Why Did the MTA’s Union Turn Against Congestion Pricing?

The vocal support of TWU International President John Samuelsen was “critical” in passing the legislation, said Alex Matthiessen, an environmentalist who helped build the coalition that ultimately led to the bill’s passage under former Governor Andrew Cuomo.

“The unions cleared the way for Cuomo and the legislature to pass congestion pricing,” said Matthiessen. Most of them stayed out of the fight and “didn’t put their shoulder into it,” he said, but the TWU did.

Samuelsen was later appointed to represent New York City on the board that designed the program’s toll structure. In its final form, the policy was poised to fund $15 billion worth of MTA projects, including billions to fund MTA worker salaries and sustain thousands of TWU member jobs.

But five years after it passed, congestion pricing’s biggest labor supporter turned against it.

“This toll will whip blue collar, outer-borough workers,” Samuelsen told the New York Post in March. “It’s very classist.” Without a simultaneous expansion of public transit service to underserved areas, he said, the program’s $15 toll would place too large of a burden on commuters.

At a public hearing a few days earlier, TWU Local 100 President Richard Davis said that by charging transit workers to drive into the city, the MTA would be “milking the cow before it’s even fed.”

The TWU’s shift was part of a groundswell of union opposition this spring in the run-up to Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to suspend the tolling program. The transit union leaders echoed arguments made earlier by municipal unions, including the United Federation of Teachers, much as Hochul would in her pause announcement in June.

The unions’ opposition was “very consequential” in fueling momentum against congestion pricing, said Kathy Wylde, president of the business group Partnership for New York City. Wylde served on the MTA’s Traffic Mobility Review Board, which designed the toll structure.

On July 11, one month after Hochul announced the pause, the TWU Local 100 made an $18,000 donation to the governor — the maximum allowed by law.

Yet the union is not pleased with the fallout from Hochul’s decision. Last week, the local joined New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams in suing the MTA; they alleged that the agency had reduced bus service earlier this month without notifying the city. The MTA made the cuts to save money, TWU officials claimed, because the pause was squeezing the agency’s operating budget.

The bus service cuts are on hold for now after a judge ordered the MTA to restore service. In response to questions about the lawsuit, an MTA spokesperson said, “Apparently, it’s now silly season.”

But that didn’t convince labor groups. The MTA “is telling the outer-borough blue collar workers of New York City to shove it,” with the proposal, Samuelsen, the head of the TWU international, reiterated to New York Focus.

In January, New York City’s teachers union — which had largely remained silent throughout years of legislative deliberation — sued to block implementation of the program, partially because of its toll structure, which the union called unconstitutionally “regressive and discriminatory.” The Municipal Labor Committee, the umbrella organization for all of New York City’s public-employee unions, filed an amicus brief backing the teachers.

Hochul cited similar concerns when she announced the pause: “Let’s be real: A $15 charge may not seem like a lot to someone who has the means, but it can break the budget of a hard-working middle-class household.”

Car drivers on average earn more than transit riders, and only 11 percent of people who commute to Manhattan for work drive there. Transit advocates and lawmakers argue that Hochul’s appeals to affordability are a smokescreen for her political concerns about the program. (It’s been reported that her decision was in part motivated by this year’s election, in which suburban Democrats are facing strong Republican challengers.)

But that isn’t to say union members and other working people wouldn’t have been affected. According to a new analysis by the poverty research and advocacy group the Community Service Society of New York, provided exclusively to New York Focus, 42 percent of people who drive from the outer boroughs to work in Manhattan earn low or moderate incomes, meaning less than $60,240 for an individual.

Another new analysis, by the independent traffic modeling firm Replica, found that over 60 percent of all commuters who drive into the Central Business District earn more than $100,000 a year, Streetsblog reported.

Some union officials and members who favor the tolling program believe that Hochul and the MTA could have built labor support for congestion pricing by clearly conveying how many jobs the program would create and how it would improve public transit. On other hot-button issues like housing, they noted, Hochul has likewise made little effort to win union support for controversial proposals.

“I understand congestion pricing because I know the system needs funding,” said J.P. Patafio, one of seven vice presidents of the TWU Local 100 and a congestion pricing supporter. “But who really understands it that way? People thought, you give money to this big agency, and where is it going?”

“Union leadership, they need to respond to the members,” he said. “And there wasn’t an effective argument or explanation as to why it’s important to make sure mass transit is funded properly, both for our jobs and for the betterment of the city.”

When he resigned, Samuelsen declined to endorse the board’s final proposal, which spelled out a tolling structure and included limited discounts for low-income drivers, reduced fares between 9 pm and 5 am, and limited exemptions, including for emergency vehicles.

An MTA spokesperson said, “Any assertions you may have heard that the MTA ‘failed to improve service before congestion pricing’ are far from the mark. The spokesperson noted that, in the past year and a half, the agency has increased weekend service and frequency on multiple train lines, increased express bus service, and is resdesigning each of the five boroughs’ bus networks.

“The legislature played a big role in pushing service improvements forward,” said Rachael Fauss, a senior policy advisor and MTA expert with Reinvent Albany. “The MTA always had the fairly neutral position of ‘If you give us the money, we will do it.’”

Last year, the state legislature did fund modest improvements to MTA service in the state budget. Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani led the charge for a fare-free bus pilot program and $35 million for increased subway service at midday and on weekends.

“Could there have been stronger [service improvements] and more of them? Absolutely,” said Fauss. But after Covid caused ridership to plummet, the priority for the MTA was preventing service cuts, she noted.

According to Nick Sifuentes, who was executive director of the advocacy group Tri-State Transportation Campaign when congestion pricing passed, Adams and the city are partly to blame for meager service improvements. The MTA has plans to redesign the bus networks in the Bronx and Queens, for instance, but the plans have been “sitting on the shelf,” Sifuentes said.

“The city has not been great at rolling that out,” he said.

The Adams administration declined to comment. Adams has previously said, “We’ve done an amazing job of building bus lanes.”

Long Island Federation of Labor President John Durso, the traffic mobility board’s other labor representative, endorsed the board’s final proposal. In June, after Hochul’s announcement, Durso and three other board members wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News encouraging the state to move forward with congestion pricing. (Durso declined to answer questions from New York Focus.)

When he was on the congestion pricing board, Samuelsen pushed for an exemption from the toll for MTA workers and other shift workers. (The final tolling plan did include a discount for shift workers, with a smaller toll between 9 pm and 5 am.)

“I get it,” added Arcidiacono. He noted that MTA workers didn’t get a railroad pass for the Long Island Railroad or Metro-North until 2014, even though the agency was incorporated in 1965. “But I think it’s a failure on the union’s part at this point. You’re looking at a handful of people who drive into the Central Business District versus $15 billion for transit.”

Around 5.5 percent of the TWU workforce commutes into the Central Business District, and many of those workers commute by public transit.

Numerous other groups, including judges, current and former cops, and health care workers, requested exemptions from the toll, but only a limited set of vehicles — such as emergency vehicles and school buses — ultimately received them. In its final proposal, the traffic mobility board noted that it had limited exemptions so that tolls would not have to be raised for remaining drivers, an effort to “consider the interests of the many over the few.”