New Jersey is making one last push Friday to curb congestion pricing, hours before the long-anticipated, at-times maligned program takes effect across the river.
Federal Judge Leo Gordon has set a 3 p.m. hearing in Newark — just 33 hours before congestion pricing is presently scheduled to begin — to consider a Temporary Restraining Order filed by the Garden State.
New Jersey officials and attorneys have argued that Bergen County and other areas west of the Hudson will suffer environmentally from new traffic patterns. The Temporary Restraining Order calls for time to clarify and reconsider the plan. A spokesman for New York's governor, however, says the nation’s first congestion toll will begin as scheduled.
“Congestion pricing is still going to take effect on Sunday, January 5th,” said Avi Small, Gov. Kathy Hochul's press secretary.
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Hochul had paused congestion pricing back in June, but unpaused it in November at a lower fee.
Years in the making, the congestion pricing program tolls drivers entering Manhattan south of 61st Street. The peak price for cars with EZ-Pass is $9. Off-peak rates drop to $2.25. The MTA has touted the toll as a way to generate billions to modernize mass transit.
Congestion pricing map
Transit officials have dismissed New Jersey's last-minute legal maneuvers.
“Nobody in their right mind should take transportation advice from the New Jersey politicians who have woefully failed to manage transit in their state—while also endorsing higher tolls on their own roads and on Port Authority bridges and tunnels, and higher fares on NJ Transit," John McCarthy, MTA chief of policy and external relations, said in a statement. "Endless litigation over New York’s program to improve its transit and reduce traffic is the height of hypocrisy.”
New Yorkers who rely on the subway say the new fee mirrors what several international cities have implemented.
“I lived in London a little bit and I know it’s helped a lot there,” said Claire O’Donnell-McCarthy, who lives just north of the Manhattan zone on the west side.
She scoffed at New Jersey’s 11th-hour request for an injunction: “it’s not their place to say what we do in Manhattan.”
But City Council member Bob Holden of Queens, who has also sued the MTA on the grounds the new toll hurts outer borough residents disproportionately, predicts even if the congestion cameras get switched on this weekend, another court hearing in a case brought by Hempstead looms in just two weeks.
“It’ll start, but then it’ll stop. That’s my guess,” Holden told NBC New York.
