01/16/2025 | News release | Archived content
As most transportation professionals know, last week marked a milestone in the decades-long quest to right-size pricing of our roads and single occupancy vehicles. The transportation industry has been undergoing a slow-moving realignment from maximizing the efficiency of private vehicles to prioritizing the environmental impacts of transportation by introducing new pricing strategies and mobility options.
We applaud New York City and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) for implementing a first-of-its-kind cordon-based congestion pricing program in the U.S.. They aren't the first in the world to tackle this issue, and the view from Stockholm, Singapore, and London is clear: these programs can help reduce congestion and incentivize behavior change. And while this isn't the first congestion pricing program in the U.S. - the results of which show a mixed bag on both mobility and social outcomes - it is the boldest. And if New York City wants to maintain its high approval ratings from riders, it needs both the capital improvements that congestion pricing will help finance, as well as the behavior change that it will incentivize.
At INRIX, we believe in using transportation intelligence from GPS data to help inform policy tools like congestion pricing, parking demand management, and more. In our 2024 Global Traffic Scorecard, INRIX estimated the cost of congestion in the New York area at $9.4 billion in lost time, costing the typical driver 102 hours and $1,826 per year. Trips going to downtown New York have continued to increase since their COVID-lows, and trips across bridges to Manhattan have returned to their pre-COVID volumes. The program aims to reduce 80,000 trips per day in the congestion relief zone and hopes to relieve traffic by 10% in the zone.
Cordon Tolling Zone with Collection PointsINRIX has tools that can help begin to understand whether the tolling program is having the intended effects. For this blog, I conducted a quick and dirty independent study to see if we can learn anything from the first week of Congestion Pricing implementation. I used INRIX Roadway Analytics to measure real-time speeds across bridges and tunnels that are affected by the congestion pricing program. In the screenshot below, you can see the segments of analysis colored a very light grey.
Study AreasThen I selected two time periods for comparison - last week Monday through Friday, and the same week in January 2024. This will give us insights on the average traffic activity for the 24-hour time period over weekdays from the same week before and after congestion pricing was implemented. Obviously we are only looking at the first week of implementation, but this is just an illustrative study to see if we can glean anything from early returns.
Roadway Analytics Study ParametersThe way that Roadway Analytics works is it provides you the average daily activity for variety of traffic metrics for your given time periods and charts them on graphs and in spatial diagrams. By then clicking "Performance Charts," we can get immediate insights into speeds, travel times, and other congestion metrics for those selected corridors across those three different days selected. I've done some high-level summarization of travel-time analysis below, which I am using as a proxy for congestion analysis (i.e. the shorter the travel time, the less congestion).
- The Williamsburg Bridge, and the Lincoln, Holland, and Battery Tunnels appear to have had the most immediate reduction in travel times
The Williamsburg Bridge appears to have the most sustained reduction in travel times, from approximately 12n - 1a, appearing to average around 2 minutes over the segment analyzed. All of the tunnels display sustained travel time reductions in midday, with some exhibiting reductions in the evening as well. The Lincoln Tunnel has sustained travel-time reductions during midday from 12n - 3p of up to 4 minutes and in the evening from 7p - 10p of up to 2 minutes. The Holland Tunnel has sustained travel-time reductions midday from 11a - 3p of up to 4 minutes. The Battery Tunnel shows sustained travel time reductions of about 2 minutes from 12n - 3p. The Holland tunnel does include some curious travel time increases around 9:45a, 3:30p and 4:30p that may warrant further investigation.
-The results from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge are less conclusive
The Brooklyn Bridge does display some travel time decreases in the evening around 4p, 8p, and after 10p, but it is less consistent and sustained than the previously discussed segments. The Manhattan Bridge does not appear to have any travel time changes during the two study periods.
There are much more insights to evaluate and inspection we can perform, including a congestion scan and bottleneck analysis before and after the congestion pricing implementation, as well as analysis of individual days or weekends, and a trip analysis. One thing is clear to me and others: these early returns indicate that the program is beginning to work as intended.
We know this congestion pricing program has just launched, and we are committed to working with anyone interested in helping evaluate the impact on traffic, travel patterns, and other mobility implications. NYCDOT uses INRIX data to help investigate transportation anomalies, like the cut through traffic impacts from bridge closures, and we hope to stay engaged with them for any future studies. We have ideas around ways to continue to evolve the program through tools like dynamic pricing, managed lanes, and more.
If history is any lesson, there will be an initial adjustment period while the traveling public adapts to the new economics and new travel patterns emerge. We'll be keeping our eye on the program impacts and outcomes, and look forward to checking in again when we have more identifiable trends. It's an exciting time to be a transportation pricing and policy nerd!