I think Hochul was actually playing the long game, not caving or flip-flopping. It probably helped Dems in the 2024 election that congestion pricing was paused at the time.
I saw this take a lot when the congestion pricing was finally approved, and it made sense to me. However, that it's in effect I'm already seeing a lot more positive sentiment for it which makes me think it would probably have been better to implement it sooner and just accrue the benefits of people lives getting easier.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I live within the zone and I have noticed an improvement. My girlfriend ubered to my apartment from NJ on Saturday at half the normal rate in half the time so that was nice. Hopefully the city uses the proceeds productively by improving the subway rather than squandering them.
squandering would actually be better than what really happens. if governments just lit on fire most of the money they got from taxation there would be fewer problems in the world than we have now. the reality is they also then use that money to distort and create dysfunction in the private markets.
Zvi, would it kill you to not make this about Hochul being your enemy when you are actually getting more or less what you want and it appears to be working? First she "betrayed" you. Then, when she does what she said she was going to do and implements, its because she "caved?"
Politics ain't beanbag and like who you like, but this is starting to feel like grudge-holding. Her decision to delay, which was how she announced it, allowed the election to go forward without it being an issue, thus probably helping her party win some closely contended races.
And you know it would have been an issue because of the crazy stuff the congestion-haters are spewing.
All things considered, kind of a pragmatic roll-out (and yes, priced too low, but can fix).
She is who she is, she did what she did, did it in the way she did it, and this was not an isolated incident, and 99% of this post is about the practical questions.
She has any number of opportunities on any number of issues to win me and my vote and support, if she were interested in that.
I certainly have my policy beefs with her, and she can be kind of a klutz in public comments. I'll be watching closely for the upcoming HEAT bill debates, which could radically change how outdoor employment is regulated in NYS relative to temperature. Would turn the whole state into the closed Stanford hiking trail.
> the new argument that congestion pricing could be reducing fees collected at the bridges and tunnels because fewer people are using them.
This one's funny to me, because as a car owner in Brooklyn who drives thru Manhattan once a month on average (but takes the train every day), I would much rather the city get my money than the Port Authority, a barely legal cartel who operates the bridges and tunnels. Even the MTA, who runs the congestion pricing program, is not "the city" but "the state", and although I'm an Albany native (perhaps *because* I'm an Albany native), I wish that Albany didn't even get to have a say here.
People aren't thinking about the political impacts here, which is to say that there's multiple players competing for public funds: NY vs NJ, Port Authority (Holland, Lincoln, GW, Goethals, Bayonne, Outerbridge) vs MTA (Triboro, Verrazzano, Whitestone, Throggs Neck, Brooklyn Battery, QMT, and now congestion pricing). Now, the only way to get out of NYC without paying an MTA toll is to take the Brooklyn Bridge specifically (or plausibly Queensboro staying north of 60th) to the FDR to the GW. This is a huge win for the MTA in general, as they're now capturing a much larger fraction of tolls relative to the PA. The only loss in return is if PATH soaks up the lost drivers and then those drivers fail to connect to the MTA trains, which seems unlikely.
Excellent overview, thanks! I live in the zone too and have already found an improvement in the biking situation. One quibble: your figure of 173k a year for the median salary in Manhattan seems way too high. I couldn't find a reputable source for it anywhere. The US census says median household income in New York County (that is, Manhattan) is 104K and per capita income is 95K, which seems much more reasonable. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcountynewyork,US/PST045224
But fwiw, "median salary" reads very differently to me than "per capita income" or even "median household income". For the former there is the median vs mean distinction. And then in addition I think in "median salary", "median" may mean "median of those who earn a salary" rather than "median of all human beings".
Question: Does improved vehicle traffic flow (higher vehicle speeds) make things less safe for people walking and cycling? Curious on perceptions of this. I'd say that the answer to that is to provide safer infrastructure and better speed enforcement, but at the margin and in the absence of those types of improvements, I'd be curious about the effect, to the degree that slow congested traffic may have been helping make things safer for people outside vehicles.
