NYC has 0.6 vehicles per household, and in Manhattan it’s closer to 0.25. This isn’t LA (1.6) or even Chicago (1.0). Congestion pricing is aimed at those who drive into the city - often with solid public transportation alternatives.
The revenue goes toward improving transit—something the vast majority actually use. These upgrades take time. Six months of data means very little in a system this complex.
If you're offering deep takes on this, it’s only fair to say whether you actually live in NYC or nearby. Most of the loudest critics seem disconnected from the day-to-day reality of getting around here.
To be fair I have a friend who lives in Brooklyn who thinks congestion pricing is a scam and this is a person of moderate means who has a car. She's inclined to blame traffic problems on Uber.
One point she has which is good is that the transit system is not good if you're going perpendicular to the major routes. A 20 minute car ride from Queens to the Bronx turns into an hour and 30 minutes on transit. Of course, it does take funding to improve the service and NYC has a hard time of it because funding for the subway is not controlled by NYC but rather by the state so a lot of upstaters like me who just ride it a few times a year or don't ride it at all have a say in it.
Your friend’s frustration is understandable, but calling congestion pricing a scam ignores the actual problem it's solving: too many cars in a dense area where most people don’t drive. Blaming Uber/Lyft is a distraction. Congestion existed long before it, and they’re being regulated too.
As for the Queens-to-Bronx example, it’s a fair critique of the transit network, but it’s not even relevant to the congestion zone. Congestion pricing targets the lower core of Manhattan, not cross-borough driving. If anything, the funds raised could eventually help fix exactly those kinds of transit gaps.
For background: I live in Brooklyn and work in Downtown Manhattan (in congestion zone). I take the subway. I used to own a car but sold it over 10 years ago because the public transportation made it obsolete. I don't bike.
Can any NYC bikers weigh in on if congestion pricing has had any positive or negative side effects? Are motorcycle-class "bikes" the biggest issue for bikers now?
Didn’t POTUS sign something to invalidate congestion pricing and liberate New Yorkers from this? I haven’t paid close attention not being from NYC, but I remember some self congratulating from POTUS about this. Did it get knocked down?
Edit: Saved, not liberated was the quote from POTUS
It was ignored because he didn't have legal authority to do it. And can't tell if you were being a little sarcastic of not but majority of New Yorkers want congestion pricing and would not feel "liberated".
I'm not the one being sarcastic. I'm pretty sure liberated was a term he used when signing the little piece of paper. This was a separate use from Liberation Day
The Federal Highway Administration tried to revoke its approval for the program (some federal roads in the congestion relief zone). Still being litigated last I checked.
lol at liberate New Yorkers? This has been a godsend as a car owning New Yorker who takes public transit 10+ times a week as well. Less traffic and all the externalities associated.
I think this is just an issue of text not conveying intent. If you wrapped the word in quotes - "liberated" - people wouldn't be as confused. There wasn't a great indication that wasn't your perspective.
Would be interesting to see how this has affected number of visits and travel times at different affluence levels. At least in London the less well off started visiting the congestion charge zones less altogether.
Businesses may benefit from this move. People driving past in cars are unlikely to stop by a local business in Manhattan. People passing by on foot are much more likely to.
The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.
Reducing traffic has other benefits in terms of making a place more liveable. If a street is full of vehicle traffic and noisy, it is a place people don't want to be & so pass through quickly. If you make the space nicer, people are more likely to want to dwell and spend money with local businesses & restaurants.
Manhattan can be quite unpleasant at times, but it's been really nice to see recent efforts to try to improve that:
- Partial pedestrianisation of broadway
- The 14th Street busway
- New protected bike lanes
Baby steps for sure, but better than doing nothing!
> The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.
In addition to making for a more pleasant environment, it's also worth pointing out that in a dense urban area, cars are pretty terrible in terms of people throughput compared to alternatives. People traveling in cars take up way more space than the same number of people riding buses, subways, bikes, or even walking, and the cars don't have enough extra speed to make up for it (in fact they're probably slower than everything except the pedestrians). This doesn't matter as much in less urban areas where there's plenty of room to spread out and the higher speeds that enables, but in downtown areas cars are realistically a pretty slow way for a bunch of people to get around.
> Others have said it would hurt businesses in the congestion zone. The report, however, says pedestrian activity inside the zone was up 8.4% in May, compared with the same period last year, while outside the zone only saw an increase of 2.7%.
And from an earlier post
> And just to take a different kind of measure, The New York Times visited 40 storefronts on a stretch of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village to gauge how businesses felt about congestion pricing. People working in four of those businesses said the change had been positive, 10 said it had been negative — and 25 said it had had no impact.
So, do you notice how the first quote doesn’t actually answer the question? Of course pedestrian activity was up. Because cars were taxed. But was pedestrian traffic up to the same rate as cars were down such that overall traffic was unaffected? No, probably not, because the story says vehicles are down 11% but pedestrian traffic is only up 8%.
And businesses saying it had a negative impact were more than twice as prevalent (10 to 4) than businesses saying it had a positive impact, with 25 saying no impact.
