Traffic Mobility Review Board presses MTA officials on congestion pricing plan

The panel charged with helping shape the MTA's congestion pricing plan kicked off its first public meeting Wednesday by pressing MTA officials on how the plan would impact low-income New Yorkers and those cut off from public transportation.

Those were two of the most important questions the Traffic Mobility Review Board, a six-member appointed panel, had regarding the full scope of the toll structure.

The new tolls would give the Metropolitan Transportation Authority a financial boost of an estimated $1 billion a year to finance $15 billion in bonds and could begin as soon as May. The Federal Highway Administration greenlighted the plan last month.

Under the plan, cars with E-ZPass entering Manhattan below 60th Street, or Manhattan’s Central Business District, will pay up to $23 for driving below 60th Street during peak hours. Motorists without E-ZPass could pay up to $34.50.

Besides raising revenue, there are other primary goals: to reduce traffic and improve air quality.

The TMRB panel includes John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union, who wondered how low-income drivers would be affected.

 “I'm curious about whether there's any kind of cross-referencing that has been done or can be done between low-income New Yorkers and where they're coming from, and if they're coming from anything that could be described as a transit desert. Because if they are, there's no way to change driver behavior, especially for low-income New Yorkers ... so you're not going to change ... [anything],” Samuelsen told officials.

The final decision on toll prices will come after the TMRB holds public hearings and makes recommendations over the next couple of months. The panel includes a Long Island representative, John Durso of the Long Island Federation of Labor, who with Samuelsen turned his attention to how people working overnight shifts would be affected.

Durso once worked the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift in a Waldbaum’s warehouse and said a toll would have had negative consequences for his family.

“If while I'm working those shifts and I get hit twice — once when I come in and once when I go home — and I wasn't making $60,000 a year or $50,000 a year, then that's taking money out of my kid's mouth or paying my rent,” Durso said. “We got to figure something out.”

The MTA already has received exemptions requests from 122 groups, from artists to judges to low-income drivers. But MTA officials stressed Wednesday that the more exemptions, the higher the toll would be for other motorists.

Of all workers in the Central Business District, 143,000, or 11%, drive to their jobs, according to Juliette Michaelson, TMRB special adviser and also deputy chief external relations officer at the MTA.

There are certain exemptions carved into the plan, including for certain emergency vehicles and drivers who stay on FDR Drive and West Side Highway. Among other exemptions and/or discounts being considered are for cars at tolled Hudson River and East River crossings.

Michaelson told the panel it had to carefully weigh all options, explaining that the “tunnels and bridges carry somewhere between 5% and 9% of all vehicles that come into the CBD.”

Meanwhile, she said, 43% of all vehicles enter Manhattan below 60th Street.

“So the question for this group again is whether to reduce the rate of the CBD toll and whether to provide a so-called crossing credit for those who are already paying a toll to cross the East River or the Hudson River. And if so, what is that discount?” Michaelson asked.

Michaelson also suggested the panel consider different rates depending on the time of day and on the type of vehicle.

Dozens of ride-share and delivery workers, as well as Uber and Lyft drivers, protested the congestion pricing plan outside MTA headquarters in lower Manhattan, the site of the meeting, carrying signs that read: “Congestion Pricing, we’re not the MTA’s ATM.”

With Alfonso A. Castillo