Suggestion: Allow people to choose a variable rate for their driving costs (through a transponder) and get a rebate on some portion of their property or other taxes. But leave it as a choice, where you can still stay with the flat rate (no transponder, regular property/other taxes without rebate). Would be an even more attractive proposition if you don't even have a car, and you just put the transponder on a shelf in your apartment.
There is definitely a sweet spot. I don't particularly like biking in midtown on a weekday but I also don't like biking on the open roads of Queens at night.
It only makes walking/cycling safer in the same sense that drinking one beer an hour for 24 hour is better than 24 beers in one hour. It's better but not the answer! To really improve safety of pedestrians and cyclists you need to change street designs. Reduced demand for streets should make changes to street designs which don't favor cars easier to implement.
Is there any research that shows _who_ is no longer driving to the congestion zone?
Your post mentions the sanitation worker in Weehawken, but I'm curious if we have a clear picture of which car trips the new toll is preventing
I live (and bike) in the congestion zone and have been struck by how much quieter the streets have been. And I don't have a great sense of which trips are actually being thwarted by this $9 toll given all the existing (and larger) costs of driving into Manhattan
I'm guessing whoever was previously indecisive about driving vs taking the train, might have been pushed over the edge by the new toll, even if it's relatively small.
It would be good to get some more data about how many people switched to trains vs cancelled their trips completely (I know there's some train ridership data in the article, but like Zvi pointed out it seems to be heavily confounded).
I’ll definitely be curious to see how many trips are cancelled altogether.
I’m guessing we won’t have good data about this, but I’m also really curious about the specific kinds of trips that were impacted. Are people from NJ more likely to cancel a trip to Manhattan than people from the Bronx? How about Westchester or CT? Also curious about the nature of these trips – are they meeting up with friends or family? Getting dinner?
Maybe we can get at some of these by seeing which businesses are most impacted. E.g., if people are cancelling dinners in the city, we’d expect more restaurants to close than usual (all else equal).
There's evidence from London. Poor people basically stopped going into London either by car or other transit. The number of car trips by the poor dropped significantly with the original congestion pricing, but didn't significantly change after an increase in the congestion pricing in 2014. Rich people didn't have their overall number of trips change, but did make fewer via car.
60% of the congestion pricing fees were paid by the top 40% of income earners,
Copying the first three of the four main findings here:
> 1. The London Congestion Charging Scheme (LCCS) impacted high-income drivers the most with the top 40% (by income) of drivers accounting for approximately 60% of the revenue.
> 2. High income travelers (top 40% by income) drop more chargeable trips (i.e., trips that are subject to congestion charges) compared to low income travelers (bottom 40% by income).
> 3. Low income travelers drop more trips into Central London overall (25%, compared to 2%), suggesting that congestion charge-eligible trips reduced are increasingly forgone entirely instead of substituted to a non-chargeable mode or time of day.
Given this, it sounds like the _pre-toll_ behavior was such that higher income travelers were already coming into the city more often than lower income travelers (finding 2). Poorer people came into the city less, but this was because they took public transit less relative to richer people or had less flexibility about when they could come to Central London (“time of day”) (3).
I wonder how much of this is a function of the specific public transit setup outside of London. For example, maybe the poorer London suburbanites live farther from the metro so their substitute is worse.
Other theories (probably discussed if I keep reading the PDF!):
Maybe commuting via train takes meaningfully longer and poorer people have less leisure time to travel?
Or poorer people have less flexiblility in their schedule? There appears to be no toll on weekends or after 6pm, so I imagine a lot of richer travelers could be driving then, and could’ve just re-scheduled their trips.
My experience taking public transit from the NYC suburbs (CT, NJ, Westchester, Hudson Valley) is that they’re decent but reliably take 50% longer. So, if that’s the reason, it could definitely still apply to NYC.
However, unlike the LCSS, NYC congestion pricing charges the peak price a huge amount of the time. If finding 3 is driven by “rich people have more schedule flexibility so they can avoid the peak toll,” then I would not expect it to apply as strongly to NYC.
