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The Battle Over NYC Congestion Pricing
The Battle Over NYC Congestion Pricing
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0:00
This is 59th street in Manhattan. Below it, spread across downtown and midtown Manhattan,
0:06
reside some 684,000 New Yorkers. That’s more than the population of Vermont living in just under
0:13
nine square miles or 23 square kilometers of land. Or, that’s a population density of about 76,000
0:21
people per square mile, making lower Manhattan singularly dense by American standards. If this
0:26
were a city by itself, it’d be the country’s most densely populated, far out cramping current #1,
0:32
Guttenberg, New Jersey, just across the river where a fifth of its 12,000 residents are stuffed
0:37
into a single building complex. If it were its own county, its population density would almost double
0:42
the nation’s second most dense: Kings County, New York. And for similarly dense cities to
0:47
lower Manhattan, you’d need to go abroad, where it would rank around Kolkata, Kathmandu, and Makati,
0:52
comfortably within the world’s top ten. But 76,000 per square mile only begins to tell
0:58
the story of just how cramped this area really is. New York City also has the most office space
1:04
by square footage of any city in North America, and just Manhattan by itself contains some 81% of
1:10
that. For comparison, Los Angeles, the city with the second most such space at 432 million square
1:16
feet, is dwarfed by Manhattan’s 592 million. With so much space comes a flood of commuters
1:23
every morning, adding another 1.2 million or so people to the southern end of the island.
1:29
For the work day then, an area of just nine square miles has a momentary population of
1:33
about two million. Two million that need to get to work, two million that need to run errands,
1:39
and two million that need to get back home at the end of the day, which, for a majority,
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means getting back out of Manhattan. But while this sub-city urban core that’s
1:48
more populous than a handful of American states is uniquely large, uniquely mobile, and uniquely
1:53
stuffed; for the past century—effectively, the age of the automobile—there’s really been no
1:58
unique solution or system for managing or limiting traffic. Aside from a prohibition on right turns
2:04
on red and honking, driving in America's densest nine square miles works the same way as in the
2:10
other 3.8 million square miles. Because of this, each and every work day, some 140,000 commuters
2:17
enter Manhattan by car, while about 1,000,000 people enter the commercial business district
2:21
south of 60th street by automobile—largely for only the price of the gas it takes to get there,
2:26
the toll to cross the bridge, and the cost of parking. All expenses that a rural American
2:31
would scoff at, but expenses that hardly reflect the shared cost that cars create in the US’s most
2:37
densely populated environment—from air quality and pedestrian danger, to simple quality of life.
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The result is this: New York’s #1 standing in Inrix’s 2023 congestion impact ranking,
2:50
where the average driver moved at just 10 miles or 16 kilometers per hour and gave up about 101
2:56
of their hours a year to sit in traffic related delays. And those are stats for
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the whole of New York City. Manhattan was far far worse. While most streets and avenues are
3:08
limited at 25 miles per hour, average traffic moves at a glacial 7 miles or 11 kilometers
3:15
per hour. This is not a new problem, either. Rather it’s one that’s just getting worse—in
3:20
2010 the average taxi navigated the Central Business District, or Manhattan below 60th St.,
3:26
at 9.1 miles per hour, and every year following through 2018, it’s slowed. While COVID lightened
3:32
the congestion for 2020 and 2021, experts are now saying that traffic hasn’t only returned,
3:38
it's gotten even slower than before 2019. Now, the exact complexion of the problem has shifted
3:44
over the years. The number of daily vehicles entering the Core Business District, for instance,
3:48
has dropped, but their impact has been replaced by an ever higher share of for-hire vehicles
3:53
serving ride-hailing apps and clogging the city streets. But the very root of the problem is so
3:59
remarkably simple. There are just too many cars. Now, oftentimes in an urban context, a problem may
4:07
present as simple and straightforward enough, but a solution could be anything but. That, though,
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is not necessarily the case here. In fact, as long as car congestion has been an issue here,
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one potential answer’s remained equally obvious, equally straightforward, equally
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simple—disincentivize driving into Manhattan. Going as far back as the 1930s, mayors have
4:30
proposed tolls to cross into Manhattan over the East and Harlem Rivers to raise city funds or,
4:35
in the ‘50s, to raise money for the subway. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, such ideas were again
4:40
returned to in an attempt first to popularize mass transit use, then to make progress toward
4:44
meeting the standards of the 1970 Clean Air Act. Further hoping to pressure individual car users,
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Mayor John Lindsay thought to reduce city parking in the business core,
4:53
while Mayor Ed Koch in 1979 looked into banning private cars entirely. For half a century,
5:00
New York city leadership has understood that in order to clean its air, raise money, and/or
5:04
support its mass transit system, it’s needed to make it harder or more expensive to drive from New
5:10
Jersey, or Queens, or Brooklyn, into Manhattan south of 60th. And yet, it’s never happened.
