A week after the launch of congestion pricing it is unclear just how much revenue the toll has generated for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — because the agency is withholding those figures while they sort through the data, transit officials said during a Monday briefing.
A lack of revenue figures are among the crucial missing data to assemble an early look at just how effective the program has been in generating cash that the MTA will leverage toward modernizing the region’s mass transit. Car traffic within the congestion pricing zone is notably down after one week, with travel times hugely sped up on river crossings and crosstown streets, but so far it is unclear how those trends bode for the program’s toll revenue.
“To be perfectly frank with you, we have not looked at revenue numbers,” said Juliette Michaelson, the MTA’s deputy chief of policy and external relations. “What is most on our mind at this point in time is that New Yorkers see and feel the effects of congestion pricing.”
Such data is expected to be shared with the public in the coming weeks, a timeline transit officials say is necessary as they tally up the different toll fees for various vehicle types and times of day, and work to enroll motorists with EZPass. Drivers without EZPass will be billed higher fees by mail. There’s a two month grace period before such drivers will be hit with penalties, according to John McCarthy, the MTA Chief of Policy and External Relations.
The MTA is similarly painting a sparse picture of how ridership is faring on the subway. Michaelson noted that the effect of commuters who are swapping cars for mass transit are “muted” because of the scale of the system and the wide foot-traffic fluctuations from day to day. For every motorist who drives into the congestion zone there are nine mass transit riders.
Systemwide, the MTA anticipated a 1% increase in transit ridership with congestion pricing, but day-to-day fluctuations make it hard to pinpoint the impact, said Michaelson.
“Simply because the base of riders is so big, you don’t have to be a statistics guru to understand that, that is difficult to measure,” she said. “There’s natural fluctuations, sometimes it rains and people stay home, and that’s more than a 1% difference.”
That’s why transit officials said Monday they felt it was more relevant to point to specific express bus routes, such as the BM1 from Brooklyn, the SIM9 in Staten Island and the QM16 in Queens, where weekday ridership growth was above average.
The MTA did not share year-over-year changes for the past week for specific subway or commuter rail stations.
The authority is in the midst of developing a public dashboard of congestion pricing related data for the public to explore; transit officials say the data portal will be up and running sometime next month.