I’m also curious to see what the enrollment ends up looking like for the Low-Income Discount Plan (“federal adjusted gross income for the previous calendar year of no more than $50,000, or be enrolled in a qualifying government assistance program”). If people start getting approval over the next month or so, I wonder how that will impact traffic.
Congestion pricing is a bit like microtransactions in games. And maybe that’s why some people intuitively hate it, even if they don’t express it that way.
It feels like the experience of this rhymes so far with how disproportionately impactful the plastic bag taxes were. It seems like people REALLY dislike paying small fees disproportionate to their size
> I do not understand how this is permitted to continue.
My impression is that this is a combination of petty corruption and administrative indifference.
The petty corruption aspect is that those who are cops themselves, or cop-adjacent in some way, or in some other group unofficially favored by the administrative state (such as press) are unofficially exempt from the usual NYPD traffic enforcement, including officer-issued tickets for speeding, red-light running, and, yes, license plate violations. There is a reason why if you look in an NYPD parking lot you will see a lot of defaced or covered plates: They know they can get away with it.
The other aspect, administrative indifference, is basically that the people who would be charged with cleaning up this situation are themselves among those who benefit from the petty corruption, so they are not particularly incentivized to draw attention to this problem, measure or manage it, or otherwise do things that could change what's happening or even make it more obvious. It's not to say that things couldn't change with directed attention from the top, but then again most NYC pols seem loathe to do anything that would antagonize the NYPD rank and file.
Sydney Australia has many speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll roads with E-ZPass-equivalent readers and cameras. Yet you almost never see vehicles with obscured or missing license plates.
I assume this is a matter of enforcement. If I drove with no plates, I'd expect to be stopped by the first police car I passed.
Do you have any articles or analysis on the capacity of the subway lines? I'm not particularly familiar with American subway capacity but my general understanding is that legacy metro lines that use switching tend to hit capacity limits much earlier than you would expect in comparison to "soviet triangle" style no shared lines system where the the maximum capacity is limited purely by how fast they can reasonably enter and exit stations. With how frequent the NYC Subway is I would have expected during peak hours for it to already be at capacity but I am legitimately curious since you seem to take it as a given that it is otherwise which implies I am misinformed here!
A lot of the lines have express vs local trains. The express trains skip some stations and the stations have extra sets of tracks so these trains don't get stuck.
Of course there are some foundational problems with the subway that are hard to fix like the age of many of the tunnels and that they are deteriorating.
Has anyone come up with a "decentralized" version of congestion pricing where the money just gets distributed from the people who do use the streets to those who wanted to but chose to stay home instead? Of course, this will incentivize people to falsely claim that they urgently wanted to use the streets so they are compensated for staying home instead. But perhaps there's some clever "incentive compatible" mechanism design that does achieve this.
I think that is not realistic, but what would be operationally realistic (but maybe not politically realistic) are
* Redistribute to taxpayers generally, by lowering sales or income tax. Zvi discusses this in the article.
* Redistribute to citizens/residents generally, by paying a cash dividend. This has been proposed for a hypothetical carbon tax, and is essentially what the state of Alaska does with its oil revenues.
For the enforcement I think that there is an interesting twist going on right now. Clearly there has been no enforcement of this issue (or placards or many other forms of petty corruption. And it has seemed unlikely that anyone would change this given the power dynamics around the NYPD.
But, a new commissioner recently took over after the last two commissioners were booted out for alleged corruption. Somewhat shockingly she seems to actually care about this and (possibly precisely because of the commissioner and mayoral corruption scandals) she seems to be able to make moves that previously would have failed:
Even if there is no reduction in traffic at all, this is still a win for congestion pricing. If 100% of drivers are willing to pay the charge then it was under priced in the past and the city was losing out on this revenue.
Dynamic toll pricing make sense when individuals are able to make the choice as close as possible to the point of service. If there is risk that when you arrive at a toll, the price is 3x as much as you want to pay and there is no alternative route, you are likely to just not take the trip at all. Dynamic pricing is great when you can be in the suck and see the glory of paying the toll, like many express lanes on highways when you can choose to pay *after* you are sitting in traffic.
