Mayor Muriel Bowser did not hold back her thoughts on the D.C. Council’s congestion report more than four years after its completion.
The study, released on Tuesday, examined the District’s transportation system with a focus on “access, affordability, and convenience for residents, workers, and visitors.” It was commissioned in 2019 and completed in 2021.
One of the main scenarios laid out in the report would charge drivers entering the District $10 between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. on weekdays. Weekends would cost $5 from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Under this plan, the city could see up to $345 million in revenue per year.
However, Bowser described the plan in a letter to Council Chairman Phil Mendelson as a “congestion pricing tax scheme.”
“The study was completed in 2021 and, upon our review of it, we found it to fall short on many measurements,” she wrote.
One of the issues Bowser pointed to is that the nearly 100-page report used traffic data from before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report came on the heels of congestion pricing being approved for New York City by the state legislature. Commuters who drive into New York City between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. are charged $9.
With New York City’s bigger population and D.C.’s “building height limits,” Bowser wrote, “Downtown D.C. is an invaluable part of Washington’s identity and economic vibrancy, but it is not Midtown Manhattan.”
In the letter, Bowser criticized the report’s “deeply flawed foundational assumptions,” including the abundance of workers that commute daily into D.C. to work in person and the potential for harm on retail businesses downtown.
Bowser wrote about the issues the city has had with empty offices since the pandemic, which has led to less foot traffic for local retail businesses.
While Bowser did sign off on the release of the report, she said that she did not want that to be “interpreted as our support for either the study itself or the concept of a congestion tax.”
“It should be obvious that charging $10 to come to Downtown D.C. is a bad idea. By releasing this report, I hope Council will move on to more serious conversations about how we can strengthen, not weaken, the District’s downtown core,” she wrote.
The report will head to the D.C. Council for its next steps.