Congestion Pricing Is Coming. It Doesn’t Have to Be Painful.

As the economist Tyler Cowan put it in a recent Washington Post column, “The composition of the residents matters, and the composition of the visitors matters, too.” We can imagine an alternate history where people like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe looked across the water at Manhattan, from New Jersey and Queens, and decided that making the trip was not worth all the trouble.

Similar if self-serving concern has expressed itself on Broadway. Last month, a piece that ran on the ticketing platform NYTIX maintained that for those accustomed to driving to the theater from the suburbs, the prospect of using public transit late at night to get home is “wholly unsatisfactory.” The platform maintains that those who travel to the theater by car account for 25 percent of all Broadway tickets sold; the fear is that an additional toll to enter the theater district would simply leave them staying home streaming “Yellowstone.” Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit representing business interests, sees this line of complaint as vaguely ludicrous. Broadway tickets are incredibly expensive; eating out and parking have always been part of the calculation.

“If you’re having a night out with the family for $1,000, I don’t think the congestion toll is going to be the decision maker,’’ she said. The fact that fewer people were in the city because of remote work and the unruly state of Times Square, seemed, in her view, to be the larger problem.

Some of the concern around the economic reverberations of congestion pricing stems from the presumption it will cost $23 to come into the designated zone during peak hours. This is a number that has been floated and latched onto in the press but has not been established. It is the job of the Traffic Mobility Review Board, a committee of appointed officials from the labor and planning worlds to make recommendations to the M.T.A. about what the pricing — and exemptions from pricing — will be across constituencies. At their second meeting a few weeks ago it was clear how complicated these questions were and how seemingly far from resolution.

How, for example, would tolling apply to overnight workers? In response to the question, Juliette Michaelson, an urban planning executive and adviser to the committee, teed up a series of charts outlining different modeling scenarios. First, within the overnight worker category, there was a lot of variance in terms of shift schedules. Beyond that, the daily toll resets at midnight, which means that people who enter the zone before that hour and leave after would theoretically be charged twice. Over the course of a five-day workweek, they might pay six times. This seemed unfair. As Carl Weisbrod, the chairman of the board, put it, sorting this all out was like “a Rubik’s Cube.”