Up to $1 Billion May Go to Waste After Hochul’s Congestion Pricing Halt

By the time Gov. Kathy Hochul made the abrupt decision to cancel congestion pricing in New York City last month, transit leaders had already allocated more than a half a billion dollars to get the long-awaited tolling program off the ground.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority entered into a $556 million contract for cameras, software and other tools that would have been used to detect vehicles entering the planned tolling zone south of 60th Street in Manhattan.

The true amount spent by the M.T.A. to implement the program is almost certainly higher. The city’s Independent Budget Office said the resources devoted to the long-delayed endeavor over the course of decades were “unquantifiable.” But Rachael Fauss, the senior research analyst for Reinvent Albany, a watchdog group, said the amount is likely to be close to $1 billion, given the amount of staff time that was dedicated to planning.

With the program indefinitely suspended, that money is, at least for the moment, wasted.

Congestion pricing was designed to rein in traffic and pollution while improving travel speeds in some of the world’s most crowded streets. The money raised from the first-in-the-nation program would have generated $1 billion annually for the M.T.A., which would have used it to pay for critical upgrades and improvements to the city’s transit network.

The M.T.A. had planned to start charging the tolls on June 30, but Ms. Hochul announced less than a month before the program was set to begin that she had changed her mind, infuriating the plan’s supporters and shocking M.T.A. employees.

Ms. Hochul, who said that the planned tolls were too high — most drivers would have been charged $15 to enter the tolling zone during peak hours — has insisted that she is only temporarily pausing the program. She has not committed to a new start date.