So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.
> But was pedestrian traffic up to the same rate as cars were down such that overall traffic was unaffected? No, probably not, because the story says vehicles are down 11% but pedestrian traffic is only up 8%.
Those percentages are only directly comparable if the number of cars and the number of pedestrians is the same, which I'm guessing it's not. Some quick searching doesn't seem to yield an answer to this question, but in a city like NYC I'd venture to guess there is more pedestrian traffic than car traffic, so it's entirely possible that an 8% increase in pedestrian traffic more than makes up for an 11% drop in car traffic.
> So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.
I don't think you can conclude that at all because you're missing some key pieces of information, like whether the average positively impacted businesses had a greater positive impact than the average negatively impacted business had negative impact. You also don't know the long term impacts that might change what types of businesses are in the area of how they attract customers. Businesses that optimize for car traffic (like Costco, at the extreme end of the spectrum) might see an initial decrease in customers, but longer term could either adapt to be more pedestrian friendly or be replaced with pedestrian friendly businesses that might generate even more economic activity.
Also not to put too fine a point on it, but the "business impact" numbers were based off a reporter going to 40 businesses in one neighborhood and asking "people working there" what the impact had been. I'm not sure that's a very scientific way to draw broad conclusions, as the NYT freely admits.
Perhaps pedestrian traffic would make up for it, but nothing said in the article actually shows that.
I agree with you that the article doesn’t contain enough information to make a firm conclusion. In fact, that was my point.
Yes, I’m basing my conclusion on the fact that more than twice the number of businesses said it went down as up. Yes, that’s qualitative at some level, but if it supports any conclusion whatsoever, it supports the conclusion of business being down, not “no impact.”
The article is trying to whitewash the impact. It reports a bunch of numbers but those numbers don’t say much at all, and if they say anything, it’s actually opposite of what the reporter claims they say.
To be clear, I don’t live in NYC and I don’t have an opinion on the policy. I’m just noticing the poor reporting.
>A more fair approach would be rationing, not just for driving but for every naturally scarce resource.
How would that even work? If there's only enough road for 10% of the cars in Manhattan, does everyone just get "hall passes" for driving 36 days a year? Ironically that'd make driving even more "a hobby for the rich", because nobody but the rich are going to spend $30k+ on a car, for the privilege of driving it for 36 days a year. Even if the ratio was closer to 50% (which is doubtful, given how congested Manhattan is), only the well off can afford a car that's sitting idle half the year. If you make the passes tradable, you basically reinvented congestion pricing.
It's even worse than that, because rationing makes driving an unreliable solution at any price point. Sure, a rich person can afford a car they only use part of the time. But if they regularly have a need to go into the city, they still need an alternative solution the rest of the time when they can't drive into the city for any amount of money. And having the ability to drive only some of the time is even more unhelpful for non-rich folks for exactly the reason you outlined.
The idea of rich people commuting by driving into Manhattan from their mansions in Connecticut while average people live closer and take public transit might bother some egalitarian sensibilities, but it's probably a better outcome than driving being so unavailable to everyone that the only people who really benefit from it are tourists or those who otherwise don't really need to drive into the city at all.
Many large European cities have congestion pricing and it's fine. The very poor can't afford a car anyway and the price conscious drivers were already using a "Park & Ride" type of service to get to the city center because parking is expensive on top of the congestion charges. If you need to drive into the center for some reason, you should be able to get the fee reimbursed (like validated parking) or it's so rare that you find yourself in that situation, you can eat the €10 cost twice a year.
You’re jumping to an extreme conclusion. A ~10% reduction in cars due to congestion pricing doesn’t support the idea that driving is becoming a hobby for the rich. That’s a modest shift, not a wholesale class divide. Let’s keep the debate grounded in actual outcomes, not sweeping generalizations.
Right now it is maybe an extreme stance, but with many resources becoming scarcer we're on a slippery slope here. The free market is nice in many ways but near resource scarcity it breaks down. It's good to think of fair solutions early on because we'll have to deal with this eventually.
Not only does it not break down, but situations with scarce resources are actually when the free market is most useful. It creates an efficient way to allocate those resources while avoiding shortages and creating incentives to develop alternatives. It's not perfect, as it can result in scarce resources going to those with the most money rather than those with the most need, but the track record compared to alternatives is pretty good.
Ok, perhaps I should have said scarce __and__ essential. We've grown so accustomed to many things that they are now considered essential to a large degree.
Has the median net worth of those driving gone up? Vancouver did all sorts of “make having a car really expensive” moves like removing parking lots and making the remaining ones prohibitively expensive for the working class. Must be nice for all the supercar drivers to have fewer poor people clogging up the roads!
The only way to reduce congestion is to have fewer cars on the roads, so someone's got to stop driving, and the rich will find a way to make it not them. You can either charge an honest price and spend the revenue on public services, or you can adopt worse policies. (E.g. some cities make it so different cars are allowed in the city on alternate days - so rich people own two cars and alternate).
