The MTA’s reported 16-month timeline to conduct an environmental review of Manhattan congestion fees passed by the state legislature in 2019 is “ridiculous,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday.
“Do I buy that timeline? No!” the mayor said during his daily press briefing from City Hall. “I’d like to meet the person who thinks 16 months is expedited, that’s ridiculous.”
De Blasio said he would communicate what he sees as an urgency to implement the tolls to soon-to-be Gov. Kathy Hochul when they meet Tuesday afternoon. Hochul’s office told the Times on Monday that while the current lieutenant governor “has supported congestion pricing in the past,” she planned to “evaluate” the project’s “pace and timing.”
“I definitely want to talk to her on it, we need it,” Hizzoner said Tuesday. “If our subways and our buses aren’t working, not only is New York City not working, the entire metropolitan region is not working.”
“We have got to get congestion pricing in place to do that.”
Tolls on auto travel in Manhattan’s “Central Business District” below 60th Street were scheduled to launch at the start of this year, after being passed by the state in 2019.
But the Trump administration declined to green-light the program — delaying New York’s plans just as the MTA began work on the $51.5 billion plan for needed subway and commuter rail improvements that the tolls were created to fund.
Transit officials now expect the tolls to be up and running in 2023. MTA Acting Chairman Janno Lieber defended the timeline at a press conference in the Bronx on Monday.
“What the MTA and [city] DOT are doing is we are collaboratively, along with the state DOT, working very closely with the Federal Highway Administration, which is part of the federal US Department of Transportation, to nail down a really aggressive schedule for the environmental process, and we’re getting close to resolving that,” Lieber said.
In response to de Blasio’s latest comment, Transit Authority spokesman Ken Lovett accused the mayor of “throwing his own DOT professionals under the bus” and further delaying the program by refusing to sign off on the timeline agreed upon by MTA and city transportation officials.
“The planned 16-month schedule was the result of months and months of negotiations between the USDOT and MTA, the state Department of Transportation and the Mayor’s own city DOT,” Lovett said in a statement. “The 16-month time-frame for such an expansive project that covers 28 counties and 22 million people is actually shorter than for many projects with relatively small geographic and environmental footprints.”
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