What would have been the effect had they just raised the toll on all bridges and tunnels into manhattan by $9? Would it have been materially different than this current scheme?
Prices of everything in the zone just jumped. This tax is just another on the highest taxed people in the country who get terrible services: a bad education system, a corrupt bureaucracy and awful transportation. But this time it will be different?
These economic thought pieces live in an imaginary online world where, of course, charging for congestion is more efficient than an income tax. But I dont see NYC reducing its income tax anytime soon.
Anything you order from instacart. My family has a business that delivers everyday to the zone, those businesses now pay a surcharge to offset the cost. Either businesses eat that or pass on to consumers.
No offense, but from here it looks like you've made a claim, been asked twice now to back it up, and every time declined to do so, instead making excuses or generalizations.
If prices have increased, but there is no evidence of it, then the increases must have been pretty insignificant, no?
Who do you think pays? Just magically tax revenue appeared? The plan is to raise $1bn/year. That’s a tax on consumers. Add in the deadweight loss (less business activity) and residents will have fewer businesses and less employment.
Fantastically detailed overview. Thanks Zvi. Eager to see how this progresses. I am in Toronto and our downtown can sure use this!
I think Hochul was actually playing the long game, not caving or flip-flopping. It probably helped Dems in the 2024 election that congestion pricing was paused at the time.
I saw this take a lot when the congestion pricing was finally approved, and it made sense to me. However, that it's in effect I'm already seeing a lot more positive sentiment for it which makes me think it would probably have been better to implement it sooner and just accrue the benefits of people lives getting easier.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I live within the zone and I have noticed an improvement. My girlfriend ubered to my apartment from NJ on Saturday at half the normal rate in half the time so that was nice. Hopefully the city uses the proceeds productively by improving the subway rather than squandering them.
'narrator: the government squandered the money'
I think that is the most likely outcome given that this is NYC we are talking about
squandering would actually be better than what really happens. if governments just lit on fire most of the money they got from taxation there would be fewer problems in the world than we have now. the reality is they also then use that money to distort and create dysfunction in the private markets.
Zvi, would it kill you to not make this about Hochul being your enemy when you are actually getting more or less what you want and it appears to be working? First she "betrayed" you. Then, when she does what she said she was going to do and implements, its because she "caved?"
Politics ain't beanbag and like who you like, but this is starting to feel like grudge-holding. Her decision to delay, which was how she announced it, allowed the election to go forward without it being an issue, thus probably helping her party win some closely contended races.
And you know it would have been an issue because of the crazy stuff the congestion-haters are spewing.
All things considered, kind of a pragmatic roll-out (and yes, priced too low, but can fix).
She is who she is, she did what she did, did it in the way she did it, and this was not an isolated incident, and 99% of this post is about the practical questions.
She has any number of opportunities on any number of issues to win me and my vote and support, if she were interested in that.
I certainly have my policy beefs with her, and she can be kind of a klutz in public comments. I'll be watching closely for the upcoming HEAT bill debates, which could radically change how outdoor employment is regulated in NYS relative to temperature. Would turn the whole state into the closed Stanford hiking trail.
> the new argument that congestion pricing could be reducing fees collected at the bridges and tunnels because fewer people are using them.
This one's funny to me, because as a car owner in Brooklyn who drives thru Manhattan once a month on average (but takes the train every day), I would much rather the city get my money than the Port Authority, a barely legal cartel who operates the bridges and tunnels. Even the MTA, who runs the congestion pricing program, is not "the city" but "the state", and although I'm an Albany native (perhaps *because* I'm an Albany native), I wish that Albany didn't even get to have a say here.