I've never really understood this argument. Road (and parking) capacity in the middle of a dense city is a limited resource. In a capitalist country, having costs associated with consuming limited resources is how you figure out how to allocate them. Demanding that limited resources be available to everyone for free just guarantees shortages. And a non-economic method of allocating those resources, like say a lottery, has the downside of making it so that those who need the resource can't obtain it at any price and fails to create economic incentives to explore alternatives.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the sentiment. It would be great if every single person who wanted to do so could easily drive into the middle of even the busiest downtown areas and park with no additional cost. But that's not practical, so we need an alternative. And it's extremely telling that for all the complaining about congestion pricing, there seem to be few proposed alternatives.
Congestion pricing is manufactured to create a new tax class.
First they let over 100k Ubers on the roads where there were only 32k taxis.
Then they added bike lanes.
Then they added two bus lanes.
Then they closed streets.
Then they added more bike lanes.
Then they added 'floating islands.
Then they added 'pedestrian walkways' in the street -- next to the sidewalks.
Some avenues are down to one lane.
Viola! Congestion.
All of the money goes to the bankrupt MTA.
The Democrat supermajority in NYS/NYC wins again.
> Public services like public transport shouldn't be seen as for-profit entities.
This is fine, but it's a question of how much/little useful service should they provide for the money provided. Is $1 billion per mile of subway OK? Is $2 billion?
My radical idea would be to turn the subway right-of-way over to licensed or automated electric shuttle on-demand shuttle vans. There would be challenges for sure, but it's hard to do worse than the efficiencies some of these systems are operating at.
But the current state of a lot of public transport being money losing entities indicates their costs are out of control. Public services shouldn't just help themselves to endless taxpayer money rather than put their house in order and provide value.
It's routine for transit systems to run at a loss in the sense that the ticket prices don't pay 100% of the costs.
The idea is that transit has benefits beyond what it gives to the riders. If a bus takes 20 cars off the street that's a huge boon to the other cars.
In Ithaca, for instance, Cornell doesn't have a lot of space for parking, if you do get a parking space it is probably far enough away that you'll ride the bus in anyway. Employees get a free bus pass and even though it means I have to fit my schedule to the bus, it drops me off right by the door of a building that's connected to my building so it's as convenient as can be.
Every second reply here is "yes, congestion pricing is bad but it could be compensated by X"
The problem with every one of these posts is the same: IS it compensated by X? No. Why not? Because X is not happening, and the city is certainly not paying for it with the extra income.
You talk about a free bus pass, but you might as well talk about free use of a Star Trek transporter. I would argue that'd be more honest, because if you talk about a nonexistent transporter technology at least it's clear that it's not happening. Also: this is New York. The bus service would need to be improved as well. That too is not happening. Nobody would be complaining in the first place if there was cheap (you even say "free"), fast and good public transport. There isn't.
Arguably the best transportation system in the world is in Japan. It's made from ~100 private and mostly private companies. For some reason, tax and spenders never seem to understand that.
Set up the incentives right as demonstrated it can work. Coversely, public transporation will always have funding issues because there is no way to setup the insentives.
Not really. The Japanese public transportation system is analogous to employer sponsored healthcare in the US. The employers and employees get significant tax incentives to get employee commuter passes.
Ths US tax system makes capital intensive business difficult to operate in the private market. It’s one of the larger distorting influences in our economy. Most public transit is operated by authorities, which are public corporations with their own books and tax exempt bonding authority.
Based on your saying “tax and spend”, I assume you identify as a modern conservative. The tax and spend aspect is really the road system - one of the ways that Nixon tried to prop up the flailing economy was to invest billions into highway aid and projects. Roads = lots of oneshot construction jobs and local patronage.
Rural, exurban and suburban towns didn’t have broad paved highways until those programs took off, as states didn’t have the will or the dollars to fund them. Drive around upstate New York and you’ll see lots of “old state route XX” — all of those roads were built in the last 50 years, all paid for by external federal dollars. (And narrower than the ridiculous wide streets in subdivisions today)
Is really. The majority of systems, especially the larger ones, get no subsidies. Mostly the smaller rural ones get subsidies.
> I assume you identify as a modern conservative
you'd be wrong.
But I still bristle every time someone says we need public transporation when my favorite system I've used for decades is not public and is designed to be positive feedback loop. No public system can do that AFAICT because there's no way to set up the incentives. It's just an expense with indirect benefits, to easy to cut funding on and make it just a "for poor people who can't afford a car" system
It’s pathetic how bad America has become at managing capitalism. Being able to profit is a privilege not some god given right. We as a society, instead of making all these silly little taxes and regulations, should simple make broad and curt decisions on when profiting is and isn't allowed. The two big problems are using public funds to fuel profits, and profiting off of conflicts of interest (healthcare).
The issue is that they consistently lose money and people who will never make use of them have to subsidize it.
A great example is Pennsylvania where they privatized the turnpike but as part of that deal, the turnpike had to pay half a billion a year for 20 years to fund public transit in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. So tolls I paid that should have gone to improve the turnpike were instead used as a form of price controls to keep people happy in the cities.
