Congestion Pricing Ignites an Old Rift: Drivers vs. Transit Riders

In 2010, Filolaos Kefalas, an electrical engineer, drove a black Corvette into Manhattan for his first date with Lisa Daglian, a transit advocate. She was not impressed.

“You know you can take the train,” Ms. Daglian, 61, recalled saying.

To this day, the couple continues to quibble over Mr. Kefalas’s car use. But Mr. Kefalas has his reasons for driving, he said. He works in Bayside, Queens, which has limited transit options, and he enjoys driving.

“Time is money,” Mr. Kefalas, also 61, said. “I try to go the quickest way possible.”

The rift between Ms. Daglian, who now leads the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 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 users, many from outside Manhattan and some with deeply personal ties to driving, and transit loyalists, who believe mass transit is not only the cheapest and fastest travel option but also a moral choice.

The divide has grown recently as the city prepares for the introduction of a congestion pricing program that is the first of its kind in the United States. The program, which is scheduled to start on June 30, seeks to ease traffic and raise money for the authority — the state agency that operates the city’s transit system — by charging most motorists $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street.

Transit leaders have said they hope congestion pricing, which has been successfully introduced in major European and Asian cities, convinces some commuters who drive to switch to mass transit. The tolling program is expected to reduce traffic in Manhattan’s core by about 17 percent, or about 120,000 vehicles a day.

Some 1.87 million New York City residents commute to work by public transit, and roughly 1.06 million drive alone or in a car pool, the latest census data shows. More than 700,000 vehicles from across the region enter the congestion pricing zone on an average weekday, the authority has estimated.