5:17
But it has come close. It started with a speech outside the Museum of Natural History,
5:22
where then Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced the idea by name–congestion pricing. It was
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just one of many components to his larger PlaNYC initiative introduced on that Earth Day in 2007,
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but one of its boldest. From below this line, any car entering Manhattan from 6 am to 6 pm Monday
5:41
through Friday would pay $8 while trucks would pay $21 per daily entry into the zone. Taxis would be
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exempt of the fee, as would emergency vehicles and those with handicapped license plates, and
5:52
any vehicles skirting around the perimeter aiming not to enter Manhattan, but to get around it,
5:56
so someone driving from Brooklyn to the Bronx by way of FDR Drive wouldn’t have to pay the
6:00
fee. The tolls would be collected by E-Z Pass readers so as not to slow down vehicles, and the
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toll money itself, 100% of all net revenue, would be invested back into city transit.
6:12
The project was bold, but between transit experts, bureaucrats, and elected officials,
6:17
it was popular. State governor Eliot Spitzer, representative Joseph Crowley, and even
6:22
presidential candidate Barack Obama supported the plan, while the US Department of Transportation
6:27
supported the initiative by awarding the city $354 million dollars in grants should it commit
6:32
to embracing new tech and infrastructure to combat urban congestion. The MTA also strongly
6:37
supported the program, as it accelerated its own capital planning process to align itself with the
6:42
congestion legislation. On a hurried timeline, it introduced its largest ever spending program of
6:47
$29.5 billion for the next five years—hoping to cover subway fleet expansion, the rehabilitation
6:54
of 44 subway stations, the purchase of some 2,500 new buses, the replacement of 57 miles of mainline
7:00
track, and the catch up on general maintenance across the transit authority’s property.
7:04
And beyond bold and broadly popular with most politicians and bureaucrats,
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congestion pricing was proven—in recent years, Stockholm and London had experimented with
7:14
congestion pricing in their downtown cores and were so far experiencing major benefits. Mass
7:20
transit systems benefited from the influx of investment, city residents benefited from the
7:24
increase in air quality and calmer streets, and even those that chose to begrudgingly pay the fees
7:29
benefited from the smoother traffic conditions. But just like in London and Sweden prior to
7:33
adopting congestion pricing, the idea wasn’t popular among all residents. At one point,
7:39
polling of New York city showed that 61% of all respondents opposed the move, with numbers from
7:44
the other boroughs even higher, as 70% of Bronx-area respondents opposed the idea.
7:50
Opposition was especially vocal in areas like eastern Queens and Southern Brooklyn,
7:55
where access to public transit was more difficult, and thus representatives argued such fees would
7:59
unfairly burden their constituents. Then across all of New York, there was a shared sentiment that
8:05
New Jersey commuters were getting away without paying their share, as fees for Jersey commuters
8:09
wouldn’t be meaningfully increased because the tolls they already paid to cross into Manhattan
8:13
would cover their congestion fee. And then there was one claim across the city that’s come
8:18
to follow congestion pricing—that it’s elitist. Congestion pricing, some correctly claimed, would
8:24
impact the working and middle class car commuters more than their upper class counterparts.
8:29
An $8 fee for the pleasure of commuting would be a much larger proportional chunk of someone’s
8:34
workday expenses if they work making $15 an hour instead of $150 an hour. Following such
8:40
logic then, congestion pricing could be painted as a means to rid the roads of working class
8:45
commuters—forcing only them to figure out new commute routes—while the city’s elite were able
8:50
to now drive into town with increased ease for a price that they could more comfortably cover.
8:56
Congestion pricing passed in the City Council, but once it made its way to the state assembly,
9:00
democratic lawmakers representing the city outside Manhattan blocked a vote,
9:04
missing the federal funding’s deadline, and killing congestion pricing on the spot.