>The issue is that they consistently lose money and people who will never make use of them have to subsidize it.
It's doubtful that congestion pricing is going to lose money given that the roads already exist.
>A great example is Pennsylvania where they privatized the turnpike but as part of that deal, the turnpike had to pay half a billion a year for 20 years to fund public transit in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. So tolls I paid that should have gone to improve the turnpike were instead used as a form of price controls to keep people happy in the cities.
A mandatory payment enforced by the government is a "tax", not "price control".
People without cars subsidize street parking and parking minimum mandates by forcing all other uses for land to be more expensive.
People without children subsidize public schools. Healthy people subsidize sick people's insurance. Part of living in communities involve subsidizing services you don't use, that it occurs is not a problem, you need to argue that it should not be subsidized in the first place, and moving people by bus is better than moving people by car in a variety of ways.
The part you're missing: All the people whose public transit you funded aren't driving! It reduced traffic! You benefitted from it, whether you realize it or not. People in the cities pay lots of car and gas-related taxes, despite not owning a car - same thing. That street goes both ways. They fund streets and highways and infrastructure in your area just like you fund public transit in theirs. It's mutually beneficial, even though both parties are funding stuff they may not use.
You see all of those roads in Pennsylvania that you have never driven on? You're paying for them in your taxes. Those people who never drive the roads you use are also helping pay for them. Thats how the system works (as designed).
You're trying to make all those things sound bad but if you think about it they really aren't.
>First they let over 100k Ubers on the roads where there were only 32k taxis
Was the old medallion system where you needed to pay $1M+ to join the taxi cartel really any better?
>Then they added bike lanes. Then they added two bus lanes.
What's the issue here? Sure, it screws over drivers, but buses and bikes are far more space efficient than cars, so it likely increases throughput in people terms.
Please. I grew up in Manhattan and Queens and have spent 75% of my life there. It was even more congested in the 80s and 90s.
The big innovation of congestion pricing is that it demonstrates is that miserable Long Islanders would rather endure their way through Manhattan than pay the toll and the trip across the Verrazano or Throgs Neck.
End of the day, NYC is changing whether you like it or not. The people living there want a voice in it, after being stuck behind the wants and desires of New Jersey and Long Island. As the populations of office workers continues to shrink, so too will prioritization of their needs.
Except for the Ubers, everything you listed that was added, moves more people than cars do. Public transit, bike lanes, walkable areas provide viable alternatives methods of transit so you no longer need to use a car. And those cars have huge costs to residents - noise, pollution - that they dont pay for. Congestion pricing literally is a price to pay if you refuse to use anything else that is more efficient in a dense city.
Also your comment on the "Bankrupt MTA". Public transit is just that - PUBLIC transit. It is not supposed to make a profit, the same way highways for cars are a public good. When is the last time you complained that your taxes are too high because of all the road maintenance? Those damn highways better make a profit!
Look at the data before you gobble up right-wing misinformation. Do you even live in NYC?
In New York in particular the density is so high that it's completely impossible that everyone who works in Manhattan could drive in. I mean, you could demolish half of it and build highways and parking lots and then maybe you could drive in but you'd lose the benefits of it being a city built up high.
NYC has 0.6 vehicles per household, and in Manhattan it’s closer to 0.25. This isn’t LA (1.6) or even Chicago (1.0). Congestion pricing is aimed at those who drive into the city - often with solid public transportation alternatives.
The revenue goes toward improving transit—something the vast majority actually use. These upgrades take time. Six months of data means very little in a system this complex.
If you're offering deep takes on this, it’s only fair to say whether you actually live in NYC or nearby. Most of the loudest critics seem disconnected from the day-to-day reality of getting around here.
To be fair I have a friend who lives in Brooklyn who thinks congestion pricing is a scam and this is a person of moderate means who has a car. She's inclined to blame traffic problems on Uber.
One point she has which is good is that the transit system is not good if you're going perpendicular to the major routes. A 20 minute car ride from Queens to the Bronx turns into an hour and 30 minutes on transit. Of course, it does take funding to improve the service and NYC has a hard time of it because funding for the subway is not controlled by NYC but rather by the state so a lot of upstaters like me who just ride it a few times a year or don't ride it at all have a say in it.
Your friend’s frustration is understandable, but calling congestion pricing a scam ignores the actual problem it's solving: too many cars in a dense area where most people don’t drive. Blaming Uber/Lyft is a distraction. Congestion existed long before it, and they’re being regulated too.
As for the Queens-to-Bronx example, it’s a fair critique of the transit network, but it’s not even relevant to the congestion zone. Congestion pricing targets the lower core of Manhattan, not cross-borough driving. If anything, the funds raised could eventually help fix exactly those kinds of transit gaps.
For background: I live in Brooklyn and work in Downtown Manhattan (in congestion zone). I take the subway. I used to own a car but sold it over 10 years ago because the public transportation made it obsolete. I don't bike.
Does she pay for parking or benefit from the over 2M free parking spots?