People aren't thinking about the political impacts here, which is to say that there's multiple players competing for public funds: NY vs NJ, Port Authority (Holland, Lincoln, GW, Goethals, Bayonne, Outerbridge) vs MTA (Triboro, Verrazzano, Whitestone, Throggs Neck, Brooklyn Battery, QMT, and now congestion pricing). Now, the only way to get out of NYC without paying an MTA toll is to take the Brooklyn Bridge specifically (or plausibly Queensboro staying north of 60th) to the FDR to the GW. This is a huge win for the MTA in general, as they're now capturing a much larger fraction of tolls relative to the PA. The only loss in return is if PATH soaks up the lost drivers and then those drivers fail to connect to the MTA trains, which seems unlikely.
Excellent overview, thanks! I live in the zone too and have already found an improvement in the biking situation. One quibble: your figure of 173k a year for the median salary in Manhattan seems way too high. I couldn't find a reputable source for it anywhere. The US census says median household income in New York County (that is, Manhattan) is 104K and per capita income is 95K, which seems much more reasonable. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcountynewyork,US/PST045224
I hope that Zvi will provide a source too.
But fwiw, "median salary" reads very differently to me than "per capita income" or even "median household income". For the former there is the median vs mean distinction. And then in addition I think in "median salary", "median" may mean "median of those who earn a salary" rather than "median of all human beings".
Question and suggestion:
Question: Does improved vehicle traffic flow (higher vehicle speeds) make things less safe for people walking and cycling? Curious on perceptions of this. I'd say that the answer to that is to provide safer infrastructure and better speed enforcement, but at the margin and in the absence of those types of improvements, I'd be curious about the effect, to the degree that slow congested traffic may have been helping make things safer for people outside vehicles.
Suggestion: Allow people to choose a variable rate for their driving costs (through a transponder) and get a rebate on some portion of their property or other taxes. But leave it as a choice, where you can still stay with the flat rate (no transponder, regular property/other taxes without rebate). Would be an even more attractive proposition if you don't even have a car, and you just put the transponder on a shelf in your apartment.
There is definitely a sweet spot. I don't particularly like biking in midtown on a weekday but I also don't like biking on the open roads of Queens at night.
It only makes walking/cycling safer in the same sense that drinking one beer an hour for 24 hour is better than 24 beers in one hour. It's better but not the answer! To really improve safety of pedestrians and cyclists you need to change street designs. Reduced demand for streets should make changes to street designs which don't favor cars easier to implement.
Is there any research that shows _who_ is no longer driving to the congestion zone?
Your post mentions the sanitation worker in Weehawken, but I'm curious if we have a clear picture of which car trips the new toll is preventing
I live (and bike) in the congestion zone and have been struck by how much quieter the streets have been. And I don't have a great sense of which trips are actually being thwarted by this $9 toll given all the existing (and larger) costs of driving into Manhattan
I'm guessing whoever was previously indecisive about driving vs taking the train, might have been pushed over the edge by the new toll, even if it's relatively small.
It would be good to get some more data about how many people switched to trains vs cancelled their trips completely (I know there's some train ridership data in the article, but like Zvi pointed out it seems to be heavily confounded).
I’ll definitely be curious to see how many trips are cancelled altogether.
I’m guessing we won’t have good data about this, but I’m also really curious about the specific kinds of trips that were impacted. Are people from NJ more likely to cancel a trip to Manhattan than people from the Bronx? How about Westchester or CT? Also curious about the nature of these trips – are they meeting up with friends or family? Getting dinner?
Maybe we can get at some of these by seeing which businesses are most impacted. E.g., if people are cancelling dinners in the city, we’d expect more restaurants to close than usual (all else equal).
There's evidence from London. Poor people basically stopped going into London either by car or other transit. The number of car trips by the poor dropped significantly with the original congestion pricing, but didn't significantly change after an increase in the congestion pricing in 2014. Rich people didn't have their overall number of trips change, but did make fewer via car.
60% of the congestion pricing fees were paid by the top 40% of income earners,
https://www.mit.edu/~hamsa/pubs/Craik-Balakrishnan-TRR2022.pdf
https://ssti.us/2023/01/10/congestion-pricing-impacts-people-differently-depending-on-their-income/
Thank you for sharing this.
