A decade ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York offered a plan to ease traffic in Manhattan and raise hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the city’s aging infrastructure. Drivers would be charged $8 to enter the most congested parts of Manhattan during peak commuting hours.
The plan was crushed in Albany, derailed before it was even brought for a vote.
Now, with the city’s subways in crisis — with daily delays increasingly common and its equipment in dire condition — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who once doubted that congestion pricing would gain any traction in the state, is planning to resurrect the idea and will expend political capital to see it succeed.
With voters increasingly blaming him for the transit mess, Mr. Cuomo is working behind the scenes to draft a proposal and is using Mr. Bloomberg’s failed campaign as a lesson to improve its chances of winning the support of stakeholders, including the State Legislature.
“Congestion pricing is an idea whose time has come,” Mr. Cuomo said. He declined to provide specifics about how the plan would work and what it would charge, but said that he had been meeting with “interested parties” for months and that the plan would probably be substantially different from Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal.
“We have been going through the problems with the old plan and trying to come up with an updated and frankly better congestion pricing plan,” Mr. Cuomo said. A key priority is making it as palatable as possible to commuters from the suburbs and boroughs outside Manhattan without undercutting the primary goals: providing a dedicated funding stream for the transit system, while reducing traffic squeezing onto some of the country’s most gridlocked streets.
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Mr. Cuomo’s comments come on the heels of a separate plan proposed by Mayor de Blasio to tax the wealthiest New York City residents to create a dedicated fund for the subway.
Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal was part of a broader plan for sustainable growth in the city and a major part of his environmental agenda.
At the time, the city’s subway system was ascendant, but the plan would have raised at least $500 million annually that could have been used to counter festering problems, including a fraying transit infrastructure.
In hindsight, with subway disruptions now a near-daily headache and politicians scrambling to find hundreds of millions of dollars just to make emergency repairs, transit advocates say the financing could have helped avert at least some of the problems.
But despite the support of then-Gov. David A. Paterson, the plan failed in part because of stiff opposition from elected officials from Brooklyn and Queens, as well as the suburbs, who viewed it as primarily benefiting Manhattan at the expense of their constituents.
“That was a missed opportunity,” said Alex Matthiessen, the leader of Move NY, a group that has continued to push congestion pricing and recently unveiled its own proposal.
With the subway riddled with problems, Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, believes that the political dynamics and public opinion have shifted.
“For people to make basic change in their own life is hard,” he said. “For society, which is now the collective, to make basic change is hard.”
He noted that in a time of crisis or hardship, legislation that might not otherwise be politically feasible can often be achieved. For example, he was able to secure some of the nation’s most stringent gun control measures after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. While that traumatizing example was of a far different magnitude, the subway system is the backbone of New York and its decline imperils the city’s economic vitality.
“There is an awareness of the need to make a basic policy shift,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Congestion pricing is also no longer such a novel concept. Cities across the world, like London and Stockholm, have adopted systems that have succeeded in reducing traffic and improving public transit.
Still, the politics of congestion pricing remain thorny.
For one, the tax plan supported by Mr. de Blasio, who is also a Democrat, has also previously failed to gain support in Albany.
He first proposed the tax to finance his program to provide universal prekindergarten. This time he believes the situation is different. “I think the fact that there is a subway crisis, it’s affecting everyone, including suburban residents,” Mr. de Blasio told reporters in announcing his tax proposal. “But we’re saying we’re only asking that New York City residents who are wealthy pay that tax. I think that’s a sweet spot.”
Mr. Cuomo still believes Mr. de Blasio’s tax plan would face long odds in the Legislature, especially in the Republican-controlled Senate — and the chamber’s Republican leadership has already opposed it. As for a congestion pricing plan, Austin Finan, a spokesman for the mayor, said in an email that “we’ll review any serious and viable plan the governor puts forward.”
A spokesman for the Senate Republicans declined to comment on Mr. Cuomo’s revival of congestion pricing. Mr. Bloomberg, through a spokesman, also declined to weigh in on the renewed interest.
The debate about how to provide long-term funding for the subway is part of the continuing conflict between Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo over how to tackle the transit system’s woes.
Neither congestion pricing nor a new tax would deal with the immediate needs or fund the emergency plan that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, has undertaken to make urgent repairs to trains, signals and other equipment. The state has contributed $400 million to start the work and has asked the city to provide the other $400 million needed to pay the total cost.
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