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 octroi7xm, 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.
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