Brian Laird on WNYC, and now as usual on Wednesdays, our lead Eric Adams reporter, Elizabeth Kim, with fresh excerpts and analysis from the mayor's Tuesday news conference and to help take your

calls and text. Headline, it seems the mayor has his own plan to fight congestion in Manhattan's

Central Business District that doesn't include the word pricing and that therefore won't pay

for improvements in mass transit, but it might produce more parking tickets and change how people

get deliveries. The mayor and

city council are also on deadline now for the new fiscal year budget, which begins next Monday,

with lots of cuts to major city services still being considered, so there's plenty to talk about.

Hi, Liz. Happy Wednesday, Brian. We'll play the mayor on congestion as our first clip.

You want to set this up?

Sure.

I thought this was an excellent question for the mayor, and I'm a little surprised that it wasn't asked earlier.

So in the wake of the governor's pause on congestion pricing, what can the city do on its own to tackle congestion?

So just to remind listeners, one of the major intended goals of congestion pricing was to remove

thousands of cars off the streets of Midtown and Lower Manhattan. And that would have been through the $15 toll and also

incentivizing trucks to drive later at night. But now that that's no longer going to happen,

you know, there's a lot more pressure or some might view it as an opportunity for this city to

step up with its own policy to address congestion.

Here's the mayor.

And there are a series of things we're doing from building our bike lanes to ensure prop enforcement.

When I was a captain, I was the traffic stat captain.

And one of the biggest problems with congestion is double parking.

On delivery, double parking, vehicles of double parking, it's slow up traffic,

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