Sudafed City

At the start of the new year, I had a cold. I picked up a pack of pseudoephedrine, 120 milligrams, signing my name in the controlled substances logbook of people who might be meth dealers. Pseudoephedrine, aka Sudafed, constricts blood flow to the nasal passages, reducing the inflammation that causes sinusitis, but for those in the know, it also acts as a speedy little stimulant to help hardworking Americans get back to their day jobs.

My city was also sick, and feeling the need for speed. And so, on January 5, Doctor Kathy Hochul finally gave New York its gogo juice, prescribing a bitter pill known as congestion pricing to clear its clogged passages and stimulate its mass transit system.

My sinuses eventually cleared up, but New York’s decongestant diet had drawn the scrutiny of the country’s self-appointed chief drug enforcement agent. In mid-February, the grim reaper of governance came knocking, bearing a scythe in the form of what was once called a tweet: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

This despotic decree by our self-proclaimed monarch raised more than a few hackles. “I don’t care if you love congestion pricing, or hate it, this is an attack on our sovereign identity,” Governor Hochul snarled, adding that the state would not be “subservient to a king.” By speaking truth to a greater power, she was downplaying her own efforts to imperil the prescribed policy, which she only agreed to launch after reducing the toll from fifteen to nine dollars. But now the MTA’s momager had the hungry mouth of the city’s subway system to feed. (Embroiled in scandal and angling for a presidential pardon, Mayor Adams dodged the drama, telling reporters who asked him about Trump’s threat, “I don’t control that.”)

Newly minted Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy, happy to sidetrack a series of recent plane crashes, sent Hochul a cease-and-desist letter announcing the administration’s intent to repeal the federal authorization of the “Value Pricing Pilot Program.” “I share the president’s concerns about the impacts to working-class Americans who now have an additional financial burden to account for in their daily lives,” he explained.

Hochul clapped back, “It’s not the Real World, Sean. It’s real life for New Yorkers”—a reference to Duffy’s foray into urban policy on MTV’s The Real World: Boston (1997). He would pivot to transportation on Road Rules: All Stars (1998) and merge his two passions on Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons (2002). After a stint in his home state of Wisconsin, where he served as a district attorney and congressman, he, along with his wife and nine children, resettled in Mendham Township, New Jersey, a short four-and-a-half-hour commute to daily tapings of Trump, Season 2.

It’s no surprise that daddy Duffy lacks the same zeal for mass transit as his predecessor, Mayor Pete, who, as a gay guy, has a genetic predisposition to enjoy cruising on the subway (though the buttoned-up Buttigieg would deny this bent). Gay men are also, anecdotally speaking, the sole constituency committed to high-speed rail in this country, salivating on social media over the possibility of a bullet train to a bottom in Boston. We’re tired of Grindr gridlock! High-speed rail to anon tail, now!

Sorry, that was the Sudafed talking. I’ve derailed a bit. Let’s turn to the real showrunner of this high-stakes political drama—an unelected official harnessing the power of government to engineer his vision of a self-driving future. Elon Musk has emerged as Decongestor-in-Chief (DIC), wielding his DOGE authority to carve out cow paths from the Washington Monument to Mars. His Boring Company’s Las Vegas Loop, a glorified traffic tunnel with rave lighting hawked as a high-tech remedy to relieve congestion, peddles the same disproven midcentury ideas that spurred urban highway development—that (per Boring’s website) “no matter how large a city grows, more levels of tunnels can be added.” If only Musk’s Tesla Cybertruck could time-travel, he would see how another unelected visionary named Robert Moses, as head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, was already digging car tunnels under New York in the 1950s.

On his transtemporal trip, Musk could skim Lewis Mumford’s 1955 New Yorker article deriding “grandiose plans for highway development, as if motor transportation existed in a social vacuum, and as if New York were a mere passageway or terminal for vehicles, with no good reasons of its own for existence.” In Musk’s cosmology, cities—and entire planets—are roadblocks to be bypassed, liabilities to be offloaded, pauperized patients undeserving of his prescriptive power.

Or maybe the billionaire could beam to 1970s Manhattan and partake in the “culture of congestion” that Rem Koolhaas identified as the city’s defining logic—something to be exploited, not cured. In Delirious New York (1978), Koolhaas points to a proposal from the ’20s by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett to expand the car-carrying capacity of the grid by tunneling out space beneath buildings. Like the Las Vegas Loop, it’s a disingenuous idea—Manhattan already had an underground transportation system. It’s called the subway. “Not for a moment” does Corbett “intend to relieve congestion,” writes Koolhaas; “his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates—as in a quantum leap—a completely new condition.”

I was struggling to wrap my head around congestion pricing. Imprisoned in the circulatory system of the city, zipping in and out of the cordon zone on the L train every day, I felt disconnected from car commuters. Cars were the boogers, filled with suburban contaminants trying to get in on the action. I was the pulsing, throbbing lifeblood of the city’s chiseled corpus, one of Delirious’s “metropolitan bachelors whose ultimate ‘peak’ condition has lifted them beyond the reach of fertile brides” (again, gay). It was time for me to exit this Musk-muddled K(oolhaas)-hole and rejoin reality. To get the tolling tea, I spoke to Patrick McAffrey at Dattner Architects, who explained that the housing for the congestion cameras was designed to be as unobtrusive and invisible as possible. The objective, he explained, was to mitigate the unsightliness of the EZPass rigging, but the idea of an invisible payment infrastructure stirred my suspicions. It felt slimy to profit from this pickpocketing policy, forcing unsuspecting auto addicts to pay unholy penance to the prodigal city.

Maybe those “working-class Americans” who chose to drive into Manhattan’s Central Business District every morning rather than put food on the table were onto something. Driving must be a powerful high if it was bankrupting people. Bending for a new buzz, I hopped in my 2010 Toyota Prius to make the morning commute from Bushwick. I had mapped the route beforehand—it would take forty-five minutes by car versus thirty-five minutes by subway—and prepared for battle by listening to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. I told myself to look for the tolling signage as I approached the Williamsburg Bridge, but I didn’t spot the rush-hour ransom takers. What I did see was congestion. Perhaps these were all fellow columnists, commuting to the city for content. While the road rush had worn off after some backup on the bridge, my drive was mellow, almost meditative, and I found free parking a block away from work. Manhattan’s streets weren’t too stuffed up—just a mild case of the sniffles—and the stop-and-go sadism I had prepared for never came. Had I soaked up Sun’s famous teaching: “To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy”? Either way, I’m hoping to see that nine dollars well spent when I transfuse myself back into the subway system as a red-pilled blood cell.