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0:00This is 59th street in Manhattan. Below it,
spread across downtown and midtown Manhattan,
0:06reside some 684,000 New Yorkers. That’s more than
the population of Vermont living in just under
0:13nine square miles or 23 square kilometers of land.
Or, that’s a population density of about 76,000
0:21people per square mile, making lower Manhattan
singularly dense by American standards. If this
0:26were a city by itself, it’d be the country’s most
densely populated, far out cramping current #1,
0:32Guttenberg, New Jersey, just across the river
where a fifth of its 12,000 residents are stuffed
0:37into a single building complex. If it were its own
county, its population density would almost double
0:42the nation’s second most dense: Kings County,
New York. And for similarly dense cities to
0:47lower Manhattan, you’d need to go abroad, where it
would rank around Kolkata, Kathmandu, and Makati,
0:52comfortably within the world’s top ten.
But 76,000 per square mile only begins to tell
0:58the story of just how cramped this area really
is. New York City also has the most office space
1:04by square footage of any city in North America,
and just Manhattan by itself contains some 81% of
1:10that. For comparison, Los Angeles, the city with
the second most such space at 432 million square
1:16feet, is dwarfed by Manhattan’s 592 million.
With so much space comes a flood of commuters
1:23every morning, adding another 1.2 million or
so people to the southern end of the island.
1:29For the work day then, an area of just nine
square miles has a momentary population of
1:33about two million. Two million that need to get
to work, two million that need to run errands,
1:39and two million that need to get back home
at the end of the day, which, for a majority,
1:43means getting back out of Manhattan.
But while this sub-city urban core that’s
1:48more populous than a handful of American states
is uniquely large, uniquely mobile, and uniquely
1:53stuffed; for the past century—effectively, the
age of the automobile—there’s really been no
1:58unique solution or system for managing or limiting
traffic. Aside from a prohibition on right turns
2:04on red and honking, driving in America's densest
nine square miles works the same way as in the
2:10other 3.8 million square miles. Because of this,
each and every work day, some 140,000 commuters
2:17enter Manhattan by car, while about 1,000,000
people enter the commercial business district
2:21south of 60th street by automobile—largely for
only the price of the gas it takes to get there,
2:26the toll to cross the bridge, and the cost of
parking. All expenses that a rural American
2:31would scoff at, but expenses that hardly reflect
the shared cost that cars create in the US’s most
2:37densely populated environment—from air quality and
pedestrian danger, to simple quality of life.
2:43The result is this: New York’s #1 standing
in Inrix’s 2023 congestion impact ranking,
2:50where the average driver moved at just 10 miles
or 16 kilometers per hour and gave up about 101
2:56of their hours a year to sit in traffic
related delays. And those are stats for
3:01the whole of New York City. Manhattan was far
far worse. While most streets and avenues are
3:08limited at 25 miles per hour, average traffic
moves at a glacial 7 miles or 11 kilometers
3:15per hour. This is not a new problem, either.
Rather it’s one that’s just getting worse—in
3:202010 the average taxi navigated the Central
Business District, or Manhattan below 60th St.,
3:26at 9.1 miles per hour, and every year following
through 2018, it’s slowed. While COVID lightened
3:32the congestion for 2020 and 2021, experts are
now saying that traffic hasn’t only returned,
3:38it's gotten even slower than before 2019. Now,
the exact complexion of the problem has shifted
3:44over the years. The number of daily vehicles
entering the Core Business District, for instance,
3:48has dropped, but their impact has been replaced
by an ever higher share of for-hire vehicles
3:53serving ride-hailing apps and clogging the city
streets. But the very root of the problem is so
3:59remarkably simple. There are just too many cars.
Now, oftentimes in an urban context, a problem may
4:07present as simple and straightforward enough, but
a solution could be anything but. That, though,
4:13is not necessarily the case here. In fact, as
long as car congestion has been an issue here,
4:18one potential answer’s remained equally
obvious, equally straightforward, equally
4:23simple—disincentivize driving into Manhattan.
Going as far back as the 1930s, mayors have
4:30proposed tolls to cross into Manhattan over the
East and Harlem Rivers to raise city funds or,
4:35in the ‘50s, to raise money for the subway.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, such ideas were again
4:40returned to in an attempt first to popularize
mass transit use, then to make progress toward
4:44meeting the standards of the 1970 Clean Air Act.
