In his first State of the Borough address today at City Hall, the president of Manhattan, Scott Stringer, will focus on the borough’s traffic problems and point to European cities such as London and Stockholm as models for successful traffic relief.

Mr. Stringer will ask the city to apply for federal funds to study how charging drivers a fee to use the city’s most crowded streets would help reduce traffic, a scheme known as congestion pricing.

“London imposed congestion pricing on its economic center and added more bus service. Traffic plummeted. Mass transit use increased, and the city’s business district was reborn,” Mr. Stringer will say, according to an advance copy of his address obtained by The New York Sun. “With federal funds available, we should seize the opportunity to study congestion pricing.”

In his address, Mr. Stringer calls the high cost of traffic an issue “too important to be held up by elected officials’ time-honored fear of going out on a limb.”

Mayor Bloomberg has said in the past that while he does not rule out congestion pricing for New York, he considers it politically unfeasible right now because of the opposition it would meet from the state Legislature in Albany.

A study released in December by the Partnership for New York City recommended that the city look at congestion pricing as a traffic-reducing method. The Manhattan Institute, a think tank, also released a study late last year that found that New Yorkers were open to the idea of congestion pricing.

Mr. Stringer also will speak about the importance of moving Madison Square Garden and renovating Pennsylvania Station in order to create a statelier gateway into Midtown. A new Moynihan train station in the Farley Post Office building on Eighth Avenue is another project whose success Mr. Stringer says is vital to the future of the city. “It must not become a political football,” Mr. Stringer will say.