On its third day, New York City’s congestion pricing system isn’t going as well as hoped, but it’s still a good idea and it can be improved.
Congestion pricing is supposed to do two things: raise money and reduce congestion. I don’t know how much money it’s raising, but the numbers suggest that it has yet to meaningfully reduce congestion inside the relief zone.
Vehicles are moving faster over the bridges and through the tunnels, but they’re going as slowly as ever on city streets, according to real-time traffic data. On Tuesday at 9 a.m., for example, it took only about 11 minutes to get through the Holland Tunnel between New Jersey and Lower Manhattan. That’s around 50 percent faster than it took at that hour on Tuesdays before the congestion pricing.
But moving around inside the zone remains sluggish. To get from Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side of Manhattan to Midtown East took the same amount of time on Tuesday at 9 a.m. as on past Mondays at that hour.
That was no fluke: The pattern was the same on those routes and others on Sunday and Monday.
You can see these numbers and many others for yourself at the Congestion Pricing Tracker, which is based on Google Maps real-time traffic data. Huge credit to the creators of the website, Benjamin Moshes, a senior at Brown, and his brother Joshua Moshes, a freshman at Northeastern.
INRIX, a transportation analytics company, similarly reported that the average travel speed in the congestion relief zone was 12 miles per hour at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, slightly slower than the 12.1 m.p.h. at the same time on the corresponding Tuesday in early 2024.
It’s early yet, but the difficulty that the congestion pricing system is having in speeding up traffic inside the zone shouldn’t surprise anyone: Its main impact is on personal vehicles, which accounted for only 35 percent of the vehicles inside the zone before congestion pricing began, according to the Traffic Mobility Review Board.
For-hire vehicles (such as Ubers) and taxis accounted for 52 percent of vehicles in the zone, and they are more lightly charged per unit of congestion that they cause. The same is true of trucks and commercial vans, which pay once and then can drive around all day inside the zone.
The solution is to raise congestion fees for those types of vehicles, as Michael Ostrovsky of Stanford and Frank Yang of the University of Chicago wrote in a research paper last year. The city is already giving incentives to delivery trucks to make more of their deliveries at night.
The post A Sluggish Start for Congestion Pricing appeared first on New York Times.