Further hoping to pressure individual car users,
4:50Mayor John Lindsay thought to reduce
city parking in the business core,
4:53while Mayor Ed Koch in 1979 looked into banning
private cars entirely. For half a century,
5:00New York city leadership has understood that
in order to clean its air, raise money, and/or
5:04support its mass transit system, it’s needed to
make it harder or more expensive to drive from New
5:10Jersey, or Queens, or Brooklyn, into Manhattan
south of 60th. And yet, it’s never happened.
5:17But it has come close. It started with a
speech outside the Museum of Natural History,
5:22where then Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced
the idea by name–congestion pricing. It was
5:28just one of many components to his larger PlaNYC
initiative introduced on that Earth Day in 2007,
5:34but one of its boldest. From below this line, any
car entering Manhattan from 6 am to 6 pm Monday
5:41through Friday would pay $8 while trucks would pay
$21 per daily entry into the zone. Taxis would be
5:48exempt of the fee, as would emergency vehicles
and those with handicapped license plates, and
5:52any vehicles skirting around the perimeter aiming
not to enter Manhattan, but to get around it,
5:56so someone driving from Brooklyn to the Bronx
by way of FDR Drive wouldn’t have to pay the
6:00fee. The tolls would be collected by E-Z Pass
readers so as not to slow down vehicles, and the
6:05toll money itself, 100% of all net revenue,
would be invested back into city transit.
6:12The project was bold, but between transit
experts, bureaucrats, and elected officials,
6:17it was popular. State governor Eliot Spitzer,
representative Joseph Crowley, and even
6:22presidential candidate Barack Obama supported the
plan, while the US Department of Transportation
6:27supported the initiative by awarding the city
$354 million dollars in grants should it commit
6:32to embracing new tech and infrastructure to
combat urban congestion. The MTA also strongly
6:37supported the program, as it accelerated its own
capital planning process to align itself with the
6:42congestion 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
6:54of 44 subway stations, the purchase of some 2,500
new buses, the replacement of 57 miles of mainline
7:00track, and the catch up on general maintenance
across the transit authority’s property.
7:04And beyond bold and broadly popular
with most politicians and bureaucrats,
7:08congestion pricing was proven—in recent years,
Stockholm and London had experimented with
7:14congestion pricing in their downtown cores and
were so far experiencing major benefits. Mass
7:20transit systems benefited from the influx of
investment, city residents benefited from the
7:24increase in air quality and calmer streets, and
even those that chose to begrudgingly pay the fees
7:29benefited from the smoother traffic conditions.
But just like in London and Sweden prior to
7:33adopting congestion pricing, the idea wasn’t
popular among all residents. At one point,
7:39polling of New York city showed that 61% of all
respondents opposed the move, with numbers from
7:44the other boroughs even higher, as 70% of
Bronx-area respondents opposed the idea.
7:50Opposition was especially vocal in areas
like eastern Queens and Southern Brooklyn,
7:55where access to public transit was more difficult,
and thus representatives argued such fees would
7:59unfairly burden their constituents. Then across
all of New York, there was a shared sentiment that
8:05New Jersey commuters were getting away without
paying their share, as fees for Jersey commuters
8:09wouldn’t be meaningfully increased because the
tolls they already paid to cross into Manhattan
8:13would cover their congestion fee. And then
there was one claim across the city that’s come
8:18to follow congestion pricing—that it’s elitist.
Congestion pricing, some correctly claimed, would
8:24impact the working and middle class car commuters
more than their upper class counterparts.
8:29An $8 fee for the pleasure of commuting would
be a much larger proportional chunk of someone’s
8:34workday expenses if they work making $15 an
hour instead of $150 an hour. Following such
8:40logic then, congestion pricing could be painted
as a means to rid the roads of working class
8:45commuters—forcing only them to figure out new
commute routes—while the city’s elite were able
8:50to now drive into town with increased ease for
a price that they could more comfortably cover.
8:56Congestion pricing passed in the City Council,
but once it made its way to the state assembly,
9:00democratic lawmakers representing the
city outside Manhattan blocked a vote,
9:04missing the federal funding’s deadline, and
killing congestion pricing on the spot.
9:09Ultimately, New Yorkers had proved that they
understood this was a feasible solution and
9:14that congestion was a real problem worth
addressing, but the solution got hung up
9:17on issues as to whose cars, exactly, were to
be limited, and who, exactly, would benefit
9:22the most from such a program. But what’s easy to
miss, what was missed by the opposition in 2008,
9:28and not made clear enough by proponents
in 2008, was exactly how elegant and
9:33ingenious a solution congestion pricing really is.
