Nestor M. Davidson, the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law at Fordham Law School, shares his expert opinion with National Law Journal after the Trump administration announced its justification for ending New York City’s traffic congestion pricing pilot program.
The Trump administration’s decision to ax the program reverses a Biden-era Department of Transportation policy that strongly supported the city’s implementation of congestion pricing, on environmental grounds in particular. President Donald Trump, a native New Yorker, campaigned on ending congestion pricing.
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York is SAVED,” Trump wrote on social media. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
But Cardozo School of Law professor Michael Pollack said the federal government’s reversal of regulatory policy must be based on sound reasoning. In Duffy’s explanatory letter, the Trump administration fell short of that requirement, Pollack added.
“The government has acted arbitrarily and capriciously here,” he said. “Essentially, the government has given no reason whatsoever other than the president’s political disagreement with the program for terminating it. And that mere political disagreement is not sufficient.”
Fordham Law professor Nestor Davidson agreed.
Though the federal government has the authority to pull funding from a state highway program, “it doesn’t seem as though they have done what they need to do procedurally and in terms of the burden of justification,” Davidson said. “It is about as cursory and without explanation as you can imagine.”