One of the lesser-known acts of the French Revolution, in the days before the storming of the Bastille, was a series of attacks on the toll barriers at the boundaries of Paris. These customs houses were a natural target for angry commoners: They levied the octroi, a tax on goods entering the city that was both an everyday financial burden and a symbol of oppression. When the revolutionary government formally abolished the tolls a couple of years later, Parisians celebrated on the Champs-Élysées. (One product that had just lost its heavy tax was wine.) By that time, the king and queen were under house arrest.
The story was one of many concerning precedents for New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, as she prepared to oversee Manhattan’s central business district tolling program, better known as congestion pricing, which takes effect today. The ring of tolls is intended to clear the region’s dirty air, ease Manhattan’s gridlock and fund the buses and trains that transport the vast majority of commuters. Governor Hochul has become the reluctant face of the program since she decided last year to pause its implementation, consider alternatives, reinstate it and override a committee of experts in order to choose a lower fee: $9 (down from $15) to take a car into the heart of Manhattan during the day. She seems about as excited to carry this initiative through her 2026 re-election campaign as Frodo was to journey across Middle-earth.
But at a moment when Democrats are in retreat, the success of this program is a major test for the party’s ideals, as well as its ability to actually get things done in the places it controls. Few areas of the country moved further toward the G.O.P. this past November than the boroughs and suburbs of New York City. If Democrats can figure out how to make congestion pricing viable, they can set a model for a whole host of innovations — in transportation, housing, crime, corruption and taxation — that, like this one, will require political courage to produce results.
Supporters of congestion pricing have long relied on two related assumptions. First, that New York City has a silent majority of car-free households whose self-interest lies with the program’s goals of better mass transit and less traffic. Second, that congestion pricing gains support (or at least becomes tolerable) over time, as other cities that have implemented it discovered.
Taken together, these two arguments echo a broader concept about politics, in which people support the policies — and the politicians — they get something out of. The author Matt Stoller chose the word “deliverism” to sum up this governing philosophy in the context of the Biden administration, which oversaw the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act. These were landmark bills, but they generated little good will even among the people they most directly advantage. A similar danger hangs over this program, since some of its benefits will accrue over time.
Governor Hochul can do a lot to ensure this traffic tax earns out, both financially and politically — and if she can get it right, it will be a model of Democratic recovery and impact. Her challenge boils down to three things: show that it works, for whom it works and why New York decided to do it in the first place.
The first step is the most complicated and the most important. The usual theory is that the way to sell taxes or fees is to say exactly what they will fund. This is the principle behind the “your tax dollars at work” signs on highways. The problem with this and other big-ticket initiatives in Democratic cities, from light rail expansion in Seattle to supportive housing in Los Angeles, is that blue jurisdictions build slowly and at a high cost.
Governor Hochul will need to find some easy wins as fast as possible. Subway infrastructure takes a long time; so would reforming the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s construction process. Working with the city to turn more streets into pedestrian zones and reserve priority lanes for bikes, buses and emergency vehicles, however, does not have to be. The sooner New Yorkers can see results, the sooner they will get behind the program. But if New York’s leaders take too long to make these infrastructure changes, the sticker shock of that $9 fee could fade and gridlock would creep back into place.
The next step is to mobilize the program’s beneficiaries. Bus and subway riders are the obvious choice to stand behind Governor Hochul when she announces that the tolls have raised their first billion dollars. But other groups should be there, too. Anyone who drives in Manhattan for work will benefit from less clogged streets: cabbies and Uber drivers; police officers, fire and E.M.S. crews; contractors and delivery workers. Anyone who cares about air quality should also get behind the toll, including nurses, doctors, teachers and the weekend warriors who run and bike the Hudson River Greenway.
Finally, Governor Hochul must tell a convincing story about why New York has imposed this toll. Framing it as a last-ditch effort to fund the wasteful M.T.A. is no way to win hearts and minds. Instead, she should spend more time arguing that the program is a way to build a cleaner, fairer, faster city. This would directly address a common criticism of Democrats from the 2024 election: that the nation’s biggest, bluest cities have become dysfunctional. Congestion pricing is a path to a city that works and a restoration of the New York minute; there’s even a tough-on-crime angle if the governor connects it to her crackdown on license plate fraud.
Governor Hochul could draw a lesson from Paris. The toll barriers of the ancien régime are no more, but the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has used her time in office to sharply reduce the presence of vehicles in the heart of the city. None of her successors are likely to undo this achievement, in part because Ms. Hidalgo has worked fast, gotten results and placed these policies in a broader story about equity, quality of life and the fight against climate change.
All three of these steps — making the plan work, building its constituencies and weaving that into a bigger story — require a gamble that conviction and big plans can be more compelling than playing defense and making excuses. The payoff can be huge, for New York City and for the nation.
