This is 59th Street in Manhattan. Below it,
spread across downtown and midtown Manhattan,
reside some 684,000 New Yorkers. That’s more than
the population of Vermont living in just under
nine square miles or 23 square kilometers of land.
Or, that’s a population density of about 76,000

people per square mile, making lower Manhattan
singularly dense by American standards. If this
were a city by itself, it’d be the country’s most
densely populated, far outstripping current #1,
Guttenberg, New Jersey, just across the river
where a fifth of its 12,000 residents are stuffed

into a single building complex. If it were its own
county, its population density would almost double
the nation’s second most dense: Kings County,
New York. And for similarly dense cities to
lower Manhattan, you’d need to go abroad, where it
would rank around Kolkata, Kathmandu, and Makati,

comfortably within the world’s top ten.
But 76,000 per square mile only begins to tell
the story of just how cramped this area really
is. New York City also has the most office space
by square footage of any city in North America,
and just Manhattan by itself contains some 81% of

that. For comparison, Los Angeles, the city with
the second most such space at 432 million square
feet, is dwarfed by Manhattan’s 592 million.
With so much space comes a flood of commuters
every morning, adding another 1.2 million or
so people to the southern end of the island.

For the workday then, an area of just nine
square miles has a momentary population of
about two million. Two million that need to get
to work, two million that need to run errands,
and two million that need to get back home
at the end of the day, which, for a majority,

means getting back out of Manhattan.
But while this sub-city urban core that’s more populous than a handful of American states
is uniquely large, uniquely mobile, and uniquely stuffed; for the past century—effectively, the age of the automobile—there’s really been no

unique solution or system for managing or limiting traffic. Aside from a prohibition on right turns on red and honking, driving in America's densest nine square miles works the same way as in the other 3.8 million square miles. Because of this, each and every workday, some 140,000 commuters

enter Manhattan by car, while about 1,000,000 people enter the commercial business district south of 60th Street by automobile—largely for only the price of the gas it takes to get there, the toll to cross the bridge, and the cost of parking. All expenses that a rural American

would scoff at, but expenses that hardly reflect the shared cost that cars create in the US’s most densely populated environment—from air quality and pedestrian danger, to simple quality of life.
The result is this: New York’s #1 standing in Inrix’s 2023 congestion impact ranking,

where the average driver moved at just 10 miles or 16 kilometers per hour and gave up about 101 of their hours a year to sit in traffic-related delays. And those are stats for the whole of New York City. Manhattan was far, far worse. While most streets and avenues are

limited at 25 miles per hour, average traffic moves at a glacial 7 miles or 11 kilometers per hour. This is not a new problem, either. Rather, it’s one that’s just getting worse—in 2010 the average taxi navigated the Central Business District, or Manhattan below 60th Street,

at 9.1 miles per hour, and every year following through 2018, it slowed. While COVID lessened the congestion for 2020 and 2021, experts are now saying that traffic hasn't only returned,

it's gotten even slower than before 2019. Now, the exact complexion of the problem has shifted over the years. The number of daily vehicles entering the Core Business District, for instance, has dropped, but their impact has been replaced by an ever-higher share of for-hire vehicles

serving ride-hailing apps and clogging the city streets. But the very root of the problem is so remarkably simple. There are just too many cars. Now, oftentimes in an urban context, a problem may

present as simple and straightforward enough, but a solution could be anything but. That, though, is not necessarily the case here. In fact, as long as car congestion has been an issue here, one potential answer has remained equally obvious, equally straightforward, equally

simple—disincentivize driving into Manhattan. Going as far back as the 1930s, mayors have proposed tolls to cross into Manhattan over the East and Harlem Rivers to raise city funds or, in the '50s, to raise money for the subway. In the '60s and '70s, such ideas were again

returned to in an attempt first to popularize mass transit use, then to make progress toward meeting the standards of the 1970 Clean Air Act. Further hoping to pressure individual car users, Mayor John Lindsay thought to reduce city parking in the business core,

While Mayor Ed Koch in 1979 looked into banning private cars entirely. For half a century, New York City leadership has understood that in order to clean its air, raise money, and/or support its mass transit system, it's needed to make it harder or more expensive to drive from New