Can any NYC bikers weigh in on if congestion pricing has had any positive or negative side effects? Are motorcycle-class "bikes" the biggest issue for bikers now?
Similar article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328032
Didn’t POTUS sign something to invalidate congestion pricing and liberate New Yorkers from this? I haven’t paid close attention not being from NYC, but I remember some self congratulating from POTUS about this. Did it get knocked down?
Edit: Saved, not liberated was the quote from POTUS
It was ignored because he didn't have legal authority to do it. And can't tell if you were being a little sarcastic of not but majority of New Yorkers want congestion pricing and would not feel "liberated".
I'm not the one being sarcastic. I'm pretty sure liberated was a term he used when signing the little piece of paper. This was a separate use from Liberation Day
That seems about right!
The Federal Highway Administration tried to revoke its approval for the program (some federal roads in the congestion relief zone). Still being litigated last I checked.
lol at liberate New Yorkers? This has been a godsend as a car owning New Yorker who takes public transit 10+ times a week as well. Less traffic and all the externalities associated.
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED.” Trump wrote, adding, “LONG LIVE THE KING!”*
Sorry, I guess I crossed the streams with all of the nonsense from the White House. Saved, not liberated.
*https://apnews.com/article/trump-halts-congestion-pricing-ny...
I think this is just an issue of text not conveying intent. If you wrapped the word in quotes - "liberated" - people wouldn't be as confused. There wasn't a great indication that wasn't your perspective.
Like most things Trump did, it's being fought in court
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York...
Would be interesting to see how this has affected number of visits and travel times at different affluence levels. At least in London the less well off started visiting the congestion charge zones less altogether.
The least well-off don't have cars at all, but suffer from their ill-effects the most. So the least well-off benefit the most from congestion pricing.
Those "least well-off" that happen to live in the zone, which is less and less each year due to gentrification
People outside the zone benefit too -- from the tax revenue, the reduced pollution, and every time they visit.
So, less cars (good), but businesses may be suffering (probably bad)?
Businesses may benefit from this move. People driving past in cars are unlikely to stop by a local business in Manhattan. People passing by on foot are much more likely to.
The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.
Reducing traffic has other benefits in terms of making a place more liveable. If a street is full of vehicle traffic and noisy, it is a place people don't want to be & so pass through quickly. If you make the space nicer, people are more likely to want to dwell and spend money with local businesses & restaurants.
Manhattan can be quite unpleasant at times, but it's been really nice to see recent efforts to try to improve that:
Baby steps for sure, but better than doing nothing!> The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.
In addition to making for a more pleasant environment, it's also worth pointing out that in a dense urban area, cars are pretty terrible in terms of people throughput compared to alternatives. People traveling in cars take up way more space than the same number of people riding buses, subways, bikes, or even walking, and the cars don't have enough extra speed to make up for it (in fact they're probably slower than everything except the pedestrians). This doesn't matter as much in less urban areas where there's plenty of room to spread out and the higher speeds that enables, but in downtown areas cars are realistically a pretty slow way for a bunch of people to get around.
There’s more to business than retail. People with service and delivery vehicles are screwed under this.
If by "screwed" you mean having to pay a modest fee to access one of the most valuable pieces of land on the entire planet, sure.
With less hindrance from congestion as well, meaning that they get to make more transactions and hence make more money.
Not really - unless you have specific info to add on this?
I haven't seen suggestion of businesses suffering
> Others have said it would hurt businesses in the congestion zone. The report, however, says pedestrian activity inside the zone was up 8.4% in May, compared with the same period last year, while outside the zone only saw an increase of 2.7%.
And from an earlier post
> And just to take a different kind of measure, The New York Times visited 40 storefronts on a stretch of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village to gauge how businesses felt about congestion pricing. People working in four of those businesses said the change had been positive, 10 said it had been negative — and 25 said it had had no impact.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
So, do you notice how the first quote doesn’t actually answer the question? Of course pedestrian activity was up. Because cars were taxed. But was pedestrian traffic up to the same rate as cars were down such that overall traffic was unaffected? No, probably not, because the story says vehicles are down 11% but pedestrian traffic is only up 8%.
And businesses saying it had a negative impact were more than twice as prevalent (10 to 4) than businesses saying it had a positive impact, with 25 saying no impact.
So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.
> But was pedestrian traffic up to the same rate as cars were down such that overall traffic was unaffected? No, probably not, because the story says vehicles are down 11% but pedestrian traffic is only up 8%.
Those percentages are only directly comparable if the number of cars and the number of pedestrians is the same, which I'm guessing it's not. Some quick searching doesn't seem to yield an answer to this question, but in a city like NYC I'd venture to guess there is more pedestrian traffic than car traffic, so it's entirely possible that an 8% increase in pedestrian traffic more than makes up for an 11% drop in car traffic.
> So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.
I don't think you can conclude that at all because you're missing some key pieces of information, like whether the average positively impacted businesses had a greater positive impact than the average negatively impacted business had negative impact. You also don't know the long term impacts that might change what types of businesses are in the area of how they attract customers. Businesses that optimize for car traffic (like Costco, at the extreme end of the spectrum) might see an initial decrease in customers, but longer term could either adapt to be more pedestrian friendly or be replaced with pedestrian friendly businesses that might generate even more economic activity.
