MTA scores court win as fight over NYC congestion pricing heats up

A Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday barred the U.S. Department of Transportation from retaliating against the MTA over the agency’s decision to continue charging its congestion pricing tolls despite a federal directive to shut down the program.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman issued a temporary restraining order that, at least for now, neutralizes much of the Trump administration's leverage in its effort to end the tolls, which have since Jan. 5 charged motorists a $9 daytime fee to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.

The Federal Highway Administration, in its third warning to the MTA, had given the agency until May 28 to end the tolling program or face cuts to city and state highway funding.

Liman said the feds could not withhold any of the funding until a lawsuit filed by the MTA over the future of the tolls is settled.

Federal lawyers have claimed they can revoke approval for the tolls granted by the Federal Highway Administration during the final months of the Biden administration.

MTA attorney Roberta Kaplan argued the feds could not rescind approval for congestion pricing because the approval for the tolls amounted to an agreement to cooperate with New York state, regardless of who is in the White House.

“It would be a recipe for chaos,” Kaplan said during Tuesday’s court hearing. “It would lead to an eternal fog of uncertainty.”

During his campaign last year, President Donald Trump vowed to end the program. Over the previous four months, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has aimed to make good on Trump's promise.

Duffy has said the federal program through which congestion pricing was authorized doesn’t allow the money raised by the tolls to be used to fund public transit. He’s also said there is no toll-free way to drive into Manhattan, and it harms poor and working-class people.

During Tuesday's hearing, Liman quizzed U.S. Department of Justice lawyer Charles Roberts — who is arguing the case for the feds — on Duffy's arguments.

“How did you get here today? Did you bike, walk, drive?” Liman asked Roberts.

Roberts replied that he commuted into the city via Amtrak for the case — a method of transportation that did not require him to pay the congestion pricing toll.

Roberts sat next to just one person, while the MTA brought a group of seven attorneys to the courtroom. The federal government has faced a staffing shakeup on the case since April, when lawyers from the Southern District of New York were yanked from the congestion pricing lawsuit after one of them accidentally uploaded an internal memo stating they had a weak case.

The MTA and U.S. DOT previously indicated the case to decide the fate of congestion pricing would play out into the fall, but Liman on Tuesday suggested he wanted it to be decided earlier. He ordered the feds to submit all their evidence in the case by 5 p.m. on June 9.

“ That's good news for the state. It's good news for New Yorkers who are benefiting from congestion pricing, because we want to move quickly to a final resolution,” MTA Chair Janno Lieber said after the hearing. “He wants us to agree on an even more accelerated briefing schedule than maybe existed before. He seems like he's ready to roll."