It is not very difficult to learn true and useful things about the new congestion pricing toll system that New York City switched on last weekend, but it is much easier to learn untrue things about it. The program itself is easy to understand; this post at Gothamist, to pick one of many, lays out both the broad strokes and the particulars in a lucid way, as does the city's website. While New York's is the first congestion pricing gambit of its kind in the United States, previous examples in London (which implemented it in 2003) and Stockholm (which did so in 2006) offer some sense of how it might work both in practice and in terms of how quickly people will get used to it. Congestion pricing has been coming into existence, fitfully and fretfully and in public, since 2007; there's a site where you can track the differences in traffic delays since the program finally went into effect just after midnight on Saturday.
The program could and probably should be simpler, and it is nice if also a little sad to imagine a different and more readily governable world in which it would be. In this one there are ins and outs and what-have-you's as there are with any bit of ambitious public policy, and carve-outs and compromises and concessions as there will be in any bit of public policy that inconveniences noisy and powerful constituencies, and hanging over it all there is the familiar element of lurid furious grievance inherent to every policy debate concerned with how people use cars. Given how atrophied and sclerotic and abstracted and plainly corrupt state and local government is, and not to put too fine a point on it but further given how absolutely fucking insane people become whenever they feel that their natural right to Do Car Stuff is being infringed upon, even this sort of tenuous and robustly caveated neoliberal intervention both feels and mostly is revolutionary.
And it is not very complicated, at all: a once-per-day charge, on a sliding scale according to the size of vehicles and the time of day, applied to vehicles driving through, or more likely kind of glumly poking and honking along within, the traffic-occluded third of Manhattan south of 60th Street. A system of traffic cameras and the little EZ Pass nuggets that most tri-state area drivers have in their cars will administer the program; a series of tax credits will return fees to those drivers making below a certain income threshold; the revenue generated will be used to make the city's groaning and ancient mass-transit system more accessible, effective, and comprehensive, and matched by enough federal funding to make that long-deferred work possible. That's the plan, anyway, and even accounting for the usual quantum of fuckery and graft and incompetence, it is the only way to imagine those necessary improvements being made given our current political circumstances and longstanding political derangements.
If it works in New York as it has worked in other big cities, the program will reduce traffic and its attendant toxic externalities, improve the quality of subway and bus service, and maybe most importantly Become Normal. Some grumpy percentage of the populace will complain about it forever, and a smaller percentage of that group will become so unbearable about it that they effectively become impossible to talk to about anything else. You will see them on the street muttering "this is unacceptable" and know both that they really mean it, that they truly will never accept whatever it is that they have given themselves up to not-accepting, and that you must never under any circumstances make eye contact with them. These people hate New York in the way that most normal people hate things like war or famine, and they will never, ever leave.
New York is big enough and depraved enough that those people have their own newspaper, and while the New York Post is not the state's most prestigious or profitable or widest-read paper, it is by far the most influential. If you have ever wondered about Mayor Eric Adams's otherwise incoherent public whipsawing between blustering triumphalism and raw panic, his scuzzy verve and fetish for cops and evident distaste for everyone and everything about New York, which is alternately the greatest city in the world and a revolting wad of shit that should by rights be obliterated from orbit—that is pure, distilled New York Post mindset. Most New Yorkers do not feel that way about the city they live in, but this is a big city with a lot of weird people in it, and it can be a pain in the ass. The big tent of reactionary grievance is always open to those seeking whatever the opposite of fellowship is. That's the Post.
The Post is strange in the way that these people are, and if it's hard to distinguish chicken from egg in this case—does the Post have journalists writing up stories that amount to Unhoused man seen at Midtown salad bar; disgusting because these seething dorks want to read stuff like that, or do they want to read stuff like that because the Post has long been so dedicated to writing it?—it is not very surprising that the Seething Dork Community's voices have been so well represented in the discourse surrounding congestion pricing. Local media, in New York but also in many other places, runs on people like this, and exists more or less to make sure that they never calm down or get less upset about anything. It turns the loudest of them—the City Council member advising the public on how to incapacitate the cameras, or the drivers the Post lauds for devising "clever ways to obscure license plate numbers"—into characters in this endless argument.
If it is easy to learn most of what you need to know about congestion pricing from one Gothamist blog—and it is unlikely that you need to know anything, as most people do not live in New York City and something like 55 percent of New Yorkers do not own cars at all—it is effectively impossible to learn anything useful about it from media like this. That coverage teases What You Need To Know across weeks and months like a threat, but is fundamentally not in the business of answering that sort of question so much as it is in the business of rephrasing it in progressively more ominous ways; all someone consuming this media would leave with is the urgent sense that there are some things that they need to know, and a suspicion that they do not know them. Eventually the question vanishes under all that dread, and then the job becomes less journalistic or propagandistic and more like landscaping—keeping the surfaces appropriately uniform, lush, and well fed.
This is easier than writing an explainer on a website, in some ways, and clearly more gratifying both for the wealthy reactionary sadists directing the coverage and the members of the Seething Dork Community who consume it. I don't need to tell you that this diet of scammy anti-human dishonesty is incredibly bad at scale, but it can deliver some rough chuckles in instances like this. These news outlets and the hideous news influencers mimicking them exist not so much to misinform people as to keep people who refuse to learn basic shit in their preferred state of furious unknowing—not just uninformed, but vigorously counter-informed and convinced that something both terrible and vague is being done to them.
There is a lot of demand for that, which ensures that there is a lot of supply. This sort of sludge tends to take on a familiar shape and fragrance—the cocksure smugness of a TikTok editorialist who is absolutely just making some shit up, a bit of video that is framed like a conventional news segment but is not—but it also has to be careful not to tell its viewership anything that might calm them down, or inform them in the ways they don't want to be informed. This is how you wind up with Freedomnews.tv talking to people like this guy about how upset he is that congestion pricing will make it onerous for him to drive from his home on one side of Central Park to a second location less than a mile away, on the other side of the park. If you know New York City, or if you know how to use Google Maps, you will laugh right away—this is maybe 20 scenic and extremely safe minutes on foot, or a two-stop subway ride. It doesn't matter that the man in question got obscenely rich by selling his widely loathed real estate rental agency to another, equally loathed real estate concern, but it isn't surprising, either.
Even if you don't know any of that, there is a sort of stink on this kind of anti-news that it's useful to recognize. Most people who have to drive in the congestion pricing zone have no choice but to see how things play out, and to see how much better an experience they will actually be getting for that once-per-day fee; some people who don't have to drive in the zone won't, which is in large part what the policy is for. Everyone is wary, and it's easy to see why. Actual attempts by the state to intervene in daily life in ways designed to improve conditions in a broad-based way are so vanishingly rare and so often compromised that some wariness seems warranted. You can read stories about those sorts of people, but those are not the stories that this robust and growing tranche of media and its attendant political class exists to tell, just as those people are not who it cares to serve. The politicians who should be advocating for the policy are feckless and wimpy; noise and animus fills the space they have vacated like floodwater.
There is a lot of this, and there is much more of it coming. There is a counter-media that exists because it is hard to know things, and whose business amounts to making them even harder to know. They will look you in the face and say, somberly or heatedly, Every Sunday, Cornelius Ticketmaster IV drives his Lincoln Navigator nine blocks to check in with his son, Prestige, a DJ and bumfight promoter who lives in a former hospital that the family bought in 2017 and turned into a 'cryptocurrency supper club experience.' But now... and dare you not to believe it, or just to check their work. By the time congestion pricing becomes normal and disappears into the busy everyday fabric of city reality, they'll be saying it about something else.
