If you want to understand why the massive, multi-billion-dollar congestion pricing toll plan to fix New York City’s transit system crashed in a giant bureaucratic heap last week, it’s helpful to turn back the clock to a Thursday 17 months ago.

Jan. 19, 2023 was an otherwise ordinary day except for the two men who met for a joint press conference on a rain-soaked corner in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, and Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, were on opposite sides of America’s often impenetrable political fence, not to mention residents of states that don’t always work well together. But on that January day, with the steel towers of the George Washington Bridge in the background, a billboard advertising “everything orthopedic” looking down and a tractor trailer delivering “Asian Food” passing by at one point, they seemed like old friends.

Gottheimer's home in Wyckoff, New Jersey, is a mere 11 miles from Lawler’s in Pearl River, New York. They conceded they shared a strong common bond that transcended partisan politics or state boundaries. Both represented large suburban Congressional districts with plenty of New York City-bound commuters. Huddling under matching blue umbrellas in Fort Lee that day, both announced they were joining forces to block a plan to impose a special toll on anyone trying to drive into midtown Manhattan.

It was the beginning of the end for the multi-billion-dollar plan known as congestion pricing that would impose as much as an extra $15 toll per trip on commuters’ cars.

There are many ways to view the collapse of the congestion pricing plan. But examining this set of complicated issues through the eyes of Gottheimer and Lawler offers a unique — and perhaps instructive — perspective.

In a stunning reversal last week, New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who bills herself as a practical politician with her ear to the ground and its occasional groundswells of voters, ordered transit officials to “indefinitely pause” the extra commuting tolls, which were scheduled to begin on June 30. Which means the issue is likely to be resurrected at some point. For now, it's in limbo, though.

Hochul, who had championed the plan as a way to raise $1 billion to underwrite a $15 billion borrowing plan to pay for desperately needed upgrades in New York City’s subways, explained that “after careful consideration I have come to the difficult decision that implementing the planned congestion pricing system risks too many unintended consequences.”

The sound you heard across New Jersey, New York and even Connecticut and Long Island and New York City itself was a loud: “What?”

Explaining her change of mind, Hochul cited that she had come to believe that congestion pricing tolls — estimated at as much as an extra $5,000 a year for some........

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