Also not to put too fine a point on it, but the "business impact" numbers were based off a reporter going to 40 businesses in one neighborhood and asking "people working there" what the impact had been. I'm not sure that's a very scientific way to draw broad conclusions, as the NYT freely admits.
Perhaps pedestrian traffic would make up for it, but nothing said in the article actually shows that.
I agree with you that the article doesn’t contain enough information to make a firm conclusion. In fact, that was my point.
Yes, I’m basing my conclusion on the fact that more than twice the number of businesses said it went down as up. Yes, that’s qualitative at some level, but if it supports any conclusion whatsoever, it supports the conclusion of business being down, not “no impact.”
The article is trying to whitewash the impact. It reports a bunch of numbers but those numbers don’t say much at all, and if they say anything, it’s actually opposite of what the reporter claims they say.
To be clear, I don’t live in NYC and I don’t have an opinion on the policy. I’m just noticing the poor reporting.
Preliminary results are that businesses is up in downtown New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
[flagged]
You mean the poor who disproportionately take transit into Manhattan rather than drive and/or suffer the adverse consequences of traffic?
I mean the poor who now can no longer afford to drive and now have to use public transportation.
There are roughly zero poor people in Manhattan who own a car. Heck, many moderately well off people in Manhattan don't own a car.
"Poor people who used to drive but now can't afford to due to congestion pricing" is not a population that exists in Manhattan.
Driving is becoming a hobby for the rich.
A more fair approach would be rationing, not just for driving but for every naturally scarce resource.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing
>A more fair approach would be rationing, not just for driving but for every naturally scarce resource.
How would that even work? If there's only enough road for 10% of the cars in Manhattan, does everyone just get "hall passes" for driving 36 days a year? Ironically that'd make driving even more "a hobby for the rich", because nobody but the rich are going to spend $30k+ on a car, for the privilege of driving it for 36 days a year. Even if the ratio was closer to 50% (which is doubtful, given how congested Manhattan is), only the well off can afford a car that's sitting idle half the year. If you make the passes tradable, you basically reinvented congestion pricing.
It's even worse than that, because rationing makes driving an unreliable solution at any price point. Sure, a rich person can afford a car they only use part of the time. But if they regularly have a need to go into the city, they still need an alternative solution the rest of the time when they can't drive into the city for any amount of money. And having the ability to drive only some of the time is even more unhelpful for non-rich folks for exactly the reason you outlined.
The idea of rich people commuting by driving into Manhattan from their mansions in Connecticut while average people live closer and take public transit might bother some egalitarian sensibilities, but it's probably a better outcome than driving being so unavailable to everyone that the only people who really benefit from it are tourists or those who otherwise don't really need to drive into the city at all.
Many large European cities have congestion pricing and it's fine. The very poor can't afford a car anyway and the price conscious drivers were already using a "Park & Ride" type of service to get to the city center because parking is expensive on top of the congestion charges. If you need to drive into the center for some reason, you should be able to get the fee reimbursed (like validated parking) or it's so rare that you find yourself in that situation, you can eat the €10 cost twice a year.
You’re jumping to an extreme conclusion. A ~10% reduction in cars due to congestion pricing doesn’t support the idea that driving is becoming a hobby for the rich. That’s a modest shift, not a wholesale class divide. Let’s keep the debate grounded in actual outcomes, not sweeping generalizations.
Right now it is maybe an extreme stance, but with many resources becoming scarcer we're on a slippery slope here. The free market is nice in many ways but near resource scarcity it breaks down. It's good to think of fair solutions early on because we'll have to deal with this eventually.
Not only does it not break down, but situations with scarce resources are actually when the free market is most useful. It creates an efficient way to allocate those resources while avoiding shortages and creating incentives to develop alternatives. It's not perfect, as it can result in scarce resources going to those with the most money rather than those with the most need, but the track record compared to alternatives is pretty good.
Ok, perhaps I should have said scarce __and__ essential. We've grown so accustomed to many things that they are now considered essential to a large degree.
At least the fees are invested back into public transport (for non rich people)
Has the median net worth of those driving gone up? Vancouver did all sorts of “make having a car really expensive” moves like removing parking lots and making the remaining ones prohibitively expensive for the working class. Must be nice for all the supercar drivers to have fewer poor people clogging up the roads!
The only way to reduce congestion is to have fewer cars on the roads, so someone's got to stop driving, and the rich will find a way to make it not them. You can either charge an honest price and spend the revenue on public services, or you can adopt worse policies. (E.g. some cities make it so different cars are allowed in the city on alternate days - so rich people own two cars and alternate).
Sounds an awful lot like the reason the IRS and CRA use for going after a waitresses tips and not tax fraud by HNWI.
