Goodbye to the new toll system in Manhattan: This is Donald Trump’s plan to end NYC’s congestion pricing

More than six weeks ago, New York City implemented a first-of-its-kind congestion pricing system in the United States for the central business district in lower Manhattan. The program, which had been in the works for decades, charges drivers a toll to use streets and avenues below 60th Street which runs parallel with the south side of Central Park.

The congestion pricing scheme went live on 5 January, 2025, but now that Donald Trump is president he plans to follow through on his promise during the 2024 campaign to “terminate congestion pricing.” On Wednesday his Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, sent a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul saying that his department would be canceling its agreement to the program calling it “a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners.”

Trump took to social media to declare victory posting “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Just so that people wouldn’t think that the whole “king” thing was hyperbole, the White House posted a picture of Trump donning a crown with New York City in the background.

Congestion Pricing most likely not going anywhere anytime soon despite Trump declaration

Clearly the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) was prepared for the move by the Trump administration to terminate the congestion pricing program as it filed a 51-page legal challenge within minutes of Secretary Duffy’s letter. Gov. Hochul held a press conference as well where she made reference to Trump declaring himself king.

“New York hasn’t labored under a king for 250 years. We sure as hell are not going to start now,” she said. “I don’t care if you love congestion pricing or hate it. This is an attack on our sovereign identity, our independence from Washington.” Adding, “We are not subservient to a king or anyone else out of Washington.”

Legal scholars don’t think that the Trump administration has much of a chance winning in the courts either. David A. Super, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, told The New York Times that the Transportation Secretary’s “interpretation of the law was largely irrelevant because the statute itself does not grant him the authority to negate the program.”

He said that if one looks at the text of the statute that “there is no authority for this cancellation.” Likewise, a lawyer who supports congestion pricing, John Reichman, said, “You can’t unilaterally decide to void a contract that the other party has relied on — and spent millions of dollars implementing.”

The MTA in its legal filing said that the Federal Highway Administration, part of the Department of Transportation, “has never attempted to unilaterally rescind tolling authority” for any other tolling programs, like in Florida and Texas, that have relied on the same statute used for NYC’s congestion pricing.

Furthermore, that reversing course would create “uncertainty that may make it difficult to issue bonds for other projects and would clearly undermine the purposes” of the Value Pricing Pilot Program, the federal statute that authorized New York’s congestion pricing program.

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