Opinion: Trump’s congestion pricing outrage is classic ‘dead cat’ strategy

Opinion by Rosa Prince

London (CNN) — Former US President Donald Trump seems to be going out of his way this week to try to divert the public’s attention, and many of us can guess why.

“I can’t believe that New York City is instituting Congestion Pricing, where everyone has to pay a fortune for the ‘privilege’ of coming into the City, which is in desperate trouble without it,” he wrote on his Truth Social site Tuesday, after what many political observers say was the most challenging day so far of his Manhattan election interference trial.

Here in the UK, we call it a “dead cat strategy.”  Want to change the conversation at a dinner party? Throw a dead cat on the table. Want to change the political discussion? Talk up some other area of controversy, as loudly and energetically as possible. Yes, it’s a bit extreme — but it’s often extremely effective.

Trump’s former paramour, Stormy Daniels, took the witness stand on Tuesday, offering devastating and lurid details about their brief affair, as prosecutors build their case asserting that he paid hush money to keep her quiet about the affair, so as not to torpedo his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election.

In short, Trump’s New York congestion comment was classic dead cat. And we in the UK know it was pretty much off the mark.

In the same Truth Social message, the former president mused about the impact of congestion pricing elsewhere in the world. “It’s been a failure everywhere it has been tried,” he said, “and would only work if a place were HOT, HOT, HOT, which New York City is not right now. What office tenant or business would want to be here with this tax. Hopefully, it will soon be withdrawn!”

Unlike the former president, I’m not going to pontificate about congestion mitigation fees I know nothing about. But “a failure everywhere it’s been tried”? That seems like a stretch.

After all, congestion pricing has been introduced in a number of cities, from Singapore to Stockholm, over the past 25-odd years. In London, where I live, congestion pricing isn’t seen as a failure — far from it. And as someone who lived for more than a decade until recently in New York City, it doesn’t feel as if it would be much of a problem in the Big Apple, either. In fact, I could well imagine that given enough time to get used to it New Yorkers might even grow to like it.

The goal of putting a congestion zone in place, of course, is to help reduce traffic. It has the added bonus of cutting pollution, and lowering noise and wear and tear on city streets. It’s also a pretty handy way for cash-strapped cities to raise cash to spend on other transport measures such as bike lanes — or whatever they want. By contrast, in the UK there are relatively few road tolls on motorways compared to the toll booths which interrupt journeys of any substantial distance on US highways.

The key to getting buy-in from the public to taxing city roads is where the physical boundary is set delineating where the congestion zone is located.

In London, the congestion zone covers the very center of town, where few people actually live and where driving for most people isn’t a necessity, given the highly efficient public transportation system. And of course, for those who have to drive, there are alternative routes that don’t take you through the heart of town, and are both faster and more convenient. I live about four miles from the edge of the congestion zone, and it’s never once been a problem to circumvent. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I paid the charge, which is £15 ($19) per day (7.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. Monday to Friday, 12.00 p.m. to 6.00 p.m. on the weekend).

My former apartment in Manhattan is less than a mile north of the where zone is due to go into effect on 60th Street, but like most of my neighbors, I didn’t own a car, so the charge just wouldn’t have been an issue. It was always more convenient to hop on the subway or grab a cab. Sensibly, taxis are exempt from the fee in London — in New York, they’re slated to pay $1.25 compared to $15 for regular cars, which doesn’t feel like a huge amount.

Looking back, there was definitely a degree of wariness ahead of the charge’s introduction in London 21 years ago, but it very rapidly came to be seen as a non-issue, and it’s since been maintained by mayors of all political stripes — including Trump’s Conservative pal Boris Johnson, who was London’s mayor from 2008 to 2016.

By most metrics, London’s congestion pricing experiment has been a resounding success. Figures released by Transport for London (TfL) to mark the 20th anniversary of its introduction last year show traffic within the congestion zone fell by 18%. Traffic jams were reduced by 30% and use of public buses increased by one-third. There were 10% fewer car trips as residents shifted to walking more as well as cycling and taking public transit.

And there’s been no evidence of a detrimental financial impact on businesses within the London zone. In fact, quite the opposite — it’s way easier to get your deliveries through if the roads aren’t gridlocked.

Johnson’s successor as London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party (who has clashed with Trump in the past, and who under his watch, TfL reportedly hit the former president with a £750 ($935) bill for unpaid congestion charges during a 2019 state visit to England) has divided opinion by introducing a separate fee for the most gas-guzzling vehicles, under a scheme called the Ultra Low Emissions Zone, popularly known as ULEZ.

The plan, which aims to reduce pollution, was introduced in addition to the congestion charge in 2019 in the wake of the asthma death of a nine-year-old girl, Ella Roberta Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who lived near the city’s busy South Circular Road and about a mile from my home in south London. She was the first person in the UK to have air pollution listed as the cause of death, and the pollution reduction proposal was widely welcomed when it applied only to London’s inner boroughs.

Khan received some pushback after extending the scheme to the outer boroughs last year, but polls show that overall, Londoners prefer that polluting cars are kept off their streets. After all, nine out of 10 vehicles, including my own old banger, are ULEZ compliant and a variety of trade-in schemes were implemented for those others who were caught.

The upshot is that, after initiating its congestion reduction scheme, in conjunction with other initiatives to reduce traffic and generally improve the quality of life, air quality has dramatically improved in central London — in fact, levels of harmful nitrogen oxides have been cut nearly in half.

Mayor Khan was re-elected only last week, a sign perhaps that Londoners approve of his overall job performance, as well as his stewardship of the car tax policy put in place by his predecessor. That suggests it certainly isn’t seen as much of a “failure” by most people who live in this city.

To be fair to Trump, he’s a New Yorker, and he wants New York to thrive.

But as someone who sees themselves as a fellow New Yorker who is also a Londoner, I can honestly say that with all the other troubles facing our two great cities — and, more broadly, our strange post-pandemic world — congestion pricing just isn’t one of them.

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