Congestion pricing carries precisely this kind of baggage,
even though it will improve our lives in many ways. That means the big question
politically, the one that will determine congestion pricing’s longevity as a
policy, is whether the vast majority of New Yorkers will experience its
benefits and how quickly.
We must see the positive results of congestion pricing in
our own lives to balance out the rage induced by what behavioral economists
call “the pain of paying” (research shows that we are far more bothered about small
expenses that we pay frequently and can see, like milk or gas, than about bigger
expenses we don’t pay often or that are simply deducted from our paychecks, like our
health insurance premiums). Unfortunately, we can’t see or feel reductions in
carbon emissions. Clean air is more ambiguous. We do notice pollution. We freak
out about bad air quality warnings in the summer. And last year when the smoke
from the Canadian wildfires turned New York City’s skies red and smoky, I saw children
running out of school buildings to gape at it in terror. Some of us will
undoubtedly feel, over time, that our asthma or headaches have improved, or
that we are breathing more easily. But it’s possible that for many people, the
clean air might be an invisible benefit, the kind that is politically troublesome
because it doesn’t reward its architects.
By contrast, New Yorkers have in recent years been
complaining about the subway a lot and will notice if it gets better. Public
transit is one of the least abstract political issues for New Yorkers,
affecting where we can work, whether we can get there in time, and whether we
can pick up our kids on time at the end of the day. Ridership has suffered
since the pandemic. Sensationally reported crimes on the subway have
contributed to anxiety about the system, which New York’s governor has
idiotically played into by sending in the National Guard. Less dramatic but
perhaps far more frustrating to most people, the service has deteriorated
recently, with more
delays and disruptions, and even derailments, which are quite scary. The
political reception of congestion pricing, then, will be mostly determined by
how tangibly it improves our transit system.