Eager not to let New York’s $9 congestion fee outlive his social media proclamations, Donald Trump’s administration has pressed Judge Lewis Liman for a swift verdict to end the embattled toll south of 60th Street. The Metropolitan Transportation Aut…
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority crows that its $9 congestion charge has thinned Manhattan’s traffic by 11% and exceeded $500m in first-year takings, though Port Authority figures and grumbling cabbies like Mohammad Haque beg to differ. With critics dismissing the MTA’s selective data as little more than creative accounting, we suspect congestion pricing may be moving more numbers on spreadsheets than cars on Second Avenue.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has called for bolstered legal teeth to curb tenant harassment, citing indictments from Chelsea to Harlem ranging from landlord neglect to deed fraud. His office’s Housing and Tenant Protection Unit prosecutes alleged offenders, but Bragg backs State Senate Bill S8559 to make repeat harassment a class D felony—because, in New York’s rental jungle, deterrence gets lost somewhere between the radiator and the roof.
Santa Fe, never shy about marching to its own rhythm, has become the first American city to set a minimum wage for rental property owners, aiming to curb surging rents that risk driving out long-standing residents. City officials hope this novel mandate will safeguard Santa Fe’s fabled cultural tapestry, though landlords grumble and economists reach uneasily for their crystal balls—rent control, it seems, is the hottest new local pastime.
Starting Monday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will swap the F and M subway lines’ tunnels in Queens and Manhattan, rerouting the M through the 63rd Street tunnel and the F through the 53rd, all in hopes of taming congestion and delays affecting some 1.2 million New Yorkers daily. Weekday riders face revised stops and inevitable confusion—though, in classic fashion, we’re assured all will be smooth once the dust (and flyers) settle.
New York’s congestion pricing—ostensibly meant to clear Midtown gridlock—has prompted businesses citywide, from Lightning Express to humble bodegas, to blanket all invoices with service surcharges, regardless of where customers actually reside. Truckers and shopkeepers alike lament that tracking precise tolls is more trouble than it’s worth, while customers nurse $3 cookies and the faint hope that traffic theory will eventually trump accounting reality.
Responding to criticism of Mayor Eric Adams’s plan for Fifth Avenue, the Fifth Avenue Association insists that their proposal—wider sidewalks, fewer car lanes, but still no bike lane—will finally put New York’s walkers first, and not at the expense of bus riders. Pedestrians, apparently, will gain space only from drivers, though cyclists must still take the long way round retail paradise.
A federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to restore Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood in New York and other plaintiff states, pausing a H.R.1 budget cut that shuttered 20 clinics nationwide. The order may be short-lived: the Department of Justice has a week to appeal, and local advocates presume they will. New York’s $35m stopgap means service, if not litigation, continues undeterred—at least for now, expectant optimism aside.
New York legislators, led by Micah Lasher and Sam Sutton, have proposed banning protests within 25 feet of houses of worship and abortion clinics, after anti-Israel demonstrators besieged Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue with hostile chants. Offenders could face a Class A misdemeanor and up to a year in jail. Balancing free speech and sanctuary, lawmakers appear keen to keep tempers—and decibels—outside the pews for now.
