What it Means That Miri Regev Wants to Cancel Congestion Pricing
Minister of Transportation Miri Regev is trying to cancel the Tel Aviv congestion pricing plan, slated to begin operations in 2026. Congestion pricing is still planned to happen, but 2026 is already behind schedule due to delays on past contracts required to set up the gantries. The plan is still to go ahead and use the revenue to help fund the Tel Aviv Metro project, to comprise three driverless metro lines at regional scale to complement both the longer-range commuter trains and the shorter-range Light Rail system, which opened last year with a subway segment after several decades of design and construction. But Regev has wanted to cancel it since she became transportation minister early last year, and her latest excuse is the war, never mind that usually during war one raises taxes and aims to restrain private consumption such as personal vehicle driving.
I bring this up partly to highlight that Regev has not been a good minister; the civil servants at the ministry quickly found that she routinely bypasses them, makes decisions purely with her own political team, and sometimes doesn’t even inform them before making public announcements. More recently, she’s been facing corruption investigations, since much of the above behavior is not legal in Israel, a country where one says “the state” with a positive connotation that exists in French and German but not in English.
But more than that, I bring this up to highlight the contrast between Regev and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who outright canceled the New York congestion pricing plan last month on no notice, weeks before it was about to debut rather than years. At a personal level, Regev is a worse person than Hochul. But Regev’s ability to cause damage is constrained by far stronger state institutions. The cabinet can collectively decide to cancel congestion pricing, in the same way a state legislature could repeal its own laws, but that would involve extensive open debate within the coalition. Thus, the ministry of finance already said that if the ministry of transportation is bowing out, it will have to take over the program, since it’s necessary for financing the metro, which is still on-budget; the civil servants at finance have long drawn ire from populists over their control over the budget, called the Arrangements Law, and unless the metro is formally canceled, the money will have to come from somewhere.
A formal repeal is still possible, but it cannot be done on a whim. Netanyahu, an atypically monarchical prime minister in both power within the coalition and aspirations, might be able to swing it if he wants, but he’d still have to persuade coalition partners. His power derives from long-term deals with junior parties that are so widely loathed they feel like they have to stick with him, and from over time turning Likud into a party of personal loyalists; at the same time, he has to govern roughly within the spectrum of opinions of the loyalists, and while their opinions on the biggest issues facing the state align with his or else they would not be in this position, on issues like transportation they may have different opinions and express them. At no point does a loyalist like Regev get absolute control of one aspect of policy; the coalition gets a vote and absent a formal repeal, the legislation creating congestion pricing still binds.
In other words, Israel is a functioning multiparty parliamentary democracy, more or less. Mostly less these days, let’s be honest. But much of the “less” comes from a concerted attempt to politicize the civil service, which Regev is currently under investigation for. In the United States, it’s fully politicized; one governor can announce the cancellation of a legislatively mandated congestion pricing program on a whim, the MTA board (which she appointed) will affirm that she indeed can do it and will not sign a statement saying the state consents to congestion pricing, and the question of whether it’s legal will be deferred to courts where the judges were politically appointed based on governor-legislative chief deals. Israel can make long-term plans, and a minister like Regev can interfere with them, but would need to do a lot of work to truly wreck them. The United States, as we’re seeing with New York congestion pricing, really can’t.
Pedestrian Observations 
(People who want to use this post as an excuse to give me their opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are welcome to write their opinions in a private diary.)
I Hochul is certainly exploiting a bug in the system (she does not it seems to any lawyer I’ve read have the power to do what she is doing), but the FHWA does not appear willing to put an agreement into from of only the MTA and NYCDOT without NYSDOT, largely because this seems to be viewed as so norm breaking.
what is occurring in Israel imo is demonstrative of the strength between a fused executive and legislature as well as a single level one. There is no agreement here that needs to be signed. If the minister continues to undermine government policy she can be fired.
(hochul of course in some sense blew up NYS’s budget with this choice, but that is for her and the legislature to attempt to fix next year.)
