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By: Hellen Zaboulani
New York City’s controversial congestion pricing program was put into action last week. The Metropolitan Transit Authority has released early data on the effects. As reported by the NY Times, the toll introduced has already made strides in curbing traffic into Manhattan’s core allowing for faster bus rides. “The anecdotal and the evidence and the reports are pretty consistent, that people coming from buses, whether they’re coming from Jersey or on Express buses from the New York City boroughs, are having much faster morning commutes, faster evening commutes,” said Janno Lieber, Chairman and chief executive of the MTA.
Most passenger cars are now charged $9 a day to enter the tolling zone below 60th Street to the southern tip of Manhattan, at peak hours, with additional fees being incurred for trucks and other vehicles. The tolls went into effect on Sunday Jan. 5th, although there is still a lawsuit fighting to have the plan abolished and continued opposition from Republican lawmakers. The Congestion pricing plan aims to ease traffic by luring people out of their cars and onto mass transit, while also raising much-needed funds for the MTA’s expansions.
As per the information in the NY Times, on the first workday with the new pricing plan (Monday Jan. 6), the MTA reported that entries into the zone and the highways that surround it fell by 7.5% in comparison to an estimate of an average workday in January before the tolls. “There’s so much evidence that people are experiencing a much less traffic-congested environment,” said Lieber. “They’re seeing streets that are moving more efficiently, and they’re hearing less noise, and they’re feeling a less tense environment around tunnels and bridges.”
The decline in traffic represented an average of 43,800 less vehicles per day, or 219,000 fewer vehicles per week, entering the zone and its surrounding highways, per the MTA, which calculated the estimates using data from previous years. Traffic picked up again later in the week, however, with heavier traffic by Friday. The MTA says that one week of data is not enough to gauge the response to or success of such a major policy shift. Also, there was no historical data on the number of vehicles entering the said zone daily before the program, so the comparisons are just an estimate. The data provided by the M.T.A. for last week used a small sample with many variables that may have been imperfect.
Also, the subfreezing temperatures experienced in the city when the tolls began may have affected driver behaviors, and possibly kept some motorists home altogether. Still, the early data is the first hard evidence that the congestion pricing plan may be successful in its ambitious goal of reducing traffic into the city.
“New York’s a tough town,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner who supports congestion pricing plan. “Any show that opens and gets panned the first week usually closes. We have survived the first week.”
Prior to the tolls’ implementation, the M.T.A. predicted traffic would lessen about 13% in the zone over the course of a year. Opponents of the congestion plan have contended that the tolls will not actually make big changes in traffic, but rather will penalize drivers from outside Manhattan, many of whom don’t have convenient options for public transit. These critics have called it a money grab by the ailing transit authority.
