The Manhattan cordon pricing project, while approved and funded, is still very much a concept, but it is already having a transformative effect on other parts of the city. Winnie Hu, a reporter on the Metro desk of The New York Times focusing on transportation and infrastructure, writes about a report released January 30 on the BQE Atlantic [Avenue] to Sands [Street] project

"The idea of shrinking the highway to four lanes from six is a remarkable shift for the city, which, like the nation, has been shaped by a car-centric culture and is now wrestling with the consequences, including gridlocked streets, polluted air and rising pedestrian and cyclist deaths," writes Hu.

[Contributor's comment: Add climate change to that mix of auto-induced woes: Since 2017, transportation has replaced power generation as the nation's largest source of carbon emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles, like the ones using the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Interstate 278), comprising 82 percent of the sector's emissions.

That is the key recommendation from a panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio that was tasked with coming up with a rescue plan for a key stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which is rapidly falling apart under the weight of 153,000 vehicles a day, more than three times what it was built to handle. The notion of eliminating highway lanes is realistic because of another ambitious effort to move cars off the road: congestion pricing. Next year [hopefully], New York will become the first American city to charge a fee to drive into the busiest areas of Manhattan.

The report [pdf] indicates (on pg. 20) that the Manhatten cordon-pricing project "is expected to end bridge shopping by equalizing costs at all facilities. This means fewer vehicles using the three Brooklyn to Manhattan bridges and more traffic at the two tunnels currently tolled."