Jersey, or Queens, or Brooklyn, into Manhattan south of 60th. And yet, it's never happened. But it has come close. It started with a speech outside the Museum of Natural History, where then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced the idea by name: congestion pricing. It was

just one of many components to his larger PlaNYC initiative introduced on that Earth Day in 2007, but one of its boldest. From below this line, any car entering Manhattan from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, would pay $8, while trucks would pay $21 per daily entry into the zone. Taxis would be

exempt from the fee, as would emergency vehicles and those with handicapped license plates, and any vehicles skirting around the perimeter aiming not to enter Manhattan, but to get around it,

so someone driving from Brooklyn to the Bronx by way of the FDR Drive wouldn't have to pay the fee. The tolls would be collected by E-ZPass readers so as not to slow down vehicles, and the toll money itself, 100% of all net revenue, would be invested back into city transit.

The project was bold, but between transit experts, bureaucrats, and elected officials, it was popular. State Governor Eliot Spitzer, Representative Joseph Crowley, and even presidential candidate Barack Obama supported the plan, while the US Department of Transportation

supported the initiative by awarding the city $354 million in grants should it commit to embracing new tech and infrastructure to combat urban congestion. The MTA also strongly supported the program, as it accelerated its own capital planning process to align itself with the

congestion legislation. On a hurried timeline, it introduced its largest ever spending program of $29.5 billion for the next five years—hoping to cover subway fleet expansion, the rehabilitation of 44 subway stations, the purchase of some 2,500 new buses, the replacement of 57 miles of mainline

track, and the catch-up on general maintenance across the transit authority’s property. And beyond bold and broadly popular with most politicians and bureaucrats, congestion pricing was proven—in recent years, Stockholm and London had experimented with

congestion pricing in their downtown cores and were so far experiencing major benefits. Mass transit systems benefited from the influx of investment, city residents benefited from the increase in air quality and calmer streets, and even those that chose to begrudgingly pay the fees

benefited from the smoother traffic conditions. But just like in London and Sweden prior to adopting congestion pricing, the idea wasn’t popular among all residents. At one point, polling of New York City showed that 61% of all respondents opposed the move, with numbers from

the other boroughs even higher, as 70% of Bronx-area respondents opposed the idea. Opposition was especially vocal in areas like eastern Queens and Southern Brooklyn, where access to public transit was more difficult, and thus representatives argued such fees would

unfairly burden their constituents. Then, across all of New York, there was a shared sentiment that New Jersey commuters were getting away without paying their share, as fees for Jersey commuters wouldn’t be meaningfully increased because the tolls they already paid to cross into Manhattan

would cover their congestion fee. And then there was one claim across the city that's come to follow congestion pricing—that it's elitist. Congestion pricing, some correctly claimed, would impact working and middle-class car commuters more than their upper-class counterparts.

An $8 fee for the pleasure of commuting would be a much larger proportional chunk of someone's workday expenses if they work making $15 an hour instead of $150 an hour. Following such logic then, congestion pricing could be painted as a means to rid the roads of working-class

commuters—forcing only them to figure out new commute routes—while the city's elite were able to now drive into town with increased ease for a price that they could more comfortably cover. Congestion pricing passed in the City Council, but once it made its way to the State Assembly,

Democratic lawmakers representing the city outside Manhattan blocked a vote, missing the federal funding's deadline, and killing congestion pricing on the spot.

Ultimately, New Yorkers had proved that they understood this was a feasible solution and that congestion was a real problem worth addressing, but the solution got hung up on issues as to whose cars, exactly, were to be limited, and who, exactly, would benefit the most from such a program. But what's easy to miss, what was missed by the opposition in 2008,

and not made clear enough by proponents in 2008, was exactly how elegant and ingenious a solution congestion pricing really is. You see, when driving, everyone values their time differently depending on… well, a lot of things: where they’re going, whether they’re on time,

why they’re driving, etc., and then these varying personal values translate to different monetary values based on differing income levels. A person of average income driving into the city just for a visit on their day off might value their time in traffic quite low—say, $10 per hour—meaning

