New Jersey is making one final push Friday to curb congestion pricing, hours earlier than the long-anticipated, at-times maligned program takes impact throughout the river.
Federal Decide Leo Gordon has set a 3 p.m. listening to in Newark — simply 33 hours earlier than congestion pricing is presently scheduled to start — to contemplate a Short-term Restraining Order filed by the Backyard State.
New Jersey officers and attorneys have argued that Bergen County and different areas west of the Hudson will undergo environmentally from new site visitors patterns. The Short-term Restraining Order requires time to make clear and rethink the plan. A spokesman for New York’s governor, nonetheless, says the nation’s first congestion toll will start as scheduled.
“Congestion pricing is still going to take effect on Sunday, January 5th,” mentioned Avi Small, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s press secretary.
Hochul had paused congestion pricing again in June, however unpaused it in November at a decrease charge.
Years within the making, the congestion pricing program tolls drivers getting into Manhattan south of 61st Road. The height value for vehicles with EZ-Move is $9. Off-peak charges drop to $2.25. The MTA has touted the toll as a option to generate billions to modernize mass transit.
Congestion pricing map
Transit officers have dismissed New Jersey’s last-minute authorized maneuvers.
“Nobody in their right mind should take transportation advice from the New Jersey politicians who have woefully failed to manage transit in their state—while also endorsing higher tolls on their own roads and on Port Authority bridges and tunnels, and higher fares on NJ Transit,” John McCarthy, MTA chief of policy and external relations, said in a statement. “Endless litigation over New York’s program to improve its transit and reduce traffic is the height of hypocrisy.”
New Yorkers who depend on the subway say the brand new charge mirrors what a number of worldwide cities have carried out.
“I lived in London a little bit and I know it’s helped a lot there,” mentioned Claire O’Donnell-McCarthy, who lives simply north of the Manhattan zone on the west aspect.
She scoffed at New Jersey’s Eleventh-hour request for an injunction: “it’s not their place to say what we do in Manhattan.”
However Metropolis Council member Bob Holden of Queens, who has additionally sued the MTA on the grounds the brand new toll hurts outer borough residents disproportionately, predicts even when the congestion cameras get switched on this weekend, one other court docket listening to in a case introduced by Hempstead looms in simply two weeks.
“It’ll start, but then it’ll stop. That’s my guess,” Holden informed NBC New York.
