How Well Is Congestion Pricing Doing?
Photo-illustration: brake; Photo: Getty
“By the way, I have a favorite statistic,” said Juliette Michaelson halfway to our conversation. She is assistant chief of the MTA, working on policy and in particular on the deployment of the congestion price toll program. “The city 311 collects information on the number of people call what is called” excessive car difficulty, “she said. “And the number of complaints concerning an excessive epulnide by car in January and February was less than 70% in January and February. I love it, because it’s all.”
We are 100 days in the era of congestion pricing, which started with cheers and a few diatribes very early in the morning of January 5. Statistics from January to March, both all-in-one and otherwise, are underway, and they show a clear and undoubted trend: That works. There is a lot, much less traffic in the streets. A group called the congestion price coalition now – composed of A wide range of defense organizations This includes the Regional Plan region, the alliance riders, the open plans, the conservancy nature and the transport alternatives – has done a good job of gathering the facts, and if you are even slightly convincable, that makes a strong argument. The Dutch tunnel, during peak hours, has 65% less delays than before, and the time required to pass is down 48%. During these 100 days, 6 million less cars driven at the bottom of Manhattan than it had done a year earlier. In March, the decline was 80,000 per day. In the congestion zone, we see half as many injuries related to traffic. Bus routes in Manhattan are so much less blocked than drivers are forced to slow down to maintain their schedules. (As a rider, I lived it twice last week, and it was weird: a bus moving to 5 mph in a wide track.
Cynic could call it all a problem rather than a success, which suggests that Manhattan has lost 80,000 daily catering customers, theater lovers and buyers. How many of them took the train instead? It is a bit difficult to judge, because the figures from one year to the next are likely to incorporate part of the change of return to the office, but the suburban lines are definitively more complete than them. In January 2024, Metro-North bore almost exactly 5 million runners. In January 2025, he brought 5.3 million, up approximately 8%. The numbers on the NJ transit and the LIRR are also higher – and in the case of the latter, They started climbing immediately after January 5strongly suggesting that these passengers were drivers. Broadway ticket sales are also increasing, and the city’s improvement districts say they have seen 1.5 million visitors from more than year to year. Again, we are still in covid-recovery mode, and theater sales are governed by things in addition to traffic, but at least, all this suggests that tolls do not choke, It doesn’t matter what dinner Guy comfort believes.
“Completely anecdotal,” continues Michaelson, “doctors report that their patients are not late for meetings. I talked to someone who has to deliver goods that said: “It’s saving so much time”. There was a study in 2019 by the partnership for New York, believing that the cost of traffic towards companies and individuals was around $ 20 billion per year of wasted activity. As improbable as it may seem, I myself live near a tunnel, and I can confirm it.
Almost all those who know town planning and planning believed that congestion prices would work, and it sometimes seemed that everyone thought it would fail. New York is different, they said, a place where well-intentioned policies run aground on a mixture of cynicism, selfishness and Cussedness. The sentence treasury I launched a lot. The idea took more than a decade before it crossed the Legislative Assembly, and even then, it was imposed adopted by Kathy Hochul, who lost his nerve, then found it at the last possible moment. The governor of New Jersey try To stop it. In a state of December Siena survey51% of people were against the plan and only 29% supported it.
The figures of popularity have not completely overturned, but there was a recent follow-up of this Siena survey from December, and the split of For-Amainst has increased from 29 to 51 33-40. Among the people who live in the city, it is 42-35-not a majority outright but certainly above the water, which it was not categorically before. The most striking of all, however, is that the greatest turnaround has been among a population to which you expect the least: people very often pay the toll. “There was A survey led by the morning consult A few weeks ago, “said Michaelson,” showing that the biggest supporters in the program were those who led the central business district. ” “Really?” I ask. she said. Because the cars move? “They move. The people who oppose it are people who live in the north or do not come. This is the experience that people from London and Stockholm have described us beforehand, “says Michaelson:” that people oppose it until they see that the program is effective. »»
Traffic flow is a real measure of this efficiency. But the other is the final result-that is to say where all this money goes or is perceived as having gone. The congestion toll aims to pay huge improvements in metro and bus systems. These will take time: the contracts must be submitted and the construction must occur, and we can all agree that the MTA, no matter how much you think or sick, is not the fastest of these things. Until the end of February, the agency had received around $ 100 million From the toll program, and after the recovery costs and such are subtracted, the end of the year should be around the projection of $ 500 million. This is something like half what it would have been under the initial version of the plan – before Governor Hochul resets the toll from $ 15 to $ 9 – but it is not very nothing, and a lot of capital improvements have already been paid and green: Metro elevators at rue de Delancey – Essex Street This will be part of an affordable housing construction project, some contracts for the next stage of the second avenue metro, more electric buses, etc.
The last entity that could destroy this, of course, is in Washington. Donald Trump usually ignores the arguments and reasoned statistics in favor of his instinct, and one thing he loves is an opportunity to stick it to anyone who is serious for the good activist government. All the cases could still go to hell. But in the meantime, traffic and species flow, and MTA Michaelson suggested me another measure of how everything will plan well: “It’s funny – it’s a quick environment here at the seat how The program is more doing a lot. We continue to look at the figures and figures continue to appear well. »»