I've never really understood this argument. Road (and parking) capacity in the middle of a dense city is a limited resource. In a capitalist country, having costs associated with consuming limited resources is how you figure out how to allocate them. Demanding that limited resources be available to everyone for free just guarantees shortages. And a non-economic method of allocating those resources, like say a lottery, has the downside of making it so that those who need the resource can't obtain it at any price and fails to create economic incentives to explore alternatives.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the sentiment. It would be great if every single person who wanted to do so could easily drive into the middle of even the busiest downtown areas and park with no additional cost. But that's not practical, so we need an alternative. And it's extremely telling that for all the complaining about congestion pricing, there seem to be few proposed alternatives.
> In a capitalist country, having costs associated with consuming limited resources is how you figure out how to allocate them
... and having these costs then paid by other people
Sorry. Just felt like this rather important detail needed mentioning.
Some countries handle this kind of thing by making it a percent of income.
Even better in the Vancouver case. Most are “students” and “homemakers” with $0 declared income!
Driving a supercar in lower Manhattan is a great way to devalue it.
Congestion pricing is manufactured to create a new tax class. First they let over 100k Ubers on the roads where there were only 32k taxis. Then they added bike lanes. Then they added two bus lanes. Then they closed streets. Then they added more bike lanes. Then they added 'floating islands. Then they added 'pedestrian walkways' in the street -- next to the sidewalks. Some avenues are down to one lane. Viola! Congestion. All of the money goes to the bankrupt MTA. The Democrat supermajority in NYS/NYC wins again.
I see plenty of congestion when I drive in Texas, with its Republican supermajority. Surely, a few more lanes on the highway will fix it.
Public services like public transport shouldn't be seen as for-profit entities. For some reason Americans don't seem to understand that
> Public services like public transport shouldn't be seen as for-profit entities.
This is fine, but it's a question of how much/little useful service should they provide for the money provided. Is $1 billion per mile of subway OK? Is $2 billion?
My radical idea would be to turn the subway right-of-way over to licensed or automated electric shuttle on-demand shuttle vans. There would be challenges for sure, but it's hard to do worse than the efficiencies some of these systems are operating at.
But the current state of a lot of public transport being money losing entities indicates their costs are out of control. Public services shouldn't just help themselves to endless taxpayer money rather than put their house in order and provide value.
It's routine for transit systems to run at a loss in the sense that the ticket prices don't pay 100% of the costs.
The idea is that transit has benefits beyond what it gives to the riders. If a bus takes 20 cars off the street that's a huge boon to the other cars.
In Ithaca, for instance, Cornell doesn't have a lot of space for parking, if you do get a parking space it is probably far enough away that you'll ride the bus in anyway. Employees get a free bus pass and even though it means I have to fit my schedule to the bus, it drops me off right by the door of a building that's connected to my building so it's as convenient as can be.
Every second reply here is "yes, congestion pricing is bad but it could be compensated by X"
The problem with every one of these posts is the same: IS it compensated by X? No. Why not? Because X is not happening, and the city is certainly not paying for it with the extra income.
You talk about a free bus pass, but you might as well talk about free use of a Star Trek transporter. I would argue that'd be more honest, because if you talk about a nonexistent transporter technology at least it's clear that it's not happening. Also: this is New York. The bus service would need to be improved as well. That too is not happening. Nobody would be complaining in the first place if there was cheap (you even say "free"), fast and good public transport. There isn't.
> Every second reply here is "yes, congestion pricing is bad but it could be compensated by X"
I don’t think the person you replied to said that congestion pricing is bad.
Well they're defending it, while admitting it causes problems. But sure, technically you're right.
Arguably the best transportation system in the world is in Japan. It's made from ~100 private and mostly private companies. For some reason, tax and spenders never seem to understand that.
Set up the incentives right as demonstrated it can work. Coversely, public transporation will always have funding issues because there is no way to setup the insentives.
>It's made from ~100 private and mostly private companies
how much state intervention/subsidies are those companies getting?
Japan’s system didn’t start that way, though. They built the initial infrastructure via “tax and spend”.
JNR was public. Most of the other 99 were not
You have to pick one and stick to it. The mess of hybrid public private gets you the worst of both.
Not really. The Japanese public transportation system is analogous to employer sponsored healthcare in the US. The employers and employees get significant tax incentives to get employee commuter passes.
Ths US tax system makes capital intensive business difficult to operate in the private market. It’s one of the larger distorting influences in our economy. Most public transit is operated by authorities, which are public corporations with their own books and tax exempt bonding authority.
Based on your saying “tax and spend”, I assume you identify as a modern conservative. The tax and spend aspect is really the road system - one of the ways that Nixon tried to prop up the flailing economy was to invest billions into highway aid and projects. Roads = lots of oneshot construction jobs and local patronage.
Rural, exurban and suburban towns didn’t have broad paved highways until those programs took off, as states didn’t have the will or the dollars to fund them. Drive around upstate New York and you’ll see lots of “old state route XX” — all of those roads were built in the last 50 years, all paid for by external federal dollars. (And narrower than the ridiculous wide streets in subdivisions today)
> Not really.
Is really. The majority of systems, especially the larger ones, get no subsidies. Mostly the smaller rural ones get subsidies.
