NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker

You are correct, steveBK is incorrect.

It's a neat little project but people aren't doing that on the regular so the data should be pretty good.

I have a flexible commute that sometimes involves driving a car into the zone and if I see snow in the forecast I'll be less likely to be in the city with a car that day.

I love congestion pricing, I will gladly pay $9 if it lowers traffic during peak hours. I also try to plan trips in the offpeak hours anyway. If you leave at 11pm you can get from shea stadium to Philly in an hour forty-five.

I think it was worse in suburban areas slightly outside of the city, at least on the NJ side. In western Bergen county, I had a bit over 1 inch and had to break out the shovel for the sidewalk.

Luxembourg has free public transit.

> There is a reason no country provides it.

While small, Luxembourg is still considered a country. And their public transit is both free, and fantastic

Some internet searching suggests fares account for between 25 and 33 percent of the MTA’s revenue. There’s no way the infrastructure for collecting fares costs that much.

This is one of the main criticisms of free fares: in reality the revenue stream from fares is never actually fully replaced, so it just results in the transit agency becoming underfunded. This makes transit worse for existing users who are already paying. The new users you get because of free fares are mostly casual users like tourists who have alternate options, so serving them isn’t that useful and not worth the negative impact on existing users.

This is true, but it's also changing in interesting ways: the rise of both light-truck SUVs and EVs as a whole means that passenger cars are, on average, heaver than they've ever been before.

This is still a small portion of overall road damage, but it matters in places like NYC. In particular it matters on our bridges and cantilevered highways, where passenger traffic can't be easily filtered away from weight-sensitive areas like commercial traffic can.

>Semis et al. definitely do not pay taxes proportionate with the damage they cause to the roads, but then again we all need them even if we don't drive.

I don't think there would be much point. At the end of the day we'd all pay it because we all consume the goods they deliver or transport during intermediary steps in the supply chain.

I guess you could argue that the status quo is somewhat of a tax incentive that favors local manufacturing (i.e they use the roads for every step of the chain vs imported goods which only use it for delivery). I don't take much issue with that.

Repairing road damage is only a part of road cost. We do not build expensive 2-16 lane roads and massive parking lots to support trucks and buses. We build them because everyone needs to drive their personal vehicle to work each day at 8am.

Then the space taken up by unnecessarily big roads and parking lots further stretches distances between destinations out, leading to... more roads required.

I agree that semis are subsidized to a ridiculous degree, but I don't agree that we necessarily _need_ them. What we need is a way to transport things, and in a non-subsidized world, we'd probably come up with a different way which could be just as good or better.

Note that diesel is taxed nearly 40% higher than gasoline per gallon in the US. And shipping trucks use a lot more gallons of gas (total and per mile).

Should the rate be higher? Perhaps. But it's already a bit slanted towards vehicle weight based on fuel type and consumption.

Electric vehicles, and especially electric shipping trucks, are going to require finding new taxation sources.

Figuring out how, and how much, to pay, and then fumbling with cash and change or whatever, during the fairly stressful experience of boarding, is something of a barrier to using transit. So removing the fare payment entirely removes that barrier. But, that's gotten a lot easier with support for paying fares in apps, so I think it's a lot less of an issue now than it was ten years ago. I used to be in favor of free fares, mostly because it'd make using transit less intimidating for newbies. But I'm on the fence now.

Private passenger car driver is paying 12x Taxi toll / 6x Uber toll. Taxi/Uber toll is passed directly onto he rider.

Why should it be cheaper to be chauffeured?

Also your average Taxi may not even cross into the CPZ 12x per day, so unclear we are making it up on volume either.

> The uber/taxi fee is charged per ride, whereas private passenger cars pay once per day. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.

The fee for cabs was actually set by dividing the regular fee for private cars by the average number of trips cabs make into the Congestion Relief Zone per day (because the fee is only paid once per day for private cars, but per trip for cabs)

if the passenger car pays once a day, it's only generating one unit of congestion.

> In the case of a TLC driver you'll have them paying probably well over $100 a day (assuming the $2.75 charge x 4-5 trips an hour give or take) and aiding in the transport of probably dozens of people to their destination.

This is completely wrong.

First, the fee for cabs is different from the fee for private cars, and in fact, it was set at the value which is the private car fee divided by the average number of trips into the Congestion Relief Zone that cabs make each day.

Second, passengers are the ones paying the fee, not cab drivers. It's one of the fees tacked on to your receipt.

Third, this fee has already been charged on cab fares since 2019. The only difference is it's now being applied to all vehicles except taxis/FHVs. For cab drivers, there's no difference - it was the one part of the program that has already been in effect for years!

I have a car and live in Brooklyn. I usually take an Uber anyway because parking is a pain and/or expensive.

So I was previously comparing: $0 car toll + $20-50 parking vs $0 car toll + $50 Taxi/Uber fare

Now I am comparing: $9 car toll + $20-50 parking vs $1.50 Uber toll + $50 Uber fare

That is - the fee is being passed onto riders anyway, so why should I pay a lower toll sitting in the back of an Uber than when driving myself across the bridge?

This is where some of the concerns about classism come into play. I'm already paying more to be driven around in an Uber vs drive myself. Why should I be given a toll discount?

So far, none of the data provided by the linked site would suggest Manhattan will see a reduction in transportation times. This is with the Monday snow however, which I'd imagine caused delays by itself.

I will say, being in Manhattan, their seems to be less traffic on the road. I wonder if Google Maps traffic data is using a rolling average of ~7 days or something

I thought London's traffic returned to the same levels as prior to their congestion pricing?

