Four weeks out from the launch of congestion pricing tolls and everyone wants to know: Is it working?
Preliminary data is promising, but even enthusiasts of the toll aren’t celebrating just yet, as it’s likely too early to make definitive claims about the program’s merits.
Crain’s took a look at data from a variety of sources for helpful clues in assessing the initial successes, trouble spots and unknowns of congestion pricing. Here’s what we know:
Fewer cars: Tens of thousands of vehicles that would typically travel into Manhattan below 60th Street on a weekday are no longer making the trip.Speedier commutes: Travel times on bridge and tunnel crossings into the zone are way down, but traffic speeds are barely changed on some major north-south avenues.Transit over cars: More people are riding the subway, bus and commuter rail lines than last year, but it’s unclear if congestion pricing deserves all the credit.Cleaner air: Air pollutants are trending down, but weather patterns are also contributing.
Public attitudes have begun to shift, with drivers who were previously skeptical of the plan noting and taking to social media to tout faster travel times and less money spent on gas.
Namely, the “rebound effect” is currently underway, says Charles Komanoff, a New York-based transit economist — that is, the dust is still settling from the initial shock to the system, and people are choosing if they value time or money more in their new routines.
“The one thing we can say with certainty,” he said, “is that no two people have the same exact time and price sensitivities.”
Here’s what we know so far about how congestion pricing is performing on the core promises that led to its implementation.
Fewer vehicles on the road ✔️
In the first week of the toll, from Jan. 6 to Jan. 10, an average of roughly 539,000 vehicles entered Manhattan’s central business district, a more than 8% decrease in traffic compared to the same time in the previous year. The trend continued into the second week of congestion pricing but was less dramatic, at a 5% reduction, according to MTA data. (The above includes vehicles on non-tolled roads in the district, such as the FDR Drive and West Side Highway.)
On an average weekday, 490,000 vehicles have entered the congestion zone, and an additional 63,000 have stayed on the non-tolled roads in the central business district, MTA data shows.
As a result, the MTA says evening commute times on river crossings have dropped between 10% and 30%. Travel times on most east-west two-way crosstown streets have also dipped — an average of 25% on Canal Street, for example. Some north-south avenues have seen smaller decreases, or essentially the same traffic levels. Ninth Avenue and Second Avenue have stubbornly resisted traffic reductions and have actually seen a bit of an uptick.
Those takeaways come as little surprise to Bruce Schaller, a former deputy commissioner of traffic and planning at the city’s Department of Transportation, given the density of commercial vehicles on Manhattan thoroughfares.
“Stand on an avenue and count how many vehicles you think pay the $9 fee — they’re mostly taxis, Uber, Lyft, buses and trucks, right?” said Schaller, a transportation consultant. “The traffic mix is so heavily weighted toward vehicles that gotta brake. It slows things down.”
Schaller’s theory is supported by a Bloomberg analysis of more than 75,000 vehicles outside of that company’s 59th Street office, which showed that after congestion pricing took effect, the share of private vehicles dropped by 6 percentage points, yellow taxis increased by 7 percentage points, for-hire vehicles (like Uber and Lyft) fell by 1 percentage point, and commercial vehicles like vans, box trucks and large freight vehicles was basically unchanged.
Overall, more than half of all vehicles entering the congestion zone are passenger cars (57%), with an additional third being taxis, or Uber and Lyft rides (36%). Small trucks make up just 4% of the vehicle mix entering the zone, and large trucks are only 0.5%, according to MTA traffic data.
Fewer cars means less gridlock; delays of more than three minutes have notably improved at several major intersections along Manhattan’s busiest streets, said Ahmed Darrat, a transportation engineer and the chief product officer of real-time traffic analytics company Inrix.
For instance, at the intersection of Park Avenue and 57th Street, almost 20% of vehicles during the week of Dec. 9th experienced more than three minutes of delays. The first week of congestion pricing, that figure dropped to 1%, according to Darrat’s analysis of Inrix data.
“Traffic is moving more smoothly,” said Darrat, who served in management and transportation advisory roles at Seattle’s DOT and mayor’s office. “Has congestion pricing had an impact? Definitively, yes. The question is, is it going to last? That’s the big elephant in the room.”
