Opinion | A slow start for congestion prices

On day three, New York’s congestion pricing system isn’t going as well as hoped, but it’s still a good idea and can be improved.

Congestion pricing is intended to do two things: raise money and reduce congestion. I don’t know how much money this will raise, but the numbers suggest that congestion within the relief zone has not yet been significantly reduced.

According to real-time traffic data, vehicles are moving faster over the bridges and through the tunnels, but on city streets they are as slow as ever. For example, on Tuesday at 9 a.m., the journey through the Holland Tunnel between New Jersey and Lower Manhattan only took about 11 minutes. That is around 50 percent faster than at this hour on the Tuesday before congestion pricing was introduced.

But movement within the zone remains sluggish. The journey from Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan to Midtown East took just as long at 9 a.m. on Tuesday as it did at this time on previous Mondays.

This was no coincidence: the pattern was the same on these and other routes on Sunday and Monday.

You can see these and many other numbers for yourself in the Congestion Pricing Tracker, which is based on real-time traffic data from Google Maps. A big thank you goes out to the site’s creators, Benjamin Moshes, a graduate of Brown University, and his brother Joshua Moshes, a freshman at Northeastern University.

INRIX, a transportation analytics firm, also reported that the average travel speed in the congestion relief zone was 12 mph as of 8 a.m. Tuesday, slightly slower than the 12.1 mph at the same time on the corresponding Tuesday in early 2024.

It’s still early days, but the difficulties that the congestion pricing system is having in speeding up traffic within the zone should surprise no one: the main impact is on private vehicles, which accounted for only 35 percent of vehicles within the zone before congestion pricing began, said the Traffic Mobility Review Board.

For-hire vehicles (e.g., Ubers) and taxis made up 52 percent of vehicles in the zone, and they are charged a smaller fee per unit of congestion they cause. The same goes for trucks and vans, which pay once and can then drive around within the zone all day.

The solution is to increase congestion pricing for these 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 already incentivizes delivery trucks to make their deliveries more often at night.