Copying the first three of the four main findings here:
> 1. The London Congestion Charging Scheme (LCCS) impacted high-income drivers the most with the top 40% (by income) of drivers accounting for approximately 60% of the revenue.
> 2. High income travelers (top 40% by income) drop more chargeable trips (i.e., trips that are subject to congestion charges) compared to low income travelers (bottom 40% by income).
> 3. Low income travelers drop more trips into Central London overall (25%, compared to 2%), suggesting that congestion charge-eligible trips reduced are increasingly forgone entirely instead of substituted to a non-chargeable mode or time of day.
Given this, it sounds like the _pre-toll_ behavior was such that higher income travelers were already coming into the city more often than lower income travelers (finding 2). Poorer people came into the city less, but this was because they took public transit less relative to richer people or had less flexibility about when they could come to Central London (“time of day”) (3).
I wonder how much of this is a function of the specific public transit setup outside of London. For example, maybe the poorer London suburbanites live farther from the metro so their substitute is worse.
Other theories (probably discussed if I keep reading the PDF!):
Maybe commuting via train takes meaningfully longer and poorer people have less leisure time to travel?
Or poorer people have less flexiblility in their schedule? There appears to be no toll on weekends or after 6pm, so I imagine a lot of richer travelers could be driving then, and could’ve just re-scheduled their trips.
My experience taking public transit from the NYC suburbs (CT, NJ, Westchester, Hudson Valley) is that they’re decent but reliably take 50% longer. So, if that’s the reason, it could definitely still apply to NYC.
However, unlike the LCSS, NYC congestion pricing charges the peak price a huge amount of the time. If finding 3 is driven by “rich people have more schedule flexibility so they can avoid the peak toll,” then I would not expect it to apply as strongly to NYC.
I’m also curious to see what the enrollment ends up looking like for the Low-Income Discount Plan (“federal adjusted gross income for the previous calendar year of no more than $50,000, or be enrolled in a qualifying government assistance program”). If people start getting approval over the next month or so, I wonder how that will impact traffic.
Congestion pricing is a bit like microtransactions in games. And maybe that’s why some people intuitively hate it, even if they don’t express it that way.
It feels like the experience of this rhymes so far with how disproportionately impactful the plastic bag taxes were. It seems like people REALLY dislike paying small fees disproportionate to their size
> I do not understand how this is permitted to continue.
My impression is that this is a combination of petty corruption and administrative indifference.
The petty corruption aspect is that those who are cops themselves, or cop-adjacent in some way, or in some other group unofficially favored by the administrative state (such as press) are unofficially exempt from the usual NYPD traffic enforcement, including officer-issued tickets for speeding, red-light running, and, yes, license plate violations. There is a reason why if you look in an NYPD parking lot you will see a lot of defaced or covered plates: They know they can get away with it.
The other aspect, administrative indifference, is basically that the people who would be charged with cleaning up this situation are themselves among those who benefit from the petty corruption, so they are not particularly incentivized to draw attention to this problem, measure or manage it, or otherwise do things that could change what's happening or even make it more obvious. It's not to say that things couldn't change with directed attention from the top, but then again most NYC pols seem loathe to do anything that would antagonize the NYPD rank and file.
Sydney Australia has many speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll roads with E-ZPass-equivalent readers and cameras. Yet you almost never see vehicles with obscured or missing license plates.
I assume this is a matter of enforcement. If I drove with no plates, I'd expect to be stopped by the first police car I passed.
My sense is that Australian police culture has way less tolerance for petty corruption than NYPD. Non-petty corruption, I’m less sure.
Do you have any articles or analysis on the capacity of the subway lines? I'm not particularly familiar with American subway capacity but my general understanding is that legacy metro lines that use switching tend to hit capacity limits much earlier than you would expect in comparison to "soviet triangle" style no shared lines system where the the maximum capacity is limited purely by how fast they can reasonably enter and exit stations. With how frequent the NYC Subway is I would have expected during peak hours for it to already be at capacity but I am legitimately curious since you seem to take it as a given that it is otherwise which implies I am misinformed here!
