New York Gov. Hochul touts NYC as first U.S. city to move forward with traffic congestion pricing

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2 years ago

June 27, 2023

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Pedestrians cross a street past traffic in the Midtown neighborhood of New York, US, on Saturday, June 17, 2023. New York City’s congestion pricing plan for the central business district is expected to get final approval this month.

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After New York City was cleared late last week to move forward with a congestion pricing plan, Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday said the largest U.S. city is leading the way to “achieve cleaner air, safer streets and better transit.”

The Federal Highway Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation, on Friday gave the green light for New York to go ahead with a plan to manage congestion, primarily through tolls in parts of Manhattan.

The measure could go into effect as soon as the spring of 2024, and would be the first of its kind in the U.S., according to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. State agencies have 310 days to stand up the tolling program and associated infrastructure.

“We are going to be the very first state in the nation, the very first city in America, to have a congestion pricing plan,” Hochul said in a press conference on Tuesday. “Others will look at us. Other cities are paying attention. How is it going to work here? Well, we’re going to show them. We’re going to show them how you do this.”

While it’s a new model for the U.S., congestion pricing plans have previously been implemented in London, Stockholm, and Singapore.

The cost of the toll is still being decided. A six-member Traffic Mobility Review Board is tasked with determining the specific pricing structure.

A report last August on the environmental impact of the plan included toll rates that ranged from $9 to $23 at peak times, $7 to $17 at off-peak times, and $5 to $12 during overnight hours.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The toll area covers much of central Manhattan’s surface roads. Cars will be tolled at 60th Street and south, but not on FDR Drive along the East Side or the West Side Highway. There also won’t be tolls in the Battery Park Underpass or on any surface roadway portions of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel connecting to West Street, according to the MTA.

Tolls will be collected via E-ZPass. For cars that don’t have E-ZPass, a bill will be mailed to the address of the registered vehicle, MTA says.

The congestion pricing plan, formally called the Central Business District Tolling Program, was put together by MTA, the New York State Department of Transportation, and the New York City Department of Transportation. It aims to reduce congestion in Manhattan, improve air quality and raise money to invest in the city’s public transportation system.

Before the Covid pandemic, approximately 700,000 vehicles entered the central business district per day, according to data from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council shared by the MTA. In 2020, traffic dropped to just 10% of normal volume, but has since rebounded to more than 90% of pre-pandemic levels, a more robust recovery than mass transit ridership, the MTA says.

The MTA Reform and Traffic Mobility Act passed in April 2019 called for the traffic congestion plan, and included certain limits, including making sure passenger vehicles can only be charged once per day for entering the area. Residents of those neighborhoods who make less than $60,000 will be eligible for a state tax credit. The act also requires that overnight toll rates be lower than peak costs and that a discount be available to low-income drivers.

Janno Lieber, the CEO of the MTA, said at Tuesday’s press conference that the plan required a 4,000-page environmental assessment to get federal government to sign off.

“They studied it to death,” Lieber said. “And we studied every intersection almost all the way to Philadelphia. And they studied the air quality, and they studied all it means, and they said that this initiative — this dramatic historic initiative — will not have a significant impact on the 28 million people in the region under federal environmental law. That’s what this means.”

Some New Jersey Democratic lawmakers, however, are upset by the move and the associated costs.

“This is nothing more than a cash grab to fund the MTA,” Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Bill Pascrell and Senator Bob Menendez said in joint written statement published Tuesday.

They wrote that the plan represents an attempt by New York “to balance its budget on the backs of hard-working New Jersey families.”

WATCH: The $52.6 billion plan to save the NYC region from climate change

Technology

Tesla’s stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

Published

8 hours ago

September 15, 2025

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Tesla's stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters

Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.

After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.

The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.

It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.

In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.

Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.

Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.

Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.

However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.

WATCH: Musk’s share purchase

Elon Musk's Tesla stock purchase is a great vote of confidence, says Sand Hill's Brenda Vingiello

Technology

Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach $3 trillion market cap

Published

14 hours ago

September 15, 2025

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach trillion market cap

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images

Alphabet has joined the $3 trillion club.

Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.

The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.

But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”

Bessent: TikTok deal ‘framework’ reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

Published

16 hours ago

September 15, 2025

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Bessent: TikTok deal 'framework' reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.

“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.

Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”

Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.

At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.