On Friday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul attended a rally in Chelsea with Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) officials in support of the city’s congestion pricing measure. The occasion was not without a sense of theater, as the governor rode to it on a crosstown bus and, upon arriving, led the crowd in a chant of “Traffic is down! Business is up!”
The event comes a day after the Trump administration announced that it is extending a deadline it had set for New York State to scrap the program by 30 days. Federal authorities previously sanctioned congestion pricing at various junctures over the years-long process of enacting the measure, the last of which was an agreement with the Federal Highway Administration allowing the MTA to collect the $9 toll last November. In a social media post on Thursday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy told Hochul that “the federal government and [President Trump] are putting New York on notice,” and threatened to withhold federal funds from the state, warning that “continued noncompliance will not be taken lightly.”
At Friday’s rally, Hochul appeared unfazed, addressing Duffy’s social media post directly. “I think there’s always going to be threats coming out of Washington, tweets from secretaries,” the governor said. She also cited statistics to back up her opening chant, as traffic in the pricing zone (below 60th Street in Manhattan) has decreased by 11%, and attendance at Broadway shows has surged by nearly 20% over last year.
The governor also played up her personal relationship with the president as a factor that will contribute to the program remaining in place: “I have a direct communication line with the president and I feel confident we will find a path forward not just on important revenue, but something that stimulates a quality of life in the city we have not seen for a long time.”
Despite the governor’s apparent confidence in bringing the president around to her perspective on the issue on Friday, she did not make it seem like their one-on-one meeting on the matter a month ago was a productive one. “I don’t know that we’re very persuasive on that front,” Hochul told CBS at the time.
In the meantime, the conflict between the state and federal government remains simmering. On Friday, Hochul maintained her refrain that “the cameras are staying on” in defiance of an order form the federal government. The MTA has sued the Federal Highway Administration and Sean Duffy over his agency’s about-face on the measure, while the Trump administration is threatening to pull federal funding from the state agency.
