Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Getty
“By the way, I have a favorite statistic,” Juliette Michaelson tells me midway through our conversation. She’s a deputy chief of the MTA, working on policy and especially on the rollout of the congestion-pricing toll program. “The city’s 311 collects information about how many people call about what is called ‘excessive car-honking,’” she says. “And the number of complaints about excessive car-honking in January and February was 70 percent lower than last January and February. I just love that, because it’s all-in-one.”
We’re 100 days into the era of congestion pricing, which began with cheers and a few rants very early on the morning of January 5. The statistics from January into March, both all-in-one and otherwise, are rolling in, and they show a trend that is clear and unmistakable: It’s working. There is far, far less traffic on the streets. A group called the Congestion Pricing Now Coalition — made up of a wide array of advocacy organizations that includes the Regional Plan Association, the Riders Alliance, Open Plans, the Nature Conservancy, and Transportation Alternatives — has done a nice job of marshaling the facts, and if you are even slightly persuadable, it makes a strong case. The Holland Tunnel, at rush hour, has 65 percent fewer delays than it did before, and the time it takes to get through is down 48 percent. In those 100 days, 6 million fewer cars drove into lower Manhattan than had done so a year earlier. In March, the decrease was 80,000 per day. In the congestion zone, we’re seeing half as many traffic-related injuries. The bus routes in Manhattan are so much less clogged that the drivers are being forced to slow down to maintain their schedules. (As a rider, I experienced this twice last week, and it was bizarre: a bus moseying along at 5 mph in a wide-open lane. Presumably the schedules will soon be retimed.) The diminished honking is a bonus.
The cynic might call all of that a problem rather than a success, suggesting that Manhattan has lost 80,000 daily restaurant customers, theatergoers, and shoppers. How many of them took the train instead? It’s a little hard to judge, because year-over-year numbers are likely to incorporate some of the return-to-office shift, but the commuter lines are definitely fuller than they were. In January 2024, Metro-North carried almost exactly 5 million riders. In January 2025, it carried 5.3 million, up about 8 percent. The numbers on NJ Transit and the LIRR are higher as well — and in the case of the latter, they began to rise immediately after January 5, strongly suggesting that those passengers used to be drivers. Broadway-ticket sales are up, too, and the city’s Business Improvement Districts say they’ve seen 1.5 million more visitors year over year. Again, we’re still in COVID-recovery mode, and theater sales are governed by things besides traffic, but at a minimum, this all suggests that the tolls are not choking off business, no matter what the Comfort Diner guy believes.
“Totally anecdotally,” Michaelson continues, “doctors are reporting that their patients are not late for appointments. I spoke to someone who has to deliver merchandise who was saying, ‘It saves so much time.’ There was a study in 2019 by the Partnership for New York City estimating that the cost of traffic to businesses and individuals was about $20 billion a year in wasted activity. And we’ve already captured some of that — it’s hard to quantify, certainly, but there’s no question that at the macro level, in addition to at the personal level, there’s been a lot of benefit. I’ve even literally gotten comments from people who live near the tunnels that they clean up less soot at their windowsills.” As implausible as it sounds, I myself live near a tunnel, and I can confirm it.
Almost everybody who knows about urbanism and planning believed congestion pricing would work, and it sometimes seemed that everyone else thought it would fail. New York is different, they said, a place where well-intended policies run aground on a mix of cynicism and selfishness and cussedness. The phrase cash grab got thrown around a lot. The idea took more than a decade before it squeaked through the Legislature, and even then it was uneasily embraced by Kathy Hochul, who lost her nerve, then found it again at the last possible moment. The governor of New Jersey tried to stop it. In a December statewide poll from Siena, 51 percent of people were against the plan, and only 29 percent backed it.
The popularity numbers have not entirely flipped, but there has been a recent follow-up to that Siena poll from December, and the for-against split has gone from 29-51 to 33-40. Among people who live in the city, it’s 42-35 — not a flat-out majority but definitely above water, which it emphatically was not before. Most striking of all, though, is that the biggest turnaround has been among a population you’d least expect: the people paying the toll really often. “There was a poll conducted by Morning Consult a few weeks ago,” Michaelson tells me, “showing that the program’s biggest supporters were those who drove into the central business district the most frequently.” “Really?” I ask. “Yes, yes, yes!” she says. “It was 66 percent supporting the program, of those who reported driving into the city multiple times a week.” Because cars are moving? “They’re moving. The people who oppose it are folks who live upstate or don’t come in. That was the experience that folks in London and Stockholm described to us beforehand,” Michaelson says: “that people oppose it until they see that the program is effective.”
Traffic flow is one real measure of that effectiveness. But the other is the final result — that is, where all that money goes or is perceived to have gone. The congestion toll is intended to pay for enormous improvements to the subway and bus systems. Those will take time: Contracts have to be bid out and construction has to happen, and we can all agree that the MTA, no matter how well or ill you think of it, is not the fastest at those things. Through the end of February, the agency had received about $100 million from the toll program, and after the costs of collection and such are subtracted, the end-of-year take should be around the projection of $500 million. That is something like half of what it would have been under the initial version of the plan — before Governor Hochul reset the toll from $15 to $9 — but it is very much not nothing, and a bunch of capital improvements have already been paid for and green-lit: subway elevators at Delancey Street–Essex Street that will be part of an affordable-housing construction project, a couple of contracts for the next leg of the Second Avenue Subway, more electric buses, and so on.
The last entity that could wreck this, of course, lies in Washington. Donald Trump customarily ignores reasoned arguments and statistics in favor of going with his gut, and one thing he loves is the opportunity to stick it to anyone who’s earnest about activist good government. The whole business could still go to hell. But in the meantime, both traffic and cash are flowing, and the MTA’s Michaelson suggested to me one further measure of how well everything’s going to plan: “It’s funny — this is a fast-moving environment here at HQ. We were watching the impact of this program extremely closely for the first couple of months, and it’s sort of been incorporated into the fabric; we don’t talk about how the program is doing much anymore. We just continue to look at the numbers, and the numbers continue to look good.”
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