By Ana Ley, Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris
Ana Ley spent more than 12 hours at M.T.A. board meetings last week. Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris and 25 of their colleagues spent the morning counting more than 22,000 cars.
Monday would have been the first weekday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.
A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?
To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.
Here’s what we saw:
Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times
You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)
The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.
We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.
Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.
To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.
The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.
Vehicles counted at each crossing
from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. Monday
5,668 vehicles
crossed 60th St.
1,696
Queensboro
Bridge
2,647
Queens-
Midtown
Tunnel
4,363
Lincoln
Tunnel
manhattan
2,489
2,061
Holland Tunnel
Williamsburg
Bridge
2,182
Manhattan
Bridge
1,146
Brooklyn
Bridge
Brooklyn-Battery
Tunnel*
Vehicles counted at each crossing from 8 a.m.
to 9 a.m. Monday
manhattan
1,696
5,668 vehicles
Queensboro
Bridge
crossed 60th St.
2,647
4,363
Queens-
Midtown
Tunnel
Lincoln Tunnel
2,489
2,061
Holland Tunnel
Williamsburg
Bridge
2,182
Manhattan
Bridge
1,146
Brooklyn
Bridge
Brooklyn-Battery
Tunnel*
Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.
It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.
And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.
But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.
Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates
| CROSSING | EST. TRIPS |
|---|---|
| Queens-Midtown Tunnel | 50,600 |
| Lincoln Tunnel | 49,200 |
| Williamsburg Bridge | 27,900 |
| Manhattan Bridge | 24,000 |
| Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel | 23,100 |
| Queensboro Bridge | 21,700 |
| Brooklyn Bridge | 17,100 |
| Holland Tunnel | 15,400 |
| All other entrances | 118,000 |
| Total | 347,000 |
Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Includes only trips that ended in the zone. Source: Replica.
The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.
The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.
Methodology
We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.
Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.
We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.
We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.
For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.