More money for mass transit ❓
It’s unclear just how much revenue the toll has generated for the MTA so far because the authority is keeping a tight lid on those figures. Janno Lieber, the MTA’s chair and chief executive, said at a Wednesday board meeting that toll revenue is in the ballpark of what the authority anticipated. Less clear is how much toll evasion is eating into early returns. The authority has said it will publicly share those numbers at its February finance committee meeting and provide monthly toll updates in subsequent meetings.
Transit officials are waiting for the revenue generated by the toll with bated breath. Without the cash, more than $16 billion in projects to upgrade the region’s mass transit would be at risk. Ongoing legal challenges and the Trump administration are a looming threat to the program.
Still, in early February the MTA will issue $500 million in short-term bank notes to help kick off projects funded by the incoming toll revenue, ahead of a larger bond blitz in about a year.
More people on mass transit ✔️
Early ridership data from the first weeks of congestion pricing indicates that at least some motorists are migrating to mass transit as travelers adjust their commuting habits.
For instance, throughout the second full week of the program, MTA ridership data shows that more people traveled on the subway, the bus and the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road commuter rail networks each day compared to the same January week last year. But there are too many variables and day-to-day fluctuations (think weather and the gradual return to office) to know definitively at this point why that may be, Chris Pangilinan, the MTA’s vice president of paratransit, said at a Wednesday board meeting.
The impact on the city’s buses, however, is clearer. Over the past three weeks, bus speeds across Hudson and East River crossings have significantly sped up. The most dramatic amount of commuter time saved has occurred on routes traversing the Midtown Tunnel, said Pangilinan.
Weekday and weekend ridership has spiked on express buses and local routes entering or traveling within the zone. Overall, the uptick amounts to a roughly 1.5% weekday ridership increase on buses and a 7.9% jump on weekends, according to MTA ridership data.
The new toll, however, doesn’t appear to have deterred people from coming back to the office altogether. Return-to-office figures from research firm Kastle show that during the first three weeks of January, office occupancy averaged 53.5%, a slight uptick from 41.6% during the same weeks in 2024 and 41.7% in 2023.
Safer to drive ✔️
The early days of congestion pricing appear to have had a significant impact on collisions in parts of Manhattan. There have been just 21 car crashes so far this January combined for the neighborhoods of Midtown, Hell’s Kitchen, Murray Hill and the Theater District, according to a Crain’s analysis of city traffic data.
That’s a marked reduction from January 2024’s 74 crashes, though the data is incomplete for the current month as of press time. There were 99 crashes in January 2020, before the pandemic, city traffic data shows.
It’s also worth noting that congestion pricing launched Jan. 5, so the month of February will be the first full month of data transit officials and observers will have to draw on for takeaways.
Better air quality❓
Data suggests that Manhattan’s air is also at least a little bit cleaner. A Crain’s analysis of the air quality index — a scale created by the Environmental Protection Agency that measures how clean or polluted the air is in a given location – shows that on a daily basis, AQI improved by about 8% in January 2025, compared to the same days in 2024. For reference, air pollution was up about 5% between 2023 and 2024 during the same period.
The air quality improvement comes with a big caveat: the impact of weather patterns. A low-pressure system that helps flush out pollution has hovered over New York since December, says Mark Wysocki, former New York state climatologist and a senior lecturer of earth and atmospheric science at Cornell University.
“The low-pressure is sort of like opening the window in your house and allowing the fresh air to come in,” said Wysocki. “And then with the high pressure, it’s like closing the window and letting that air build up.” The real air pollution test, Wysocki said, will be in the summer, when New York tends to experience high-pressure systems that allow smog to linger.
Air quality instruments and the toll-collecting cameras will enable transit officials to measure those precise impacts as the year progresses. Komanoff, who created a predictive congestion pricing model 18 years ago with more than 160,000 equations to test reactions to the policy, will also have fewer theoreticals at long last.
“Only empirical evidence of how the world is actually running will reveal the price sensitivities,” said Komanoff.