they’d theoretically be willing to pay $10 to eliminate that hour of traffic, but any cost above that and they’d rather just wait it out. But in the car right behind them, there might be a person of the same income level who’s late to their first meeting of the morning. They

might value their time quite highly—maybe $100 an hour—as the consequences of the delay from traffic are far higher. They’d pay an enormous amount to eliminate traffic in that scenario. Theoretically, it’d be fair and good for both these drivers if the high-value-of-time person paid the low

value-of-time person to cut in front of them, and do the same with plenty of others in order to get to their destination faster. In some places, this effectively happens through tolled express lanes, but that’s not practically feasible in lower Manhattan. What is, is congestion pricing. In it,

the person valuing their time higher is paying, say, $15, to drive on the roads, and that $15 is effectively going to the low-value-of-time person who’s been priced out of driving. That’s because

that person would get pushed onto public transit, and so if congestion charge fees go to public transit, as is typical, it's funding improvements that make transit better, faster, or cheaper. But this is, of course, an overly simplified reality, and it only considers the benefits

to individual car users. In practice, there are plenty of upsides to freeing up the roads even for non-drivers due to all the other scenarios where time is exceptionally valuable for a particular vehicle type. For example, with the bus. With ten, twenty, thirty, or more people,

even if their individual value of time is low, the collection of all of them means one bus can have a value of time well into the hundreds per hour. Delivery vehicles are a similar scenario—in fact, research by the Federal Highway Administration suggests that shippers value transit time between

$25 and $200 per hour. Everyone who buys anything in Manhattan effectively pays for any inefficiency in goods delivery, so it's a scenario where the costs of traffic get passed on to everyone. And perhaps the greatest example is that of ambulances. A report by New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal and former

NYC Traffic Commissioner Sam Schwartz pointed out that between 2014 and 2024, New York EMS response times for life-threatening emergencies increased by 24%, from 6.09 to 7.54 minutes. Not all of that increase can be directly attributed to traffic,

but a lot can—half, in fact, according to their analysis. Minutes matter during life-threatening emergencies. As the report points out, in cardiac arrest, a person's chances of survival decrease an average of 7-10% for every additional minute before medical intervention. With a stroke,

each additional minute is linked to the loss of an additional 1.9 million brain cells, meaning New York City traffic quite directly leads to increased disability for stroke victims. Right now, the cost of driving in Manhattan is so low that there are plenty of people doing it

even when it’s barely worth it to them. But with buses and delivery vehicles and ambulances using the same roadways and having their extremely high benefit to society diluted by the congestion caused, in part, by the low value-of-time drivers who have little disincentive to driving,

the net benefit to society of Manhattan’s roads is lower than it could be. That’s to say, everyone that could take a fast cross-town bus, everyone who buys goods brought in by delivery vehicles, everyone who might need an ambulance would benefit from congestion-free roads,

but they can’t capture that benefit now because there are all these drivers out there that only barely want to be driving. But the logic goes further. You see, traffic is not a linear phenomenon. That’s to say, every additional vehicle does not have the

same effect on how much it slows down traffic. The impact of an additional vehicle varies depending on how congested the road already is. On a highway with a 70 mile per hour speed limit, it’s expected that the roadway can have a throughput of up to 1,120 cars per hour, per lane while still

maintaining 70 mile per hour average speeds. As the number of cars using the highway increases, their density increases, and therefore average speeds decrease—at 32 cars per mile per lane, for example, speeds slow down to just 64 miles per hour, but even with the slower speeds, the higher

density means the roadway’s throughput still increases to 2,048 cars per hour. The roadway is being used more efficiently as an asset, even as the efficiency of individual journey times gets lower. This phenomenon continues as speeds get slower and density gets higher… up until

a point. According to the analysis behind this set of numbers, on a 70 mile per hour highway, that tipping point is 53 miles per hour. At that speed, 2,400 cars get through a lane in an hour,

but it’s not really ever theoretically possible to get more than 2,400 cars per hour through one of these lanes. While the intersection-less highway is the simplest example, this same phenomenon occurs on all roads, with any congestion—there just is a theoretical