The engineering term “normalization of deviance” applies more generally. There is an ostensible process, nicely written down on a document sitting on a shelf, and there is the real process, which is whatever the people in fact do. Likewise, there are ostensible laws, written down somewhere and which can be quoted by lawyers, and there are real laws. If an organization works well, the ostensible and the real almost entirely overlap, and it is a part of the real to actively adjust one or the other to keep them highly overlapping. This, crucially, keeps everyone on the same page about what the real rules are (i.e. what the rest of the organization is actually doing), namely, they match the ostensible rules, which you can read for yourself. Whereas when things work poorly, there is a significant difference between the two, and because in this case the only way to accurately learn what any group/subsystem G actually does is to spend a fair lot of time observing said group G acting, even other groups closely up-/downstream of G will not have accurate knowledge of what G does and thus cannot make reliable and efficient plans. (Picking efficiency over reliability is to assume that G actually does its job; sometimes this blows up in your face. Picking reliability over efficiency is to create your own private G’ as a replacement for G, a.k.a. empire-building, but the resulting G’ tends not to be reliable despite (…due to?) being under your control. Also, other groups interfacing with G create their own G* and G†.)
In addition to the above, there is also the issue that in a well-working system, for any question there is, for the most part there is only one entity that gets to decide that question. (This includes delegation. If X delegates to Y some task “for real”, not as an apprentice or advisor, then X ought to respect their own choice to do so, and not overrule Y.) Here the situation is even more obvious: if there are multiple, similarly-legitimate claimants and they make incompatible decisions, then the people downstream will not be able to implement “the decision”. Having a multi-level structure of delegation and local autonomy merely creates more opportunities for screwups of this sort (resulting in a vetocracy).
Alon does Israel have a properly siloed civil service? I mean the lack of a codified constitution, the weakness of local government, the hyper-centralisation of taxation look quite British. But it looks like amateur generalist civil service isn’t one them (this is good).
It does. Israel’s educational hierarchy is more Continental (esp. German) than British – it matters what you studied more than where you went, since the country is too small for an Oxbridge or ENS or Todai. (Singapore resolves this by sending the top elite to be educated at Oxbridge or at US elite unis; domestically, it’s too small for that.)
Not quite what I meant, I meant do bureaucrats in the Ministry of Transport in Israel stay in that ministry or do they flit about like Westminister model civil services to.
Education elitism isn’t the problem. UK civil service is much less educational elitist than the Japanese central bureaucracy which still dominated by Todai-Kyodai and their law faculty*. Sue Gray** who is Starmer’s interface with the Civil Service an Irish immigrant who didn’t go to uni would be impossible in Japan. But MLIT documents and decision making are vastly more technically competent than anything I read from the British Ministry of Transport.
*Prefectures have their own recruitment stream that tend towards local big unis but not much otherwise.
** Although her career is so insane that the rumours her years as a publord were actually working for MI5
Alon you can discount this as the bleetings of an Oxford man but Oxford-Cambridge would effortlessly adjust to a more technically competent British public sphere, after all that’s what happened in France etc. Reinvention is something the ancient universities are very good at. And academically they are weak in social sciences not engineering, maths-statistics or science.
What makes people oppose rebuilding the UK state to generate, maintain and mobilise technical expertise isn’t educational elitism. Indeed people like Sue Gray or Network Rail’s management staff would lose out. As would the suburban SME core of the Tory party/elite and the non-profit/human-rights industry from which Labour draws a disproportionate share of its staff and ideas.
Narratives of UK aristocratic sonderwerg are bullshit including its university one. If the Guardian or Novara or the New Statesmen spent 1% of their energy whining about Oxbridge elites talking about how local councillors should be paid instead voluntary then maybe we might get politicians that have provincial experience rather Oxbridge. Or paying competitive wages for Civil servants and council officers. Instead is just rehashed “Norman Yoke” bullshit that only distinguishes itself from similar stuff written in 1965 is added discussions of racism (which is the healthiest part of the discourse).
Bureaucrats stay in the ministry. Bouncing between senior positions in different ministries isn’t really a thing.
One difference at the top level is that ministers do have influence over civil service appointments, and the top civil servant in each ministry, called in Hebrew the CEO of the ministry, is chosen by the minister – but holdovers from previous cabinets are common, and straight-out political appointments are unpopular and resented by the rest of the hierarchy and tend not to lead to results. Rank-and-file Likudniks will still resent it if a minister appoints a loyalist rather than someone with expertise in the field. (Israeli political culture talks about the distinction between people who talk and people who do, and the sort of person who worms their way into a political appointment is the former.) So much of this depoliticization of the civil service is norms rather than Westminster-style rules.
