It might have been a little late, but Mayor Muriel Bowser did not hold back her thoughts on the D.C. Council’s congestion report more than four years after its completion.
Bowser described the plan in a Tuesday 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.
The study was commissioned in 2019 and completed in 2021.
One of the issues Bowser pointed to is that the nearly 100-page report used traffic data from before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The nearly a half-million-dollar study was first proposed in 2019 on the heels of congestion pricing being approved for New York City by the state legislature.
While $9 is how much it costs commuters to drive into New York City between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m., the D.C. Council’s plan would charge commuters from outside the District $10 between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Weekends would only cost $5 from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
With New York City’s bigger population and D.C.’s “building height limits,” Bowser wrote, “Downtown DC 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, the letter made it clear she did not want that fact 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 DC 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.
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
© 2026 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
