If the Math Works, Why Do Tolls Almost Die in Politics Anyway?
Welcome back! This is the second half of a two-part detour from a research paper I've been writing on New York's congestion pricing program. The first post looked at whether a flat toll is actually unfair to lower-income riders. This one looks at a stranger puzzle: congestion pricing has been studied since the 1960s, cities that adopt it tend to see real gains, and it still nearly gets killed politically almost everywhere it's tried. New York is a good example. The toll worked, by most measures, and it still got paused by the governor months before launch.
Losses Hurt More Than Gains Help
Part of the answer is behavioral. Kahneman and Tversky's (1979) work on loss aversion found that the pain of losing something hurts more than the pleasure of gaining something equivalent. A toll on a road that used to be free registers as a loss, immediately and personally, to the exact people who now have to pay it: taxi fleets, trucking unions, drivers who've made the same commute for years without a bill attached. Meanwhile, the benefits, faster trips, cleaner air, are diffuse. They arrive later, they're spread across a much larger population, and no single person experiences them as sharply as the toll-payer experiences the toll.
Environmental Concern Tracks Income
That asymmetry connects to something else: environmental concern itself tracks income. Wealthier households have more time, resources, and bandwidth to organize around environmental and political causes, which means the loudest political voices aren't necessarily the people most affected by a policy. Stockholm's congestion charge succeeded in part because the city let residents experience the toll before voting on it permanently, paired it with credible transit alternatives, and was transparent about where the revenue went. New York's last-minute pause showed what happens without that groundwork: trust erodes fast when a policy change is announced abruptly.
Who Actually Blocked the Toll
The population that actually forced New York's pause wasn't the poorest population you'd expect to be squeezed hardest by a new toll. It was outer-borough car commuters: less wealthy than Manhattan residents, but with more political voice and less dependence on transit than the lower-income riders who stood to benefit most from the toll. That's the pattern worth remembering: the people with the most to gain from a policy often have the least power to defend it, and the people with the most power to block it are rarely the ones the policy was designed to help or hurt the most.
The toll ultimately survived, relaunched at a lower price, and is now measurably working. But it's a good reminder that "the math works" and "the policy survives" are two completely different fights, won or lost on completely different terrain.
See you next time.
References
Börjesson, M., Eliasson, J., Hugosson, M. B., & Brundell-Freij, K. (2012). The Stockholm congestion charges—5 years on: Effects, acceptability and lessons learned. Transport Policy, 20, 1–12.
Jeffords, C., Thompson, A., & Gwinn, J. (2019). The luxury of environmental concern in the US: Evidence from Google Trends data. Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences. Advance online publication.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
New York Focus. (2024, July 26). Why did the MTA's union turn against congestion pricing? nysfocus.com/2024/07/26/mta-union-hochul-congestion-pricing
Streetsblog NYC. (2026, January 6). How Kathy Hochul learned to stop worrying and love congestion pricing. nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/01/06/