Ah. Sounds like the normal bureaucratic system (Japan is similar although 2013 saw politicisation of the top rankers for the first time).
You’re saying that the Anglosphere’s planning/cost problems are a consequence of its leadership being centered around a few elite universities? Interesting and novel approach. What about Canada and Australia which don’t seem to have such elite universities?
And France which 100% does have a small number of elite Universities has good costs.
Just speculating, but isn’t the answer to that, “CAN/AUS send their elite to Oxbridge/Ivies”?
Canada has huge cultural cringe toward the US and UK; it was doing fine on infrastructure and then got the design-build bug from the UK starting 20 years ago and the civil service politicization bug from the US starting around 10 years ago.
I wouldn’t deny Canada has cultural cringe towards the UK/US, but it also has insufferable Imperial-Anglo disease as do Aus/NZ/Ireland etc.
Also don’t underestimate the grassroots anti-statism in Canadian politics, Prairie populism is real, as the collapse of the Progressive “establishment” Conservative machines 1993-present has shown. Red-Blue Tories only survive in Atlantic Canada now that the BC Liberals have collapsed and the Ontario PCs were taken over by populist right wing interest under Harris in the late 1990’s. Heck Quebec is having its own right-ward shift between the CAQ, the right-swerve of the Bloc and the rise of Quebec Conservative Party. Canada while having a codified constitution at the Federal level, has a very Westminster mix of FPTP majoritarianism plus no codified constitution for provincial institutions (The charter protects rights, bureaucratic forms not really).
Canada doesn’t have US or UK levels of state legitimacy crisis, but it does have it to the level that Reagan-Thatcherite-Populism has genuine attraction beyond cultural cringe.
@Borners “insufferable Imperial-Anglo disease” sounds very vague and nonfalsifiable. Doesn’t France have insufferable Imperial-Franco disease etc? I mean De Gaulle literally named his foreign policy the “Politics of Grandeur”.
America has clear Imperial solipsism for genuine reasons, it is the greatest thing on the face of the earth right now. UK has it both as legacy holdovers and because its pinned itself to the US system so tightly. Canada/NZ/Australia/Ireland/Singapore inherit/partake from both. The English language meaning elites in particular in their elites are permanently America brained even when they are ostensibly anti-American (Corbyn etc)*. Or anti-British as a certain Aussie demonstrates here regularly.
On France 1. French are just insufferable in general. 2. De Gaulle founded the 5th Republic to put on Great Power airs safely and outside Francophone Africa its worked pretty well for France, in particular through the commitment to the EU. 3. France can often be insular, hence too few high rises, TER sucks, rubber metros, and love for locomotives just because. But for the most part the state is strong enough to contain these things**.
*Deprogramming oneself is really really hard.
**The two big exceptions are French treatment of immigrant minorities and its role in Africa. Which could very well explode onto the 5th Republic.
@Borners, have you seen the new A30 improvements in Cornwall.[1] £25m/km for a road you could comfortably do 150mph on when the speed limit is 70mph and a huge number of emergency lay-bys.
Plus it doesn’t follow the existing A30 route exactly even though the only issue with it was capacity at peak times. I certainly don’t remember it being an unacceptably slow section to drive historically.
I don’t think this is something I have seen the Americans or whoever we have cultural cringe towards doing, and it has much stronger engineering than the M40 extension from Oxford to Birmingham (which to be fair is also a pretty nice road) and which is at most half the cost at £12m/km adjusted for inflation[2] (and this assumes the widening of the existing M40 and the A34 north of Oxford were free which they obviously weren’t. They were probably 1/3rd of the total cost or something).
