved that they don’t have any interest in that. Instead, the things that would improve the city are pushed away for the suburban lifestyle that both parties seem to agree represents their actual constituency.”

A generation ago, it was common for informed liberals to lament the transformation of the country’s densest and most walkable city into a traffic-snarled carscape at the hand of Robert Moses in the mid-20th century. But despite the rise of YIMBYism and a sort of conventional wisdom new urbanism, the city hasn’t become meaningfully less automobile-centric since. More cars traveled into Lower Manhattan in 1990 than in 1981, more came in 2000 than in 1990, and although the rates dropped a bit after Sept. 11, they were still slightly higher in 2010 than they were 20 years before and have remained pretty flat since. Decades into new urbanism, the country’s most walkable city has just about the same number of cars driving into its in-demand downtown.

Taxi registrations doubled from 1980 to 2010 and then grew even more rapidly through the Uber years that followed, so that there are now five times as many taxis registered in the city as there were nearly 40 years ago and two and a half times as many taxi rides. (The difference between the two figures suggests that a pretty big portion of the increase is empty cars idling or cruising without fares.) Since 2006, excess congestion has grown by 53 percent, and since 2010, the average travel speed in the central business district has fallen 22 percent, from a crawl of 9.1 miles per hour to a glacial 7.1. I can comfortably run faster.

As has been the case everywhere, the kind and size of cars in New York have changed, too. When I was growing up there in the 1980s and ’90s, I could look out at the streetscape and see things other than trucks and supersized sport utility vehicles — trees, storefronts, pedestrians on the opposite curb, each of them visible because the streets were much less packed with automobiles the size of small elephants. Parking spots were not walls of S.U.V.s back then but lines of sedans, nestled along the sidewalk, it seemed, almost like a string of small boats puttering by the boarding platform of a flume ride. I remember climbing down into cars then, even as a 9- or 10-year-old. As a grown-up, I’m now climbing up, into what feels more like a cockpit and an imperious claim to the street.

My parents and in-laws remember a different kind of city still, the kind where you could park right in front of restaurants, play stickball in the street with infrequent interruptions, ride bikes down the cobblestones of SoHo and see only the occasional delivery truck along the way. I never knew that world, except through photographs and the haze of secondhand nostalgia. By the time I came around, the streets were already pretty full of cars. But even so, the city as a whole didn’t seem to belong to them yet. Certainly they didn’t seem to be holding its future hostage.

Here is what the indefinite pause on New York City’s congestion pricing program, if it sticks, will cost: 120,000 more cars daily clogging Lower Manhattan’s bumper-to-bumper streets, according to a New York State analysis, and perhaps $20 billion annually in additional lost productivity and fuel and operating costs, as well as health and environmental burdens and a practically unbridgeable budget shortfall for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that will straitjacket an already handicapped agency and imperil dozens of planned necessary capital improvement projects for the city’s aging subway system.

Here is what it gains Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who announced her unilateral decision about the suspension last week: perhaps slightly better chances for New York Democrats in a couple of fall congressional races. According to reporting, these are especially important to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who may still be somewhat embarrassed about his state’s performance in the 2022 elections, when surprise victories for several New York Republicans kept the House of Representatives out of Democratic control. It has also handed the governor several news conferences so bungled, they have made reversing a policy unpopular with voters into a genuine political humiliation.

In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.

In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

Robinson Meyer, a contributing Times Opinion writer, wrote for Heatmap that delaying the plan will be “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States,” adding that “it is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.” He called it worse than the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Willow oil project in Alaska — not just because of the direct effect on emissions, though that would be large, but what a pause means for the morale and momentum of any American movement toward a next-generation, climate-conscious urbanism.

For years, the country’s liberals have envied the transformation of London by its Ultra Low Emission Zone, which generates hundreds of millions of pounds annually and quickly cut nitrogen dioxide air pollution in central London by 44 percent from projected levels. And liberals practically salivated over the remaking of Paris by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose policies have significantly reduced the number of cars in the city center, cutting nitrogen oxide pollution by 40 percent from 2011 levels, and turned huge swaths of the urban core into a paradise for pedestrians and bikers.

Similar programs have been carried out in Stockholm and Oslo, proving remarkably popular, and while it didn’t exactly seem likely that all the world’s cities were on the verge of leaving behind the car, the fact that any American city was taking the leap looked like a sign that change was possible. There aren’t many places in the United States that could plausibly hope to take even a few steps in the direction of the 15-minute city. But the New York City metro area — which has higher public transportation ridership than the next 16 American cities combined and whose residents account for 45 percent of U.S. commutes by public transit — was the obvious place to try. At least until last week.

To enthusiastic reformers, the reversal was all the more painful because the obvious hurdles had already been cleared. Especially after the Inflation Reduction Act kicked off a frenzied real-world spending spree, progress-minded Democrats have argued about the difficulties of building things at anywhere close to the necessary speed, taking aim at a bundle of obstacles to more rapid development and build-out of green infrastructure — rampant NIMBYism, burdens of environmental review, permitting and zoning challenges, social justice litmus tests. It had taken a few decades, but congestion pricing had jumped through all the necessary hoops. The everything bagel had been slathered with cream cheese and was ready to serve. And Hochul put the kibosh on it anyway.

The cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority has spent $500 million developing the system and installing its hardware, and the inevitable shortfall now means a much less ambitious future for the agency, to trust its spokesmen, which is now probably incapable of extending the Second Avenue Subway or undertaking the Interborough Express project, which promised to revitalize huge corridors of Brooklyn and Queens and give more than 100,000 New Yorkers more viable public transit commutes. (Hochul says the pause won’t imperil those projects.) The pause may even be illegal, as State Senator Liz Krueger argued last week in The Daily News.

But for all its inscrutability, Hochul’s reversal follows a recent partisan pattern, a sort of centrist backlash among establishment Democrats and their supporters against left-wing causes and their supporters in the run-up to the November elections, partly as a matter of electoral strategy and perhaps as part of a pre-emptive blame game in anticipation of Republican victories, possibly including Donald Trump’s re-election.

The backlash is perhaps most visible in commentary from liberal pundits, who in recent weeks have tried to blame the party’s left wing for President Biden’s dicey re-election prospects, though the most obvious drags on those chances are his age and voters’ perceptions about the cost of living. At the national level it is best embodied by Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who rarely speaks at length but happily seizes opportunities to punch left, particularly toward those protesting the war in Gaza. More locally, it is embodied by Mayor Eric Adams, who won election in 2021 as a kind of centrist backlash candidate — hailed at the time as a political counterweight to progressive candidates like Maya Wiley and progressive forces like the Black Lives Matter movement and perhaps even as a future face of the Democratic Party — and whose approval ratings are now lower than any other New York City mayor in decades, even as the city has inarguably bounced back from its pandemic trough on his watch.

Hochul has been a less visible and less polarizing figure than Adams. But every time she has poked her head up and made national news lately, it has been in the same spirit, to roll her eyes at or pick fights with those to her left. In February she mocked critics of Israel’s war in Gaza by saying, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day.” (She later apologized.) In March she suddenly deployed the state’s National Guard to patrol the subways, on the same day that Adams boasted about rapid declines in subway crime. And now on congestion pricing, just weeks after bragging she was proud to stand up to “set in their ways” drivers, she reversed course out of apparent deference to those drivers and their outsize political clout. The state government and the transit authority have hard-earned reputations for ineffectuality, and faced with an opportunity to do something big, the governor chose to retreat and do nothing instead.

“It makes me think about the fight for progress, and how any real progress in the moment seems impossible,” wrote Cooper Lund in a melancholy reflection he called “Who Gets to Be a Constituent?” Nine times as many people ride public transit into the central business district each day as take cars there. There are 11 times as many people living in Manhattan who breathe the air polluted by automobile exhaust each day as there are who drive there for work. And those who work in the greater New York area lose 113 million hours each year to traffic, at an estimated cost of nearly $800 for each commuter. “With N.Y.C.’s reputation you’d think that the Democrats would be eager to uphold the city as an example of what a liberal, multicultural society is capable of, and to foster it,” Lund went on. “But both the mayor or the governor proved that they don’t have any interest in that. Instead, the things that would improve the city are pushed away for the suburban lifestyle that both parties seem to agree represents their actual constituency.”

A generation ago, it was common for informed liberals to lament the transformation of the country’s densest and most walkable city into a traffic-snarled carscape at the hand of Robert Moses in the mid-20th century. But despite the rise of YIMBYism and a sort of conventional wisdom new urbanism, the city hasn’t become meaningfully less automobile-centric since. More cars traveled into Lower Manhattan in 1990 than in 1981, more came in 2000 than in 1990, and although the rates dropped a bit after Sept. 11, they were still slightly higher in 2010 than they were 20 years before and have remained pretty flat since. Decades into new urbanism, the country’s most walkable city has just about the same number of cars driving into its in-demand downtown.

Taxi registrations doubled from 1980 to 2010 and then grew even more rapidly through the Uber years that followed, so that there are now five times as many taxis registered in the city as there were nearly 40 years ago and two and a half times as many taxi rides. (The difference between the two figures suggests that a pretty big portion of the increase is empty cars idling or cruising without fares.) Since 2006, excess congestion has grown by 53 percent, and since 2010, the average travel speed in the central business district has fallen 22 percent, from a crawl of 9.1 miles per hour to a glacial 7.1. I can comfortably run faster.

As has been the case everywhere, the kind and size of cars in New York have changed, too. When I was growing up there in the 1980s and ’90s, I could look out at the streetscape and see things other than trucks and supersized sport utility vehicles — trees, storefronts, pedestrians on the opposite curb, each of them visible because the streets were much less packed with automobiles the size of small elephants. Parking spots were not walls of S.U.V.s back then but lines of sedans, nestled along the sidewalk, it seemed, almost like a string of small boats puttering by the boarding platform of a flume ride. I remember climbing down into cars then, even as a 9- or 10-year-old. As a grown-up, I’m now climbing up, into what feels more like a cockpit and an imperious claim to the street.

My parents and in-laws remember a different kind of city still, the kind where you could park right in front of restaurants, play stickball in the street with infrequent interruptions, ride bikes down the cobblestones of SoHo and see only the occasional delivery truck along the way. I never knew that world, except through photographs and the haze of secondhand nostalgia. By the time I came around, the streets were already pretty full of cars. But even so, the city as a whole didn’t seem to belong to them yet. Certainly they didn’t seem to be holding its future hostage.

David Wallace-Wells, a best-selling science writer and essayist, explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it.