You see, when driving, everyone values their time
9:41differently depending on… well, a lot of things:
where they’re going, whether they’re on time,
9:46why they’re driving, etc, and then these varying
personal values translate to different monetary
9:51values based on differing income levels. An person
of average income driving into the city just for a
9:57visit on their day off might value their time
in traffic quite low—say $10 per hour—meaning
10:02they’d theoretically be willing to pay $10 to
eliminate that hour of traffic, but any cost
10:07above that and they’d rather just wait it out.
But in the car right behind them, there might be
10:12a person of the same income level who’s late
to their first meeting of the morning. They
10:16might value their time quite highly—maybe $100 an
hour—as the consequences of the delay from traffic
10:21are far higher. They’d pay an enormous amount to
eliminate traffic in that scenario. Theoretically
10:28it’d be fair and good for both these drivers
if the high value-of-time person paid the low
10:33value-of-time person to cut in front of them, and
do the same with plenty of others in order to get
10:37to their destination faster. In some places this
effectively happens through tolled express lanes,
10:43but that’s not practically feasible in lower
Manhattan. What is is congestion pricing. In it,
10:49the person valuing their time higher is paying,
say, $15, to drive on the roads, and that $15 is
10:55effectively going to the low value-of-time person
who’s been priced out of driving. That’s because
11:00that person would get pushed onto public transit,
and so if congestion charge fees go to public
11:05transit, as is typical, it’s funding improvements
that make transit better, faster, or cheaper.
11:11But this is, of course, an overly simplified
reality, and it only considers the benefits
11:15to individual car users. In practice, there are
plenty of upsides to freeing up the roads even
11:20for non-drivers due to all the other scenarios
where time is exceptionally valuable for a
11:26particular vehicle type. For example, with the
bus. With ten, twenty, thirty or more people,
11:32even if their individual value of time is low, the
collection of all of them means one bus can have
11:37a value of time well into the hundreds per hour.
Delivery vehicles are a similar scenario—in fact,
11:44research 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
11:54any disefficiency in goods delivery, so it’s
a scenarios where the costs of traffic get
11:59passed on to everyone. And perhaps the greatest
example is that of ambulances. A report by New
12:04York State Senator Brad Holman-Sigal and former
NYC Traffic Commissioner Sam Schwartz pointed out
12:09that between 2014 and 2024, New York EMS response
times for life-threatening emergencies increased
12:15by 24% from 6.09 to 7.54 minutes. Not all of that
increase can be directly attributed to traffic,
12:24but a lot can—half, in fact, according to their
analysis. Minutes matter during life-threatening
12:30emergencies. As the report points out, in cardiac
arrest, a person’s chances of survival decreases
12:35an average of 7-10% for every additional minute
before medical intervention. With a stroke,
12:42each additional minute is linked to the loss
of an additional 1.9 million brain cells,
12:47meaning New York City traffic quite directly
leads to increased disability for stroke victims.
12:53Right now, the cost of driving in Manhattan is
so low that there are plenty of people doing
12:57so even when it’s barely worth it to them. But
with buses and delivery vehicles and ambulances
13:03using the same roadways and having their extremely
high benefit to society diluted by the congestion
13:08caused, in part, by the low value-of-time
drivers who have little disincentive to driving,
13:13the net benefit to society of Manhattan’s
roads is lower than it could be. That’s to say,
13:19everyone that could take a fast cross-town bus,
everyone who buys goods brought in by delivery
13:24vehicles, everyone who might need an ambulance
would benefit from congestion-free roads,
13:29but they can’t capture that benefit now
because there are all these drivers out
13:32there that only barely want to be driving.
But the logic goes further. You see,
13:38traffic is not a linear phenomenon. That’s to
say, every additional vehicle does not have the
13:44same effect on how much it slows down traffic. The
impact of an additional vehicle varies depending
13:50on how congested the road already is. On a highway
with a 70 mile per hour speed limit, it’s expected
13:56that the roadway can have a throughput of up
to 1,120 cars per hour, per lane while still
14:02maintaining 70 mile per hour average speeds. As
the number of cars using the highway increases,
14:08their density increases, and therefore average
speeds decrease—at 32 cars per mile per lane,
14:14for example, speeds slow down to just 64 miles per
hour, but even with the slower speeds, the higher
14:20density means the roadway’s throughput still
increases to 2,048 cars per hour. The roadway
14:26is being used more efficiently as an asset, even
as the efficiency of individual journey times gets
14:32lower. This phenomenon continues as speeds
get slower and density gets higher… up until
14:38a point. According to the analysis behind this
set of numbers, on a 70 mile per hour highway,
14:43that tipping point is 53 miles per hour. At that
speed, 2,400 cars get through a lane in an hour,
14:51but it’s not really ever theoretically
possible to get more than 2,400 cars
14:55per hour through one of these lanes. While the
intersection-less highway is the simplest example,
15:01this same phenomenon occurs on all roads, with
any congestion—there just is a theoretical
15:07maximum throughput that roads can’t surpass,
and overloading the road actually decreases
15:12its efficiency below this maximum throughput.