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq555zezryro
[2] https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1991-01-21/debates/12661b57-cd39-402a-b0d6-6b94c787f7e0/M40?highlight=m40%20cost#contribution-44b0cf4f-aa8f-4ddf-989b-27bf4e771b3c
I think it mostly shows that it is the ministry of finance (and eventually the prime minister, or if needed a coalition cabinet) that eventually calls the shots, as in most parliamentary democracies, with other ministries clearly in a sub-ordinate position. If the will to remove it had come from a more powerful ministry such as Finance or the prime ministers office, it would probably not have been very hard to wreck in Israel either (even if there is some legislative support).
While the New York case is direct from the source of local executive power.
Local executive power plus likely some pressure at least from senior figures in the national Democratic Party.
Hmmm, so the folks holding up congestion pricing implementation in New York are political appointees not career civil service, right?
It’s the governor specifically; the NYSDOT commissioner is a political appointee and therefore isn’t signing the VPPP.
Okay, i get it you are saying the process was politicized not necessarily the civil servants at MTA and NYSDOT.
In Germany if Munich city wanted to do a congestion charging scheme and they passed a law but Markus Söder and Angela Merkel were publicly opposed because it risked costing the CDU the Bundestag what would happen?
Bavaria would have to pass the law, and it wouldn’t agree to it because CSU doesn’t.
Notably, in Berlin, the city has authority to pass a congestion pricing scheme. It’s been discussed, under the name City-Maut, but only the Greens are in favor, so there’s no majority for it and it’s not happening. My objection in New York is not that there’s no congestion pricing, which Berlin and Paris don’t have either; it’s that it voted on congestion pricing and then the governor canceled it on a whim.
Paris seems to be doing a very good job at reducing congestion in its centre without congestion pricing, chiefly through steadily reducing the road space allotted to traffic/parking, and increasing cycle paths and bus lanes.
Berlin doesn’t really need congestion pricing? It doesn’t have a high-density core and already has a pretty high mode share for public transport. The idea floated around to ban traffic inside the Ringbahn is an interesting one. But people in that area mainly lead carfree lifestyles anyway. It’s real challenge is reducing car-dependency in the outer areas of the city.
I’ve made that point here before. But it’s like the Irish joke on direction-finding advice: “I wouldn’t start from here.”
First, few cities have a Metro system like Paris, especially the coverage and density in “core” Paris (ie. the whole 100km2 of what we call Paris. Of course that includes the RER which brings in huge numbers from the far suburbs.
Second, Paris has had a Socialist city government for 23 years with activist mayors Bertrand Delanoë (2001-2014) and Anne Hidalgo (2014-2027). Delanoë introduced the slogan/policy of “Paris for people not cars” and the Velib cycle-sharing scheme in 2007. Hidalgo was deputy mayor during Delanoë’s administration. If anything Hidalgo is even more aggressive on the green front, bringing in “Paris Respire” in 2016 to improve air quality by reducing cars, banning them in some places, banning diesel cars, promoting cycling, championing the “15-minute city” and literally greening the city with plantings. Then covid helped shifting up a gear to recover more street parking space for other uses.
It’s not as if all of this was widely popular at the time, though the instant popularity of Velib probably cemented him and the socialists in power. Most of it took time for policies to convince Parisians, and more, beyond Paris the more conservative Franciliens fought most of it until popularity spread and eventually they embraced many of Hidalgo’s agenda (while trying not to credit her).
Compare to Bloomberg’s mayoralty 2002-2013, which involved an exceptional 3rd term. Bloomberg wanted to bring in a congestion charge, killed by the state of course. He, via Janet Sadik-Khan, instituted some good things but clearly it has been a return to the usual since then as shown by Hochul’s actions. Simply not enough time for a structural or cultural change. I suppose they have introduced wheelie-bins … only half a century after most other big cities in the world, and a whole lot of American cities too.
Paris and London do have much stronger outer suburban and regional train services than New York. That is a big difference.
OK so in Germany it would work exactly the same except that the Lander/state would pass a law explicitly. So the difference is pretty small.
And yeah the German system is slightly better. But still.
FYI — a detailed explanation of why Hochul stopped congestion pricing in NYC.
https://nysfocus.com/2024/07/26/mta-union-hochul-congestion-pricing
In short: the Transport Workers Union (TWU) endorsed it initially, but the TWU president (who was on the committee deciding the details of implementing congestion pricing), quit the committee and came out against it when the TWU members weren’t given an exemption.