Picture: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images
It’s Hochul 1, Trump 0, at least when it concerns navigating town. A court judgment today enables blockage pricing, the lower-Manhattan tolling strategy that was a decade in the making and launched at the start of 2025, to continue. The administration has actually attempted everything in its tool kit to stop it, based upon not data or research studies or anything much beyond rich-old-man pique. Sean Duffy’s federal Department of Transportation last year asserted a degree of control over the financing, congressional appropriations bills and the power of the bag be damned, and summarily declared the program dead. Not so fast, said Southern District judge Lewis Liman last May, and approved a short-term injunction allowing the toll to remain in place. Today, his complete judgment came though, and it’s a smackdown to Duffy, this White House’s dopey memes, and the (purported) billionaire who will likely spend his postpresidential years griping about how it costs nine dollars now to have his chauffeur drop him at the door of his golden structure. If he ever comes back to New york city, that is.
The Trump administration informed The Wall Street Journal that it is checking out other, most likely traffic-choked, avenues to attack the program, consisting of an appeal; the New york city Times report notes that “other legal challenges stay” (and, in the so-balanced-it’s-unbalanced Times way, shoved that reality right up into the subhead). But this is likely to be completion of any significant federal challenge, considered that, when anybody with power presses back difficult in these meaningless bully battles that the administration selects, the Trump people tend to give up and carry on to their next bad idea. On the other hand, congestion rates is generating roughly half a billion a month, the cash is currently paying for a lot of work on the transit system, traffic is significantly down, and city residents are inhaling less fumes. Do we smell a win?
Register for the Curbed Newsletter
An everyday mix of stories about cities, city life, and our constantly developing neighborhoods and horizons.
By sending your e-mail, you accept our Terms and Privacy Notice and to get email correspondence from us.