Now that New York City has finally flipped the switch on congestion pricing, the big question is: Will it work? And if so, how well?
To find out, all eyes turned to a new online tool called Congestion Pricing Tracker. The brainchild of two college-age brothers, the tracker uses real-time traffic data from Google Maps to calculate traffic times for selected routes and days. The data is presented as a line graph of traffic times before and after congestion pricing took effect on January 5. Compare one row to another to see if the traffic time has increased or decreased.
Surprisingly, depending on the route and the time of day, the new fare scheme seems to be working – perhaps even better than expected. Starting Jan. 5, most drivers entering Manhattan under 60th Street during rush hour will pay $9 — or $2.25 on late nights and weekends. And this fee appears to be doing what it set out to do, which is change the behavior of people behind the wheel and pour millions of dollars into needed transit improvements.
This is what initially drew brothers Benjamin and Joshua Moshes to the project. Benjamin, a senior studying mathematics and economics at Brown University, was originally working on a project about taxis when his advisor, Professor Emily Oster, made a suggestion to change the topics.
“She recommended that I also look at this new congestion charge that’s going to happen over the summer and collect data and track how things go,” Benjamin said. threshold.
Benjamin liked the idea, especially as it related to the concept of price elasticity and demand. In other words, the more expensive something is, the less people will want to do it. Historically, driving has come at very little cost to the driver – in fact, much of it, from road infrastructure to free parking, is actively subsidized by the government. So if you make it more expensive to drive a private vehicle in one of the busiest, transit-rich areas in the country, you might convince some of them not to.
“How long does it take for people to really change their behavior?” Benjamin asked. “A lot of the theories went, you know, $9, people have to get to work, people still have to get into the area, public transit isn’t going to cut it, people aren’t going to change their behavior. Others said, people will really change their behavior, there will be a lot less traffic.”
“How long does it take for people to really change their behavior?”
He roped in his brother Joshua, who was about to start his freshman year at Northeastern University. Together, they began to describe the tool.
The data project was delayed when New York Governor Kathy Hochul surprised many by putting the congestion charge on hold, citing concerns about the affordability of the new fee and the risk to New York’s post-pandemic economy. But the pause would only be temporary, with Hochul set to reinstate the tax after President-elect Donald Trump wins the November election. The toll was lowered to $9 from $15, and a few weeks later, the toll cameras were turned on.
Photo by Selcuk Acar / Anadolu via Getty Images
At the same time, the tracker launched — and almost immediately, you could find it linked in social media posts by transportation advocates who were excited to watch in real time as fewer cars appeared to be entering the zone. overpopulation. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which was overseeing congestion pricing, was not scheduled to release its own preliminary traffic figures for several weeks. Many people wanted data now, and the sibling tracker helped fill the demand.
In designing the tool, the brothers used the Google Maps API to collect real-time traffic data from 19 routes, using the shortest time to drive from point A to point B for each route. Every 15 minutes, the tracker refreshes the clocks for each route, resulting in 1,824 data points each day. Most of the data was from the 13 routes directly affected by congestion pricing, with additional routes from outside the area to measure the effect on those journeys. They even included a handful of streets in Chicago and Boston as controls in case there were national or historical trends they weren’t picking up.
In the run-up to congestion pricing, one of the methods experts were using to measure the effectiveness of the new charge was to refer to average speeds within the congestion zone. Slower speeds meant more traffic, and faster meant less. But Benjamin and Joshua settled on travel times as the best metric.
“Oh, now it takes me four minutes to get through the Lincoln Tunnel when it used to be 10.”
“What’s great about travel time is that it’s easier to internalize saying, ‘Oh, now it’s taking me four minutes to get through the Lincoln Tunnel when it used to be 10,'” Benjamin said. it was 19 miles an hour, and now I’m going 21 miles an hour, I think I can also internalize that it’s a little bit different.”
The brothers were surprised by how quickly the tracker took off, earning quotes in major media stories of New York Times, of EconomistAND Bloomberg. Their tool became a definitive resource for evaluating whether congestion pricing was effective.
“The number of social media posts, the number of tweets, the number of people who went to the website, people who donated, which we’re really grateful for, has really surprised us in a positive way,” Benjamin said.
The brothers say they hope to keep the tracker alive — though there are costs associated with online hosting and data collection. (You can donate to their project here, or just buy them a cup of coffee.) They plan to make improvements, improve data collection methods, and design a better map. Obviously, this is the type of project that would benefit from a lot more data and a much longer lifespan.
“We’re trying to keep the website running, collecting data, so we can see if the average goes up, down, if there’s any change from what we’ve seen the last few days,” Joshua. said.
But one thing seems certain: Benjamin will likely get a very good grade on his thesis.
“I think the project was a tremendous success in terms of getting information about traffic patterns right away,” Oster, the Brown economics professor and Benjamin’s adviser, said in an email. “Ultimately, the MTA and others will have this information, but the value of the tracker is in the immediate delivery. I was so proud that they were able to do this together.”