9:09
Ultimately, New Yorkers had proved that they understood this was a feasible solution and
9:14
that congestion was a real problem worth addressing, but the solution got hung up
9:17
on issues as to whose cars, exactly, were to be limited, and who, exactly, would benefit
9:22
the most from such a program. But what’s easy to miss, what was missed by the opposition in 2008,
9:28
and not made clear enough by proponents in 2008, was exactly how elegant and
9:33
ingenious a solution congestion pricing really is. You see, when driving, everyone values their time
9:41
differently depending on… well, a lot of things: where they’re going, whether they’re on time,
9:46
why they’re driving, etc, and then these varying personal values translate to different monetary
9:51
values based on differing income levels. An person of average income driving into the city just for a
9:57
visit on their day off might value their time in traffic quite low—say $10 per hour—meaning
10:02
they’d theoretically be willing to pay $10 to eliminate that hour of traffic, but any cost
10:07
above that and they’d rather just wait it out. But in the car right behind them, there might be
10:12
a person of the same income level who’s late to their first meeting of the morning. They
10:16
might value their time quite highly—maybe $100 an hour—as the consequences of the delay from traffic
10:21
are far higher. They’d pay an enormous amount to eliminate traffic in that scenario. Theoretically
10:28
it’d be fair and good for both these drivers if the high value-of-time person paid the low
10:33
value-of-time person to cut in front of them, and do the same with plenty of others in order to get
10:37
to their destination faster. In some places this effectively happens through tolled express lanes,
10:43
but that’s not practically feasible in lower Manhattan. What is is congestion pricing. In it,
10:49
the person valuing their time higher is paying, say, $15, to drive on the roads, and that $15 is
10:55
effectively going to the low value-of-time person who’s been priced out of driving. That’s because
11:00
that person would get pushed onto public transit, and so if congestion charge fees go to public
11:05
transit, as is typical, it’s funding improvements that make transit better, faster, or cheaper.
11:11
But this is, of course, an overly simplified reality, and it only considers the benefits
11:15
to individual car users. In practice, there are plenty of upsides to freeing up the roads even
11:20
for non-drivers due to all the other scenarios where time is exceptionally valuable for a
11:26
particular vehicle type. For example, with the bus. With ten, twenty, thirty or more people,
11:32
even if their individual value of time is low, the collection of all of them means one bus can have
11:37
a value of time well into the hundreds per hour. Delivery vehicles are a similar scenario—in fact,
11:44
research by the Federal Highway Administration suggests that shippers value transit time between
11:48
$25 and $200 per hour. Everyone who buys anything in Manhattan effectively pays for
11:54
any disefficiency in goods delivery, so it’s a scenarios where the costs of traffic get
11:59
passed on to everyone. And perhaps the greatest example is that of ambulances. A report by New
12:04
York State Senator Brad Holman-Sigal and former NYC Traffic Commissioner Sam Schwartz pointed out
12:09
that between 2014 and 2024, New York EMS response times for life-threatening emergencies increased
12:15
by 24% from 6.09 to 7.54 minutes. Not all of that increase can be directly attributed to traffic,
12:24
but a lot can—half, in fact, according to their analysis. Minutes matter during life-threatening
12:30
emergencies. As the report points out, in cardiac arrest, a person’s chances of survival decreases
12:35
an average of 7-10% for every additional minute before medical intervention. With a stroke,
12:42
each additional minute is linked to the loss of an additional 1.9 million brain cells,
12:47
meaning New York City traffic quite directly leads to increased disability for stroke victims.
12:53
Right now, the cost of driving in Manhattan is so low that there are plenty of people doing
12:57
so even when it’s barely worth it to them. But with buses and delivery vehicles and ambulances
13:03
using the same roadways and having their extremely high benefit to society diluted by the congestion
13:08
caused, in part, by the low value-of-time drivers who have little disincentive to driving,
13:13
the net benefit to society of Manhattan’s roads is lower than it could be. That’s to say,
13:19
everyone that could take a fast cross-town bus, everyone who buys goods brought in by delivery
13:24
vehicles, everyone who might need an ambulance would benefit from congestion-free roads,
13:29
but they can’t capture that benefit now because there are all these drivers out
13:32
there that only barely want to be driving. But the logic goes further. You see,
13:38
traffic is not a linear phenomenon. That’s to say, every additional vehicle does not have the
13:44
same effect on how much it slows down traffic. The impact of an additional vehicle varies depending
13:50
on how congested the road already is. On a highway with a 70 mile per hour speed limit, it’s expected
13:56
that the roadway can have a throughput of up to 1,120 cars per hour, per lane while still
14:02
maintaining 70 mile per hour average speeds. As the number of cars using the highway increases,
14:08
their density increases, and therefore average speeds decrease—at 32 cars per mile per lane,
14:14
for example, speeds slow down to just 64 miles per hour, but even with the slower speeds, the higher
14:20
density means the roadway’s throughput still increases to 2,048 cars per hour. The roadway
14:26
is being used more efficiently as an asset, even as the efficiency of individual journey times gets
14:32
lower. This phenomenon continues as speeds get slower and density gets higher… up until
14:38
a point. According to the analysis behind this set of numbers, on a 70 mile per hour highway,
14:43
that tipping point is 53 miles per hour. At that speed, 2,400 cars get through a lane in an hour,
14:51
but it’s not really ever theoretically possible to get more than 2,400 cars
14:55
per hour through one of these lanes. While the intersection-less highway is the simplest example,
15:01
this same phenomenon occurs on all roads, with any congestion—there just is a theoretical
15:07
maximum throughput that roads can’t surpass, and overloading the road actually decreases
15:12
its efficiency below this maximum throughput. The factors that lead to this phenomenon are
15:17
numerous, varied, and not universally agreed upon or understood, and even the ones that are
15:22
are wildly complex, often being studied through the theories of fluid dynamics,
15:26
but there are are at least some examples of the nonlinear nature of traffic that make
15:30
intuitive sense. Thinking about the scenario of a long line of cars at an intersection,
15:34
let’s say it takes the first driver at the light a half second to react to it turning green. That’s
15:39
a half second of time lost by everyone in line, as it delays all of their arrival to the light.
