New York City has just implemented congestion pricing on cars. Is a big city in Canada next?

New York City, a bustling metropolis with eight million people all trying to get somewhere, has now put a price on cars entering part of Manhattan. It is the first of its kind in North America.

The charge, called congestion pricing, is aimed at reducing traffic and pollution. The city also plans to use the money to upgrade its public transportation system, run by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA).

Most drivers of passenger vehicles will be charged $9 US to enter Manhattan south of Central Park on weekdays between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. and on weekends between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. During off hours, the toll drops to $2.25 US. It is a one-time charge per day.

MTA said the program will result in 80,000 fewer cars a day in the area, which would be a roughly 11 per cent reduction in traffic.

Reactions were mixed.

“Are you kidding me?” Chris Smith, a realtor from Somerville, N.J., told The Associated Press as he drove against traffic beneath the cameras circumventing the charge on Sunday, the day it first took place. 

“Whose idea was this? Kathy Hochul? She should be arrested for being ignorant.”

But the MTA said it will take time for people to adjust.

“This is a toll system that has never been tried before in terms of complexity,” MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber said at a news conference held at Grand Central Terminal on Sunday.

“We don’t expect New Yorkers to overnight change their behaviour. Everybody’s going to have to adjust to this.”

Not everyone was upset about it.

“I think the idea would be good to try to minimize the amount of traffic down and try to promote people to use public transportation,” Phil Bauer, a surgeon who lives in midtown Manhattan, told the AP, describing the constant din of traffic in his neighbourhood as “pretty brutal.”

While New York’s congestion fee may be a first for North America, similar charges have been around for a long time — and have been successful.

Success stories

The first congestion pricing was introduced in Singapore as far back as 1975, and has reduced traffic by roughly 13 per cent. In central London, England, it was introduced in 2003, and has helped cut traffic by 15 per cent.

But one of the greatest success stories may be that of Stockholm.

In the early 2000s, city council agreed to conduct a congestion pricing pilot project, and then have the city’s residents vote on whether or not to keep it in place.

“At the time, this was seen as, you know, like a suicide idea. Who would ever do this?” Jonas Eliasson, director of transport accessibility at the Swedish Transport Administration, who led a team that did the modelling and evaluation of the pricing ahead of the trial, which was introduced in January 2006. 

“We had something, like, maybe 60, 70 per cent of public opinion against congestion pricing for all the usual reasons: It will never work, it’s unfair, car drivers have to drive,” he said. “But then it was introduced, and even to my surprise, I must say, it worked even better than we thought.”

They did do some planning ahead of time, adding buses and new routes and building park-and-ride facilities. The plan reduced traffic by a whopping 20 per cent, much more successful than they had originally anticipated.

The referendum passed by a large margin, and the charge is still in place today.

Coming to a Canadian city near you?

New York has some of the worst traffic congestion in the world. But many Canadian cities — including Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal, to name a few — rank right up there in the top 10, according to traffic navigation company TomTom.

So, could Canadian cities be next on the list of congestion pricing?

“I don’t think it’s high that we’ll see congestion pricing here in the near term,” said Shoshanna Saxe, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s department of civil and mineral engineering and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure. 

“It would require a boldness and a vision that doesn’t feel in the near horizon.”

But she noted that Toronto did propose its own form of pricing, in the way of tolls from the Don Valley Parkway, which runs north-south connecting suburban regions onto the Gardiner Expressway, which runs east-west along Lake Ontario. 

In 2016, Toronto’s then-mayor John Tory proposed the toll, but it was shot down by then-Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne just ahead of a provincial election, at a time when she was unpopular. Her strategy may have been more about not upsetting suburban voters.

And in 2020, Vancouver looked to pursue its own congestion charge, but it was killed in 2022.

Congestion pricing tends to be unpopular with motorists simply due to the cost. However, it not only helps reduce traffic in heavily congested cities, but also reduces air pollution and helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are largely behind climate change.

“In a city, most of the air pollution comes from people who live outside the city and choose to drive into the city. So if you live downtown, you bear the air quality penalties of the people who live outside the city,” Saxe said.

Some of the reticence to congestion charges may also be due to lack of imagination, she said. 

“Most people in North America have never known another way of moving around. They only know a dominant car way of doing things.”

Saxe also stressed the importance the role public transportation plays in congestion pricing. It’s a hand-in-glove approach: Better public transportation will get people out of their cars, as was demonstrated in Stockholm.

“There’s no doubt about it,” she said. “You want to do something that actually works? Congestion pricing.”