> I assume you identify as a modern conservative
you'd be wrong.
But I still bristle every time someone says we need public transporation when my favorite system I've used for decades is not public and is designed to be positive feedback loop. No public system can do that AFAICT because there's no way to set up the incentives. It's just an expense with indirect benefits, to easy to cut funding on and make it just a "for poor people who can't afford a car" system
It’s pathetic how bad America has become at managing capitalism. Being able to profit is a privilege not some god given right. We as a society, instead of making all these silly little taxes and regulations, should simple make broad and curt decisions on when profiting is and isn't allowed. The two big problems are using public funds to fuel profits, and profiting off of conflicts of interest (healthcare).
The issue is that they consistently lose money and people who will never make use of them have to subsidize it.
A great example is Pennsylvania where they privatized the turnpike but as part of that deal, the turnpike had to pay half a billion a year for 20 years to fund public transit in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. So tolls I paid that should have gone to improve the turnpike were instead used as a form of price controls to keep people happy in the cities.
>The issue is that they consistently lose money and people who will never make use of them have to subsidize it.
It's doubtful that congestion pricing is going to lose money given that the roads already exist.
>A great example is Pennsylvania where they privatized the turnpike but as part of that deal, the turnpike had to pay half a billion a year for 20 years to fund public transit in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. So tolls I paid that should have gone to improve the turnpike were instead used as a form of price controls to keep people happy in the cities.
A mandatory payment enforced by the government is a "tax", not "price control".
People without cars subsidize street parking and parking minimum mandates by forcing all other uses for land to be more expensive.
People without children subsidize public schools. Healthy people subsidize sick people's insurance. Part of living in communities involve subsidizing services you don't use, that it occurs is not a problem, you need to argue that it should not be subsidized in the first place, and moving people by bus is better than moving people by car in a variety of ways.
The part you're missing: All the people whose public transit you funded aren't driving! It reduced traffic! You benefitted from it, whether you realize it or not. People in the cities pay lots of car and gas-related taxes, despite not owning a car - same thing. That street goes both ways. They fund streets and highways and infrastructure in your area just like you fund public transit in theirs. It's mutually beneficial, even though both parties are funding stuff they may not use.
You see all of those roads in Pennsylvania that you have never driven on? You're paying for them in your taxes. Those people who never drive the roads you use are also helping pay for them. Thats how the system works (as designed).
>people who will never make use of them have to subsidize it.
That is the cost of living in world class cities with services.
I don't use every single suburban street of the state or every single interstate freeway. I still must pay taxes for it so that society functions.
If you are really so opposed to a functional society, you should really consider moving to rural villages with no services, and no taxes for them.
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Reducing the avenues and prioritizing people over cars is a solid approach that has greatly improved the lives of people in those neighborhoods.
Really? Which neighborhoods are those? What area of NYC do you live in?
You're trying to make all those things sound bad but if you think about it they really aren't.
>First they let over 100k Ubers on the roads where there were only 32k taxis
Was the old medallion system where you needed to pay $1M+ to join the taxi cartel really any better?
>Then they added bike lanes. Then they added two bus lanes.
What's the issue here? Sure, it screws over drivers, but buses and bikes are far more space efficient than cars, so it likely increases throughput in people terms.
Bike lanes and safety improvements for pedestrians aren’t causing congestion. Check out the data!
Here are some good jumping off points: - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikestats.shtml - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2025/vision-zero.shtml - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/pedestrians.sh...
Please. I grew up in Manhattan and Queens and have spent 75% of my life there. It was even more congested in the 80s and 90s.
The big innovation of congestion pricing is that it demonstrates is that miserable Long Islanders would rather endure their way through Manhattan than pay the toll and the trip across the Verrazano or Throgs Neck.
End of the day, NYC is changing whether you like it or not. The people living there want a voice in it, after being stuck behind the wants and desires of New Jersey and Long Island. As the populations of office workers continues to shrink, so too will prioritization of their needs.
Except for the Ubers, everything you listed that was added, moves more people than cars do. Public transit, bike lanes, walkable areas provide viable alternatives methods of transit so you no longer need to use a car. And those cars have huge costs to residents - noise, pollution - that they dont pay for. Congestion pricing literally is a price to pay if you refuse to use anything else that is more efficient in a dense city.
Also your comment on the "Bankrupt MTA". Public transit is just that - PUBLIC transit. It is not supposed to make a profit, the same way highways for cars are a public good. When is the last time you complained that your taxes are too high because of all the road maintenance? Those damn highways better make a profit!
Look at the data before you gobble up right-wing misinformation. Do you even live in NYC?
In New York in particular the density is so high that it's completely impossible that everyone who works in Manhattan could drive in. I mean, you could demolish half of it and build highways and parking lots and then maybe you could drive in but you'd lose the benefits of it being a city built up high.
> I mean, you could demolish half of it and build highways and parking lots
Right, and sadly this describes the downtowns of many U.S. cities since Robert Moses.
I am a police officer here and live in Manhattan. Clearly you have non idea what you are talking about.