A Brooklyn Democratic district leader says New York’s congestion pricing program didn’t just cost drivers money — it cost her a relationship.
Mariama James, a former state Assembly candidate, went viral on X this week after writing that she and her boyfriend, an MTA bus driver, effectively stopped seeing each other because of the added expense of the toll, which Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration implemented on Jan. 5, 2025. Under the program, drivers pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 61st Street.
“We basically stopped seeing each other bc of Congestion Pricing,” James wrote. “He already pays it plus bridge tolls to get from his home in East NY to the depot in Harlem where he works. Coming to visit me inside the zone a few times per week as well, not to mention driving for our formerly frequent weekend getaways to AC became a hardship & no way he’d ever let me pay instead.”
James, 55, met the man — whose name she has not disclosed publicly — in 2019 near her home in the Financial District, where he approached her on the street and followed her into a grocery store to get her phone number. The two, both single parents she described as “workaholics,” dated on and off until 2025.
Because he insisted on picking her up rather than having her travel to Brooklyn, most of their time together happened at her place or during his work breaks.
“We would meet on his break. He’d take me to dinner, like park his bus and take me out,” James told The Post.
James described him as old-fashioned and attentive. “He is the man,” she said. “I didn’t carry a bag. I didn’t pay a tab. I didn’t open the door. I didn’t walk on the outside of the street.”
James, who also does advocacy work for 9/11 victims and their families and sits on the board of a youth charity, said she appreciated that dynamic given her professional life. “I have to be the ‘man’ in my life a lot of the time. When you’re an activist, when you’re the leader, I’m in a lot of male circles … So when I’m with somebody that I’m dating or my partner, I let myself be the lady. I let him be the man,” she said.
Even before congestion pricing took effect, the relationship required effort: James said her boyfriend was already paying more than $100 a week in tolls commuting through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. “He was doing that and subsisting and then here comes congestion pricing,” she said.
She said the added cost, combined with his child support obligations, made it harder for him to justify the extra spending required to see her and to continue their weekend trips to Atlantic City.
“We’ve only seen each other like two times since 2025,” James said. “It just kind of became exhausting and we stopped doing it.”
James tied the financial strain to broader concerns about how the toll affects Black men with child support obligations. “I’m a mother of three. I know how it is for a man, a black man who is not married to the mother of his child who has him on child support,” she said. “This man is paying additional money to take me out. For that to be a barrier to meeting his obligations, and because of the kind person that he is I know that he’s going to pay.”
She added: “It was not fun for either one of us at that point because we had to figure out a master plan just to go out.”
James, a Democrat, said she opposes the program. “I don’t like it. Not for my district,” she said, arguing it has “push[ed] pollution on our neighborhood.”
The post comes during a difficult stretch for James, who lost a Democratic primary for a state Assembly seat in June to Democratic Socialists of America candidate Illapa Saorotupac. Her viral post also drew mockery online, including one reply reading, “You couldn’t waterboard this out of me.”
Despite the breakup, James said she hasn’t ruled out reconciling. “Maybe we’ll start up again one day, who knows?” she said. “Maybe there will be a change in circumstances.”
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