In 2010, Filolaos Kefalas, an electrical engineer, drove a black Corvette in Manhattan. for her first meeting with Lisa Daglian, a public transportation advocate. She wasn’t impressed.
“You know you can take the train,” Ms. Daglian, 61, recalled.
To this day, the couple continues to argue over Mr. Kefalas’s use of the car. But Mr. Kefalas has his reasons for driving, he said. He works in Bayside, Queens, where public transportation options are limited, and he enjoys driving.
“Time is money,” said Mr. Kefalas, also 61 years old. “I try to go as quickly as possible.”
The breakup between Ms. Daglian, who now heads the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Permanent Citizens’ Advisory Committee, and Mr. Kefalas did not derail their romance: They are married. But it is an example of the perennial debate between two entrenched groups of New Yorkers: car commuters, many of whom come from outside Manhattan and some with deeply personal ties to driving, and car loyalists. public transport, who believe that public transport is not only the cheapest and fastest travel option. but also a moral choice.
The divide has widened recently as the city prepares to introduce a congestion toll program that will be the first of its kind in the United States. The program, scheduled to start June 30, aims to ease traffic and raise money for the authority — the state agency that runs the city’s transit system — by charging most $15 motorists to enter Manhattan via 60th Street.
Transit executives have said they hope congestion pricing, which has been successfully introduced in major European and Asian cities, will convince some road users to switch to public transport. The toll program is expected to reduce traffic in midtown Manhattan by about 17 percent, or about 120,000 vehicles per day.
According to the latest census data, some 1.87 million New York City residents commute to work by public transportation, and about 1.06 million of them drive alone or in a carpool. More than 700,000 vehicles from across the region enter the congestion charge zone on average per weekday, the authority estimated.
Citywide, car-owning households have an average income of $110,000, compared with $87,000 for transit riders, said Replica, a transportation data and analytics company.
From its limited parking and numerous tolls to gridlocked traffic that lasts most of the day, the city is notoriously a difficult place for motorists.
But some people living outside of Manhattan don’t see public transportation as a viable option because they live on the fringes of the system. Many of them defiantly assert that they will continue to drive through the city center despite the new toll.
Helen Keier, an online learning administrator at John Jay College, said she felt she had no choice but to drive to work. She lives in the Locust Point neighborhood of the Bronx and commutes to her office on 59th Street in Manhattan several times a week.
“For me, even to take the subway, it takes me 20 to 30 minutes on the bus to Line 6,” Ms. Keier, 57, said.
Ms. Keier, disabled by severe osteoarthritis, has difficulty navigating subway stations. The MTA is working to make the subway fully accessible, but only about 32% of the system is currently, the authority said.
Exemptions for disabled drivers will be available under the congestion charging scheme. Ms. Keier said she plans to apply for one and continue driving.
Although he regularly drives into what will soon be the congestion charge zone, Julius Johnson, a home health nurse practitioner from Brooklyn, isn’t interested in throwing away his car keys either.
“Driving in New York is a status symbol for someone who grew up in low-income neighborhoods, because you don’t have to take the train,” said Mr. Johnson, 40, who also teaches in the nursing program at New York University, which is in the toll zone.
He bought his first car in 2005, a cream-colored Ford Explorer. He had recently graduated from nursing school, but he only felt a sense of success when he got behind the wheel of his new car.
He said that as a health care worker, he could appreciate possible improvement in air quality that congestion pricing could generate. But he doesn’t want to pay the extra cost of the car ride.
Driving has “been transformed into the American dream,” said Sarah Kaufman, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University. “Owning a car, owning a home, and driving so you can control your domain, whatever negative externalities you might cause,” are all part of gaining status, she said.
There are eight lawsuits pending in New Jersey and New York against congestion pricing. The program has angry reviews, including the governor of New Jerseya trucking association and some residents of Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan.
Supporters say congestion pricing will alleviate some of the nation’s worst traffic, improve air quality and provide a lifeline to the city’s public transportation system. The MTA is expected to collect about $1 billion a year in tolls, which will be used to secure $15 billion in bond financing to help pay toll fees. essential improvements to the city’s subway, bus and commuter rail systems.
The nearly 120-year-old subway system is one of the city’s defining features. The vast network of 472 stations was a civic engineering project that integrated five boroughs into the modern city.
“The bottom line is: no subway, no New York,” said Rachel Weinberger, director of research strategy at the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit advocacy organization.
Ms Weinberger said congestion pricing would help fund crucial public transport repairs. But, she adds, it could also make driving more enjoyable.
Motorists like to complain, but congestion pricing will open up the roads, Ms. Weinberger said. “Public transportation is a huge benefit for motorists,” she said.
From December to March, the transportation authority held an open comment period to gather public opinion on congestion pricing. Most of the more than 25,000 comments were favorable, according to the MTA.
“The good news for transit riders is that funding from congestion pricing benefits them directly,” said John J. McCarthy, the authority’s chief policy and external relations officer. “There will be new subway cars, electric buses, more accessible stations, more reliability with modern signaling on lines like the C train in Brooklyn.”
For many New Yorkers, using public transportation is often about choosing the cheapest and most available option for getting around.
For those who can’t afford to drive, turning to the subway is often an economic necessity, said Nicholas J. Klein, an assistant professor in the department of city and regional planning at Cornell University.
But there are New Yorkers, he added, who identify with the transit system and are proud of their specific train, bus or ferry. For others, public transportation represents an environmentally friendly choice.
Sproule Love, an executive at a company that manages independent and assisted living communities, is one of those who has a soft spot for the subway, even though he owns a car.
Leaving a friend’s apartment in Lower Manhattan late one night in 2000, Mr. Love, 52, couldn’t find a taxi home and decided to take the subway. While waiting on the platform, he said he realized it was the only time he had “experienced a New York where no one was on guard.”
“Everyone is so tired and resigned to waiting 40 minutes for an F train,” he added.
Mr. Love, who lives in Harlem, is a strong supporter of congestion pricing. While learning to drive a car is a life skill, he says, using one to get to one of North America’s largest cities is absurd.
Many transit critics point to what they perceive as a crime risk on the subway, while many transit supporters say driving poses the greatest risk.
“I feel much safer on public transportation,” said Emily Rose Prats, a 36-year-old from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A 2022 New York Times analysis of MTA and police statistics showed that the chance of being a victim of violent crime on the subway was relatively far away.
Although she is a proponent of congestion pricing, Ms. Daglian, a transit advocate, understands why people like her husband, who work or live in areas with limited access to public transportation, use their car.
“I understand why people drive,” she said. But that doesn’t mean she likes it, even close to home.
“The conflict is not over,” she said. “We still have pointed conversations.”