... for rich people.

There are several points. Some want it to get people to not drive, but work from home or drive elsewhere instead is fine with them. Some want it to get more people on transit. Some want it to fund transit expansion. You can belong to more than one of the above groups. Nobody belongs to them all.

The first sentence they said was:

> 1. The data is obviously flawed, but if there's anything to speculate from it, it's that the actual congestion in lower Manhattan isn't affected that much.

I'm not saying that's correct or incorrect, but the person you replied to already considered what you brought up and responded to it. The primary "point" seems not to have worked, so the in-practice reason to keep the policy becomes other benefits, which for the city would include revenue being raised. (I guess you can argue it's not a "success" if the main point wasn't achieved, but good luck convincing the city to give up the additional revenue.)

Because it’s based on the assumption that congestion didn’t actually go down, see number 1 posted by op.

If you want congestion to go down, keep raising the price. It will eventually go down and revenue could go up a lot.

Big econ brained is thinking about whether the congestion pricing is approximately captures the negative externalities of traffic

First, it's not exclusively defined by revenue (which is what my first point was alluding to). Second, the underlying assumption of revenue generated is that it's going to the MTA and used to improve public transit and therefore quality of life in the city, which would be a success.

Most of the bridges and tunnels have their own tolls, with a few exceptions like the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. One possible explanation is that the advocates were right and the combined bridge/tunnel + congestion toll is enough to dissuade driving into the zone entirely for people arriving via bridge/tunnel, but the lower congestion toll on its own isn't as much of a deterrent if you have access to a free crossing into Manhattan from other boros or were already in Manhattan (outsize of the zone) to begin with.

It's a bit silly to set a fixed rate.

Here in Singapore, the congestion charging pioneer, we adjust the fee dynamically to keep traffic flowing.

> I'm not sure how to reconcile the significant drop in the bridge and tunnel commute times with the apparent non-effect on commute times within the congestion relief zone.

Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of that either but it'll be interesting to see when more/better data comes available. Maybe car traffic getting to Manhattan is reduced but those people are using more taxis and Ubers to get around once they're in

Not to mention the costs of treating them.

Others have mentioned the unfairness of asking taxpayers to subsidize drivers. This is particularly egregious in Midtown Manhattan where many taxpayers are not drivers and many drivers are not (local) taxpayers.

But even as a driver I prefer when cities place an efficient price on parking. Otherwise, if parking is too cheap compared to demand it costs time and stress circling the block to find a place to park. Market pricing, where the city sets whatever prices are necessary to maintain an empty spot or two on each block, seems more fair, efficient, and pleasant.

Why should everyone pay equally, rather than people that currently store their private property for free on public land in some of the most expensive real estate in the country?

The point wasn't supposed to be to raise more money, it was to decrease the amount of people using the roads. Taxing more would, if anything, incentivize people to use those parking spots to "get their money's worth." More realistically, it would not add a barrier to actually parking on a day-to-day basis. Making you think about and reconsider it every time you go to do it with the paywall is what they want (and what is arguably necessary in order to fix the underlying problem, unless those tax dollars are going to go towards multi-level parking garages that add spaces and not just the existing roads).

It’s kind of how I feel about rent too. Instead of paywalling this $7k/mo apartment maybe just tax everyone a fair amount?

Yea, not sure if it was a post-holiday thing or weather thing, but shit the trains have been rammed.

The problem is it's just not that much money against the inflated costs of NYC transit construction. It's budgeted to produce $1B/year, though that was before Hochul unilaterally cut the toll by 40%. $1B is like a 2000ft of subway tunnel or half a station these days.

You're gonna need a lot more money than that when ~40% of MTA total spending goes to pay pensions and healthcare for people that don't even work anymore by ~2040.

You need ~35% just to keep the system running functioning (which does not include operations - like the actual drivers).

That's only going to leave you ~25% leftover for everything else - and a non-trivial percentage of that comes from the Federal Government - which may not be there in the future (when all of their money is going to pensions and healthcare).

Would be nice if they made transit better first instead of making driving worse first.

When I lived in NYC I paid huge amounts of money in taxes and as far as I can tell got very little for my money.

Until they can start using their enormous existing budget wisely I don't see any reason they should be given more money.

Homeless people are not inherently unsafe. Unstable people who threaten & assault those around them are.

> HN's takes on cars are shockingly bad. For a community as thoughtful as HN, their responses are (to use an insult provocatively) car brained.

Hm, as a big public-transit advocate coming here 5 hours after your comment, I actually thought the discussion is in pretty good shape. There's a handful of "cars only!" nuts, but they're a small minority. It seems the vibes around this topic are fairly positive, with lots of support for funding better public transit.

And this is why we have traffic today per that theory. Demand were induced and in a lot of cases cities didn’t end up building key reliever routes. So those initiall routes were overcapacity potentially from day one in the city.

It is also important to note that induced demand is not infinite. There is a point when there aren’t more drivers to actually get on the roads. We see this in some midwestern cities that had their full freeway plans built and didn’t experience significant growth after those plans were made. Those are “20 miles in 20 minutes” places any time of day for the most part.

Problem is, none of the money from congestion pricing is shared with NJ transit/infra

Flight got rebooked with a couple hours notice, stayed at LGA checkin till it opened, had the first flight out. Fare was more than 100$

I did JFK-EWR coming back from HND one time. Not the only option but probably the best, all things considered. That's life in the fast-paced, slam-bang, laugh-in-the-face-of-death world of non-revving.

It is expected that fees will also be passed down to non-wealthy locals by services whose vehicles need to utilize these roads as well-- they will raise their prices