Last month, I defended the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s proposed tolling program; New Jersey politicians are now assailing it.
Reason’s Christian Britschgi details how New Jersey is weaponizing the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) against the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to indefinitely delay the implementation of the MTA’s congestion-pricing scheme. It’s not as if the FHWA’s assessment has been expeditious: The FHWA has already spent four years evaluating the environmental impact of the tolling program after New York’s state legislature approved the plan in 2019.
As Britschgi notes, the overly broad language of the NEPA enables third parties — the state of New Jersey, in this case — to indefinitely prolong the approval process by claiming the already-multi-year review failed to consider “significant impacts.” Considering the near-infinite complexity of the dynamic system that is the environment, and the vagueness of the bill’s language, this is not a hard claim to make.
And New Jersey politicians are more than happy to make such a claim.
New Jersey has succeeded in delaying the MTA’s congestion-tolling program with “years of additional environmental analysis” before the policy is ultimately implemented. In the meantime, congestion will remain high: Cars will continue idling in slow-moving traffic emitting carbon dioxide. . . . This outcome will be achieved not on the grounds that “the tolls would harm New Jersey commuters’ pocketbooks,” as explained by Britschgi, but on the basis of disingenuous ecological concern.
In an ironic turn of events, the NEPA has been weaponized against the environment.