The ruling comes as US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is set to pause federal funds to New York state.
New York City has won a temporary reprieve in its legal battle against the administration of US President Donald Trump, which had threatened to withhold federal funding from New York state unless the city ended its congestion pricing programme.
United States District Judge Lewis Liman held the hearing on the matter on Tuesday and granted a temporary restraining order that will allow the programme to keep running until at least June 9 as the administration and state-level officials battle over the future of congestion pricing.
A day earlier, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said he believed the federal government would withhold government approvals in the state, which would have frozen contracts for highway and transit projects.
Congestion pricing is likely to move forward indefinitely despite the federal administration’s objections because the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) – New York City’s mass transit system, which is operated as a state-level agency – “showed a likelihood of success”, according to the judge.
The courts said this is because the plan was already reviewed by state, local and federal agencies, according to the New York Times newspaper.
“Congestion relief is perfectly legal and thoroughly vetted. Opponents exhausted all plausible arguments against the programme, and now the increasingly outlandish theories are falling flat, too,” Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director for the Riders Alliance, a transportation advocacy group, told Al Jazeera.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the judge’s decision “a massive victory” for New York commuters.
“So here’s the deal: Secretary Duffy can issue as many letters and social media posts as he wants, but a court has blocked the Trump Administration from retaliating against New York for reducing traffic and investing in transit … Congestion pricing is legal, it’s working and we’re keeping the cameras on,” the governor’s office said in a statement.
“It’s really upsetting that it came to this point to begin with. We should not be in a position where the federal government is trying to stop New York state from enacting its own policy and trying to blackmail New York state when it doesn’t follow their [the US Department of Transportation’s] lead,” Alexa Sledge, communications director for the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, told Al Jazeera.
New York state launched the programme in January. Drivers have to pay congestion pricing tolls of $9 per day for driving during peak times in parts of Manhattan. The state made the programme in an effort to cut congestion in the nation’s most populous city as well as raise funds for NYC’s mass transit system.
“New York state should be able to make their own laws, and they should be able to run their own streets. And so hopefully, this can be the end of this,” Sledge said.
Meeting its goals
Since the programme began earlier this year, it has fulfilled many of its goals. Within a month of congestion pricing, subway ridership increased by six percent, and bus ridership by nine percent. Traffic decreased by 11 percent.
In March, the MTA forecasted that congestion pricing would bring in $500m in revenue for the system, which will fund a swath of new transit-system projects including station upgrades and zero-emissions buses. At the time, a Siena College poll found that 42 percent of New Yorkers wanted to keep the programme, while 35 percent wanted to get rid of it.
Neither the MTA nor the US Department of Transportation was immediately available for comment.
