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New York Paused Congestion Pricing for 'Affordability' Weeks Before a 2024 Election, Then Relaunched It at a Lower Price Once Voting Was Over. A Year Later, Traffic Was Down 11 Percent and the Federal Government Was Still in Court Trying to Kill It.

On June 5, 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul stood before reporters and "indefinitely paused" New York's Central Business District Tolling Program, the long-planned congestion charge for driving into Manhattan below 60th Street. The launch was three weeks away. Hochul cited affordability concerns for working- and middle-class families who could no longer absorb a toll of up to $15 a day. The state legislature had authorized the program back in 2019. It was fully built, tested, and funded. The only thing standing between New York and the country's first congestion pricing system was a governor who had just noticed, five months before a presidential election, that it might poll badly.

It did not stay paused. Once the November 2024 election had come and gone, the program was quietly revived — at a lower base toll than the one Hochul had killed for being unaffordable. It launched for real on January 5, 2025, charging passenger E-ZPass vehicles $9 during peak hours instead of $15. The affordability crisis that required an indefinite pause in June apparently resolved itself by December, provided nobody had to vote on it in between.

A new secretary, a familiar letter

The reprieve was brief. On February 19, 2025 — about six weeks after tolling actually began — newly installed U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent Hochul a letter revoking the Federal Highway Administration's approval of the program and threatening to cut off federal highway funding to New York if the state didn't shut it down. The MTA, which runs the tolling program and had already spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars building the infrastructure for it, sued the federal government to keep it running. The case was styled, with minimal ambiguity about who was suing whom, MTA v. Duffy.

The numbers nobody disputed

While the lawsuit worked its way through federal court, the program kept running and kept producing results that neither side seriously contested. By its January 5, 2026 anniversary, the MTA reported 27 million fewer vehicles had entered the Congestion Relief Zone over the year — an 11 percent drop in traffic, about 73,000 fewer cars a day. Bus speeds were up roughly 2.3 percent; some reporting put drive times as much as 23 percent faster. Air pollution readings and noise complaints inside the zone were down. The tolls themselves had generated more than $500 million in net revenue — on pace to clear $550 million for the year — money earmarked for $15 billion in transit capital work: signal upgrades, new trains and buses, accessibility improvements. None of these figures were in dispute. The argument in court was never about whether the program worked.

A ruling, and an appeal anyway

On March 3, 2026, U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman ruled that the Department of Transportation's attempt to terminate the program was unlawful, rejecting the federal government's effort to kill it by administrative letter. The Trump administration and Duffy did not accept that as the end of the matter. Within weeks, the Justice Department filed a notice of appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case still sits. The program's continued existence now depends less on its traffic counts, its revenue, or its air quality data than on how three appellate judges read a highway funding statute.

The affordability argument that vanished

Nobody in the federal case has revived Hochul's original objection. The affordability argument that justified pulling the plug three weeks before a scheduled launch — and five months before an election — never resurfaced as a legal theory once the program was up and running and popular enough that killing it required a cabinet secretary instead of a governor's press conference.

The program was shut down once for being unaffordable, five months before an election, by the same governor who reopened it two months after the election at a lower price. It has now survived one lawsuit from the federal government trying to kill it for reasons that were never about affordability at all, and the people who lost that lawsuit filed an appeal anyway.

Filed from public reporting:

New York Paused Congestion Pricing for 'Affordability' Weeks Before a 2024 Election, Then Relaunched It at a Lower Price Once Voting Was Over. A Year Later, Traffic Was Down 11 Percent and the Federal Government Was Still in Court Trying to Kill It.

A new secretary, a familiar letter

The numbers nobody disputed

A ruling, and an appeal anyway

The affordability argument that vanished

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