page_title: Congestion pricing in New York City
section_title: Early plans
hierarchical_section_title: Congestion pricing in New York City / Early plans
caption_attribution_description: English: A row of Toyota Camry livery cabs and Nissan NV200 taxis stopped at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
context_page_description: A traffic congestion fee will go into effect in New York City by 2022, that will charge vehicles traveling into or within a predetermined area in the Manhattan central business district. First proposed in 2007, this congestion pricing plan was approved and implemented in the 2019 New York State budget. This will be the first such fee scheme enacted in the United States.
  Since the early 20th century, there have been proposals for traffic congestion fees or limit for vehicles traveling into or within the Manhattan central business district. A recurring proposal has included adding tolls to all crossings of the East River, which separates Manhattan from Long Island; currently, four bridges across the East River do not charge any tolls. In the 1970s, after New York City was deemed to be in violation of the Clean Air Act, Mayor John Lindsay proposed limiting cars in Lower Manhattan and tolling all crossings of the East River, but ultimately withdrew the proposal. Lindsay's successor Abraham Beame subsequently opposed the tolling scheme. Beame's successor Ed Koch attempted to restore limits on vehicles entering Manhattan, but the federal government preempted his plan.
context_section_description: Plans for reducing vehicular traffic in New York City's central business districts, as well as adding tolls to crossings into Manhattan, date to the early 20th century. In particular, many proposals involved adding tolls to the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro Bridge across the East River, which separates Long Island from the island of Manhattan. These bridges originally had tolls, but these were removed before the Great Depression. In 1933, in the midst of the Depression, the New York City Comptroller proposed reinstating tolls on the bridges in order to raise money for the city. This received opposition from residents of Brooklyn and Queens, in western Long Island, because the four free bridges were the only means of traveling freely to and from Long Island. Civic groups also opposed the proposal. In June 1933, Mayor John P. O'Brien acquiesced to a plan to charge city residents annual fees for any vehicles they owned, and to add a surcharge to all taxi trips. Out-of-town residents would pay tolls to cross the East and Harlem Rivers on the east side of Manhattan; since motorists already paid tolls to cross the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan, this plan would have effectively created a congestion charge to enter and exit Manhattan. Several groups came together to protest against O'Brien's proposal, and his successor Fiorello H. La Guardia canceled O'Brien's proposed traffic fees when he entered office the next year.
  In 1952, city planner Goodhue Livingston suggested that tolls be added on the four free East River bridges in order to fund the New York City Subway. By 1966, New York City Mayor John Lindsay was considering implementing tolls on all East River crossings, as well as raising prices on existing tolled crossings. In 1968, an outgoing member of the then-new Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which controlled New York City's transit system as well as the city's tolled crossings, suggested adding tolls to the East River crossings in order to encourage mass transit use. The proposal was brought up again in 1971.
  In the early 1970s, the office of Mayor Lindsay experimented with limiting and banning private cars in downtown Manhattan following federal pressure to improve city air quality. His original proposal, to ban noncommercial midday traffic in Manhattan's Financial District, was reduced to a parking ban at the request of business executives. The parking ban, announced in September 1970, affected a triangular 50-block area south of Fulton Street and upset truckers and merchants who worked in the area. A later transportation commissioner said that the plans were fashionable [but] unfeasible due to unexamined commerce relationships and lack of preemptive buy-in from merchants. Lindsay's future proposals were restricted in scale.
  In 1970, the government enacted the Clean Air Act, a series of federal air pollution regulations. Since New York City was in violation of these new regulations, it was given until 1975 to be compliant; this was later pushed back to 1977 after the state was given a 2-year delay in implementing the standards. Mayor Lindsay and the federal Environmental Protection Agency developed a plan to collect tolls on twelve free bridges across the Harlem and East Rivers, banning midtown parking, and significantly reducing the number of parking spaces south of 59th Street. They also proposed to retrofit air filtering devices on cars entering New York City's main business districts. The successive mayor, Abraham Beame, refused to implement the plan, even after federal order in 1975, but environmentalists received a court order in 1976 to proceed with implementation. Yet as the federal legislature forbade the bridge tolls and taxi restrictions went into effect, the parking ban remained the most controversial and consequential aspect of the act, and its forced implementation was poorly executed. In April 1977, Beame's administration released a report that opposed the addition of tolls, a proposal that future Mayor Michael Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan would address thir
caption: An intersection in Midtown Manhattan
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