15:45
Let’s then say it takes the driver second in line another half second to react to the first
15:50
driver moving. That’s now a full second of delay for everyone behind them. Now, if there are only
15:56
five cars in line this isn’t a big deal, as the fifth driver only loses two and a half seconds to
16:01
the cumulative inefficiencies of human reaction times. If there are 20 cars, though, that’s 10
16:06
seconds. Since every car has to wait through that whole back-up, the difference in travel
16:11
time between a lightly congested intersection and a heavily congested one, in this example,
16:16
is about 10 seconds—and even that’s assuming they all get through in the same light cycle.
16:22
Now, once again, this is only one small facet of the overall phenomenon. There are a myriad
16:26
of different factors that compound and decrease efficiency exponentially as roads get congested,
16:32
but the takeaway should be that considering traffic is exponential, there’s a lot of logic
16:36
in reducing vehicle numbers at least below the tipping point, to the point at which roadways
16:41
are most efficient. Manhattan’s roadways are consistently well above that point, and congestion
16:47
pricing is the best idea for how to fix that. Of course, all these benefits are understood
16:52
by the people who care most about this issue—certainly not every New Yorker,
16:56
but what’s proved enough of them to keep the concept alive a decade and a half after its
17:00
failure in the state assembly. As of the end of 2024, congestion pricing in the central business
17:05
core of New York City is the closest it’s ever been to becoming a reality. The policy is set: $9
17:12
per commercial vehicle in 2025, then likely $12 in ‘28, and $15 in 2031. The 100+ gantries required
17:20
to monitor roads and dole tolls are in place, too. Now, all that’s left to do is survive the
17:25
new year and its first four days until the program goes live on January 5th. But even with governor
17:31
Kathy Hochul’s greenlight, transit experts are still holding their breath. And justifiably so.
17:37
It was on the back of the spectacular, public meltdown of the MTA in 2017 that congestion
17:42
pricing returned into conversations over how to again fix the city’s crumbling public transit.
17:47
As the New York Times noted, the $500 million a year that congestion pricing would have generated
17:52
could’ve gone a long way to alleviating the city’s unraveling transit disaster. Governor Andrew
17:57
Cuomo, for his part, took a more future forward stance; that congestion pricing was an idea
18:02
whose time had finally come. And yet, since its time arrived, there’ve been two state governors,
18:08
two city mayors, a pandemic, a handful of lawsuits, and when the project was finally,
18:13
finally, finally on the verge, a pause from governor Hochul in early 2024. In so many ways
18:20
congestion pricing as part of Fix NYC initiated by Cuomo has played out as Bloomberg’s congestion
18:26
pricing as part of PlaNYC initiated a decade before it. The more recent one was able to get
18:31
the votes at the state level, but has run up against similarly heavy political opposition
18:36
in different forms—from outlying towns, the state of New Jersey, and Donald Trump.
18:41
But perhaps most confidence-inspiring as to the long term prospects of such a program is the
18:46
longevity of those that 2008 and 2017 proposals drew from, the congestion pricing models in London
18:52
and Stockholm that have remained in place for two decades now. Each has now played out slightly
18:57
differently, as Stockholm’s has kept total cars and congestion lower than London, but London has
19:02
made real strides in turning fees into additional bike lanes and bus routes, but both remain success
19:07
stories that New York’s drawn from. And likely most instructive for the New York urbanists is
19:11
the fact that congestion pricing became acceptable to Londoners polled and popular with those polled
19:16
in Stockholm, popular enough to remain policy and even survive rate hikes over the years.
19:22
So with history as a guide, what’s most likely to happen is a continued,
19:26
bitter fight over New York’s new tolls until the very hour they're implemented, but then, slowly,
19:32
as the streets get clearer, the air gets cleaner, the noise quieter, the subways better, the
19:38
ambulances faster, New York will slowly learn to love paying $9 to speed through lower Manhattan.
19:46
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