ALBANY – Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s far-reaching plan to ease traffic in Manhattan died here on Monday in a closed conference room on the third floor of the Capitol.
Democratic members of the State Assembly held one final meeting to debate the merits of Mr. Bloomberg’s plan and found overwhelming and persistent opposition. The plan would have charged drivers $8 to enter a congestion zone in Manhattan south of 60th Street during peak hours.
Mr. Bloomberg and his supporters, including civic, labor and environmental organizations, viewed the proposal as a bold and essential step to help manage the city’s inexorable growth.
But the mayor’s plan was strongly opposed by a broad array of politicians from Queens, Brooklyn and New York’s suburbs, who viewed the proposed congestion fee as a regressive measure that overwhelmingly benefited affluent Manhattanites.
“The congestion pricing bill did not have anywhere near a majority of the Democratic conference, and will not be on the floor of the Assembly,” Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, said after the meeting.
The plan’s collapse was a severe blow to Mr. Bloomberg’s environmental agenda and political legacy. The mayor introduced his plan a year ago as the signature proposal of a 127-item program for sustainable city growth that helped raise his national profile. Without approval from Albany, the city now stands to lose about $354 million worth of federal money that would have financed the system for collecting the fee and helped to pay for new bus routes and other traffic mitigation measures.
After Mr. Silver announced the plan’s demise, a statement was released by Mary E. Peters, the federal transportation secretary, indicating that her department would now seek to distribute those funds to traffic-fighting proposals in other cities.
New York also hoped to use revenues from congestion pricing to finance billions of dollars in subway expansion and other improvements by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, money that must now come from somewhere else.