maximum throughput that roads can’t surpass, and overloading the road actually decreases its efficiency below this maximum throughput. The factors that lead to this phenomenon are numerous, varied, and not universally agreed upon or understood, and even the ones that are

are wildly complex, often being studied through the theories of fluid dynamics, but there are at least some examples of the nonlinear nature of traffic that make intuitive sense. Thinking about the scenario of a long line of cars at an intersection,

let’s say it takes the first driver at the light a half second to react to it turning green. That’s a half second of time lost by everyone in line, as it delays all of their arrival to the light. Let’s then say it takes the driver second in line another half second to react to the first

driver moving. That’s now a full second of delay for everyone behind them. Now, if there are only five cars in line, this isn’t a big deal, as the fifth driver only loses two and a half seconds to

the cumulative inefficiencies of human reaction times. If there are 20 cars, though, that’s 10 seconds. Since every car has to wait through that whole back-up, the difference in travel time between a lightly congested intersection and a heavily congested one, in this example,

is about 10 seconds—and even that’s assuming they all get through in the same light cycle. Now, once again, this is only one small facet of the overall phenomenon. There are a myriad of different factors that compound and decrease efficiency exponentially as roads get congested,

but the takeaway should be that, considering traffic is exponential, there’s a lot of logic in reducing vehicle numbers at least below the tipping point, to the point at which roadways are most efficient. Manhattan’s roadways are consistently well above that point, and congestion

pricing is the best idea for how to fix that. Of course, all these benefits are understood by the people who care most about this issue—certainly not every New Yorker, but what’s proved enough of them to keep the concept alive a decade and a half after its

failure in the state assembly. As of the end of 2024, congestion pricing in the central business core of New York City is the closest it’s ever been to becoming a reality. The policy is set: $9 per commercial vehicle in 2025, then likely $12 in ‘28, and $15 in 2031. The 100+ gantries required

to monitor roads and dole tolls are in place,
too. Now, all that’s left to do is survive the new year and its first four days until the program goes live on January 5th. But even with Governor

Kathy Hochul’s green light, transit experts are still holding their breath. And justifiably so. It was on the back of the spectacular, public meltdown of the MTA in 2017 that congestion pricing returned into conversations over how to again fix the city’s crumbling public transit.

As the New York Times noted, the $500 million a year that congestion pricing would have generated could’ve gone a long way to alleviating the city’s unraveling transit disaster. Governor Andrew Cuomo, for his part, took a more future-forward stance: that congestion pricing was an idea

whose time had finally come. And yet, since its time arrived, there have been two state governors, two city mayors, a pandemic, a handful of lawsuits, and when the project was finally, finally, finally on the verge, a pause from Governor Hochul in early 2024. In so many ways,

congestion pricing as part of Fix NYC, initiated by Cuomo, has played out as Bloomberg’s congestion pricing as part of PlaNYC, initiated a decade before it. The more recent one was able to get the votes at the state level, but has run up against similarly heavy political opposition

in different forms—from outlying towns, the state of New Jersey, and Donald Trump. But perhaps most confidence-inspiring as to the long-term prospects of such a program is the longevity of those that 2008 and 2017 proposals drew from: the congestion pricing models in London.

and Stockholm that have remained in place for two decades now. Each has now played out slightly differently, as Stockholm’s has kept total cars and congestion lower than London, but London has made real strides in turning fees into additional bike lanes and bus routes. But both remain success

stories that New York’s drawn from. And likely most instructive for the New York urbanists is the fact that congestion pricing became acceptable to Londoners polled and popular with those polled in Stockholm, popular enough to remain policy and even survive rate hikes over the years.

So with history as a guide, what’s most likely to happen is a continued, bitter fight over New York’s new tolls until the very hour they're implemented, but then, slowly, as the streets get clearer, the air gets cleaner, the noise quieter, the subways better, the

ambulances faster, New York will slowly learn to love paying $9 to speed through lower Manhattan. Speaking of learning to love paying for something, over half a million people have done so with our sponsor, Nebula. Seriously, we know people like it because a majority of people that have ever signed

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The Battle Over NYC Congestion Pricing

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The Battle Over NYC Congestion Pricing

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