The factors that lead to this phenomenon are
15:17numerous, varied, and not universally agreed
upon or understood, and even the ones that are
15:22are wildly complex, often being studied
through the theories of fluid dynamics,
15:26but there are are at least some examples of
the nonlinear nature of traffic that make
15:30intuitive sense. Thinking about the scenario
of a long line of cars at an intersection,
15:34let’s say it takes the first driver at the light
a half second to react to it turning green. That’s
15:39a half second of time lost by everyone in line,
as it delays all of their arrival to the light.
15:45Let’s then say it takes the driver second in
line another half second to react to the first
15:50driver moving. That’s now a full second of delay
for everyone behind them. Now, if there are only
15:56five cars in line this isn’t a big deal, as the
fifth driver only loses two and a half seconds to
16:01the cumulative inefficiencies of human reaction
times. If there are 20 cars, though, that’s 10
16:06seconds. Since every car has to wait through
that whole back-up, the difference in travel
16:11time between a lightly congested intersection
and a heavily congested one, in this example,
16:16is about 10 seconds—and even that’s assuming
they all get through in the same light cycle.
16:22Now, once again, this is only one small facet
of the overall phenomenon. There are a myriad
16:26of different factors that compound and decrease
efficiency exponentially as roads get congested,
16:32but the takeaway should be that considering
traffic is exponential, there’s a lot of logic
16:36in reducing vehicle numbers at least below the
tipping point, to the point at which roadways
16:41are most efficient. Manhattan’s roadways are
consistently well above that point, and congestion
16:47pricing is the best idea for how to fix that.
Of course, all these benefits are understood
16:52by the people who care most about this
issue—certainly not every New Yorker,
16:56but what’s proved enough of them to keep the
concept alive a decade and a half after its
17:00failure in the state assembly. As of the end of
2024, congestion pricing in the central business
17:05core of New York City is the closest it’s ever
been to becoming a reality. The policy is set: $9
17:12per commercial vehicle in 2025, then likely $12 in
‘28, and $15 in 2031. The 100+ gantries required
17:20to monitor roads and dole tolls are in place,
too. Now, all that’s left to do is survive the
17:25new year and its first four days until the program
goes live on January 5th. But even with governor
17:31Kathy Hochul’s greenlight, transit experts are
still holding their breath. And justifiably so.
17:37It was on the back of the spectacular, public
meltdown of the MTA in 2017 that congestion
17:42pricing returned into conversations over how to
again fix the city’s crumbling public transit.
17:47As the New York Times noted, the $500 million a
year that congestion pricing would have generated
17:52could’ve gone a long way to alleviating the city’s
unraveling transit disaster. Governor Andrew
17:57Cuomo, for his part, took a more future forward
stance; that congestion pricing was an idea
18:02whose time had finally come. And yet, since its
time arrived, there’ve been two state governors,
18:08two city mayors, a pandemic, a handful of
lawsuits, and when the project was finally,
18:13finally, finally on the verge, a pause from
governor Hochul in early 2024. In so many ways
18:20congestion pricing as part of Fix NYC initiated
by Cuomo has played out as Bloomberg’s congestion
18:26pricing as part of PlaNYC initiated a decade
before it. The more recent one was able to get
18:31the votes at the state level, but has run up
against similarly heavy political opposition
18:36in 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
18:46longevity of those that 2008 and 2017 proposals
drew from, the congestion pricing models in London
18:52and Stockholm that have remained in place for
two decades now. Each has now played out slightly
18:57differently, as Stockholm’s has kept total cars
and congestion lower than London, but London has
19:02made real strides in turning fees into additional
bike lanes and bus routes, but both remain success
19:07stories that New York’s drawn from. And likely
most instructive for the New York urbanists is
19:11the fact that congestion pricing became acceptable
to Londoners polled and popular with those polled
19:16in Stockholm, popular enough to remain policy
and even survive rate hikes over the years.
19:22So with history as a guide, what’s
most likely to happen is a continued,
19:26bitter fight over New York’s new tolls until the
very hour they're implemented, but then, slowly,
19:32as the streets get clearer, the air gets cleaner,
the noise quieter, the subways better, the
19:38ambulances faster, New York will slowly learn to
love paying $9 to speed through lower Manhattan.
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