Happy birthday, congestion pricing. Cry about it, haters.
The new toll on vehicle trips into Manhattan below 60th Street spent years in organizing, legislative and bureaucratic development before it finally launched on Jan. 5 of last year. Even as New York’s political class came around to the concept, the public and much of the media lagged. Then the toll went into effect, President Trump declared himself “king” and tried to take it away and Gov. Hochul came forcefully to its defense. The toll’s approval rating went from the gutter — the proverbial “valley of political death” of London and Stockholm lore — and into somewhere more middling. Trump and his Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s flailing attempts to kill congestion pricing notwithstanding, the toll has been in place for a year and raised a half-billion dollars for the MTA.
In short, it’s working. Here’s why:
Lest we forget: It is raising money for transit
The main objective of congestion pricing was to raise money for transit under the simple premise that drivers, who cause congestion, pollution, road deaths and lost productivity, should be charged a small fee to bolster transit (which reduces all of the aforementioned deleterious effect of car driving in urban areas).
Or, as Charles Komanoff put it this week in Vital City: “The theory underlying congestion charging is as close as economics ever comes to axiomatic: Society is made better off when the negatives (sometimes called externalities) of goods or activities are covered — that is, included — in their price.”
Well, it’s doing that in spades: roughly $700 million in tolls have been paid, and that money is already being spent by the MTA. For example, in December, the MTA Board began modernizing subway signals on the A and C lines, which will improve service quality and reliability. At the same time, the Board approved accessibility upgrades to five subway stations, including 42nd St-Bryant Park, which serves 111,000 daily riders.
Congestion pricing money is helping to build the Second Avenue Subway and buy new train cars in the subway and on MTA commuter lines.
Manhattan’s not a ‘ghost town’
Ninety percent of trips into the congestion relief zone happen by something other than a car, but congestion pricing opponents were still convinced the city’s economy would crumble because of the $9 toll. As recently as November, President Trump claimed the toll had made Manhattan a “ghost town.” An AI-generated anti-congestion pricing video from mid-2024 predicted Broadway would “get crushed.”
Sales receipts tell a different story: The 2024-2025 Broadway season was the highest grossing ever — outperforming 2024 numbers for most of the year, according to an analysis by Streetsblog, which used per-show grosses because the number of productions vary from week to week).
Foot traffic increased at a faster rate in the CBD than the rest of Manhattan, according to placer.ai data reported by Bloomberg. Sales taxes receipts also increased in the city at a faster pace than other parts of the metropolitan region, while storefront vacancies also declined faster, the city’s Economic Development Corporation reported.
It reduced pollution across the five boroughs.
The MTA’s environmental assessment predicted congestion pricing would lead to an increase in truck traffic on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, raising concerns that the new toll would add polution.
That surge in truck traffic didn’t happen, as Streetsblog reported back in March.
Recently released research showed the pollution bump didn’t happen either.
The first six months of congestion pricing saw a 22-percent drop in air pollution in the congestion relief zone, according to research out of Cornell University published last month in the academic journal NPJ Clean Air. Those air-quality benefits weren’t isolated to Manhattan and the new tolling zone — the study found particulate matter dropped in all five boroughs, albeit to a lesser extent than inside the tolled Central Business District.
“The big concern was that we would see air quality improve in Manhattan, but then it go down sharply in the Bronx, for instance, was a fear. And that doesn’t appear to have happened within the first six months of congestion pricing,” said Cornell Prof. Tim Fraser.
It nudged truck deliveries to the overnight.
The Cornell researchers found “no evidence of emissions displacement to neighboring areas,” contradicting the MTA’s own conservative predictions that trucks and their associated emissions would shift to other boroughs. Rather than simply rerouting around the congestion relief zone, trucking companies may have made “coordinated adjustments” to reduce trips in and out of the CBD or make them at times of day when traffic is lighter, the report said. The toll is much lower — $5.40 for large trucks at night compared to $21.60 during the day.
Put simply: Congestion pricing seems to have boosted the city’s years-long effort to move deliveries to overnight periods in order to cut traffic and pollution, in huge part by reducing the deleterious effect double parked delivery vehicles have on safety and congestion.
It cut vehicle entries and crashes, and increased bus speeds.
Private car drivers, meanwhile, simply opted to drive less — and the CBD’s robust transit network may explain why New York’s congestion pricing toll yielded greater drops in pollution than similar schemes in Stockholm and London, the Cornell researchers said.
Vehicle entries into the CBD have dropped thanks to congestion pricing — by 11 percent in Nov. 2025 compared to the baseline of what forecasters would have expected based on past history. Traffic moved faster as a result: Trip times dropped over several crossings and routes, according to data compiled by brothers Joshua and Benjamin Moshes. Taxi and Uber speeds also increased in the initial months of the program.
But those speed boosts decreased as time progressed, according to numbers crunched by economist Charles Komanoff for Vital City.
The extra wiggle room created by the tolls inevitably filled up with cars, particularly Ubers and taxis cruising/waiting for fares, Komanoff wrote. Even then, traffic speeds in the CBD remained relatively stable, he noted, rather than declining as they have in recent years. (Komanoff offered some suggestions for how to “juice” speeds, including higher tolls on trucks delivering online retail items, most of which pay the toll just once per day.)
Average bus speeds in the CBD also increased slightly — from 5.96 miles per hour in January 2024 to 6.1 miles per hour in January 2025 and from 5.71 miles per hour in November 2024 to 5.73 miles per hour in November 2025.
And traffic injuries dropped in the congestion relief zone: In 2024, there were 6,455 reported crashes and 3,117 injuries in the toll zone. By 2025, reported crashes had dropped 5 percent to 6,137, and injuries dropped by 3.6 percent to 3,003 injuries.
All eyes on Mamdani
Mayor Adams did not move aggressively to take space away from car drivers to add bus lanes, bike lanes and pedestrian space, meaning that bus riders, cyclists and pedestrians have not benefitted as much as they could have from the drop in vehicle entries.
In 2024, then-Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani led a “Get Congestion Pricing Right” campaign to build more bus lanes, among other goals. Now that he’s mayor, Mamdani has free rein to prioritize buses on city streets and cap Uber and Lyft trips to make better use of the “congestion pricing dividend.”
He has promised to do just that, telling Streetsblog over the summer that congestion pricing has created “an opportunity to transform large amounts of public space. … I would focus on pedestrianization and building protected bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes and other street infrastructure, particularly for high foot traffic areas in and around Times Square and the entire Financial District. … We should also implement busways on all major east-west arteries in Manhattan, building on the success of the 14th Street busway.”
Today is Day 5 of the Mamdani administration … but the clock is ticking.
— With Gersh Kuntzman and Dave Colon
