Summary
As New York City struggles to curb surging vehicular traffic and care for an aging transit system, many see congestion pricing as the city’s savior. The new toll for entering Lower Manhattan during peak business hours could both reduce the number of cars on the road and increase funding for buses and trains. The policy looks like a win-win, and it may be. But as always, the devil is in the details.
When New York enacted the 2019 MTA Reform and Traffic Mobility Act, it ended the debate over whether the state would have congestion pricing. But it answered few questions over how congestion pricing would work. All we know is that drivers will be charged a variable toll to drive within certain parts of Manhattan, but we don’t know how those drivers will be tracked.
Without safeguards, congestion pricing will metastasize into a perpetual log of every car, driver, and passenger in the city, all just to collect a toll. Congestion pricing requires some data collection, such as when and where a driver enters the congestion zone, but how much data and how its retained is completely up to us. Some tracking solutions, such as automated license plate recognition (“ALPR”) technology, can go far beyond what is needed, photographing vehicles’ occupants and bystanders.
Even more importantly, current plans tell us nothing about how congestion pricing information will be stored. Absent restrictions, this traffic program can give law enforcement what amounts to a perpetual tracking device for every car in New York. The same concerns also exist for federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE, who would be able to access any data the city and state retain.
Fortunately, there are privacy-protective models from other countries that can be deployed in New York, minimizing the amount of data collected and the risk to the public. While further reforms are needed on the federal and state level, there are steps that the MTA can take today to safeguard New Yorkers.