A lot of the lines have express vs local trains. The express trains skip some stations and the stations have extra sets of tracks so these trains don't get stuck.
There is also a lot of untapped capacity due to outdated signal technology. Basically, the signals today are very old and manual operated (more or less). The MTA is already working to upgrade the signals to modern ones that let the trains run closer together and have better reliability. Presumably the money from congestion pricing can be used for this upgrade. see more: https://new.mta.info/project/cbtc-signal-upgrades#:~:text=CBTC%3A%20Moving%2Dblock%20signaling&text=The%20section%20of%20track%20around,they%20can%20run%20more%20frequently.
Of course there are some foundational problems with the subway that are hard to fix like the age of many of the tunnels and that they are deteriorating.
Alon Levy blogged about this a couple of times:
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/02/06/the-subway-in-new-york-is-not-at-capacity/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/10/27/new-york-city-zoning-and-subway-capacity/
Has anyone come up with a "decentralized" version of congestion pricing where the money just gets distributed from the people who do use the streets to those who wanted to but chose to stay home instead? Of course, this will incentivize people to falsely claim that they urgently wanted to use the streets so they are compensated for staying home instead. But perhaps there's some clever "incentive compatible" mechanism design that does achieve this.
> wanted to but chose to stay home instead
I think that is not realistic, but what would be operationally realistic (but maybe not politically realistic) are
* Redistribute to taxpayers generally, by lowering sales or income tax. Zvi discusses this in the article.
* Redistribute to citizens/residents generally, by paying a cash dividend. This has been proposed for a hypothetical carbon tax, and is essentially what the state of Alaska does with its oil revenues.
For the enforcement I think that there is an interesting twist going on right now. Clearly there has been no enforcement of this issue (or placards or many other forms of petty corruption. And it has seemed unlikely that anyone would change this given the power dynamics around the NYPD.
But, a new commissioner recently took over after the last two commissioners were booted out for alleged corruption. Somewhat shockingly she seems to actually care about this and (possibly precisely because of the commissioner and mayoral corruption scandals) she seems to be able to make moves that previously would have failed:
Cracking down on abuse of overtime: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/nyregion/new-york-police-department-maddrey.html
Towing cars without license plates: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nyc-cracks-down-ghost-cars-103700106.html
Car leasing corruption: https://nypost.com/2025/01/15/us-news/nypd-commissioner-tisch-calls-for-revue-of-car-leasing-program-abused-by-top-brass-sources/
Remains to be seen what the ultimate scale and consistency of these programs are but it does seem to be a real change.
Even if there is no reduction in traffic at all, this is still a win for congestion pricing. If 100% of drivers are willing to pay the charge then it was under priced in the past and the city was losing out on this revenue.
Dynamic toll pricing make sense when individuals are able to make the choice as close as possible to the point of service. If there is risk that when you arrive at a toll, the price is 3x as much as you want to pay and there is no alternative route, you are likely to just not take the trip at all. Dynamic pricing is great when you can be in the suck and see the glory of paying the toll, like many express lanes on highways when you can choose to pay *after* you are sitting in traffic.
What would have been the effect had they just raised the toll on all bridges and tunnels into manhattan by $9? Would it have been materially different than this current scheme?
Prices of everything in the zone just jumped. This tax is just another on the highest taxed people in the country who get terrible services: a bad education system, a corrupt bureaucracy and awful transportation. But this time it will be different?
These economic thought pieces live in an imaginary online world where, of course, charging for congestion is more efficient than an income tax. But I dont see NYC reducing its income tax anytime soon.
Example of something whose price increased due to congestion pricing? By how much did the price increase?
Anything you order from instacart. My family has a business that delivers everyday to the zone, those businesses now pay a surcharge to offset the cost. Either businesses eat that or pass on to consumers.
Could you give an example of a product that has the surcharge, and how much the surcharge is?
Google “instacart congestion tax”. I can’t share screen shots here. Also I can’t show customers invoices but they are definitely added.
"instacart congestion tax" leads me to this, which seems to be unrelated.
https://www.instacart.com/company/shopper-community/fast-tracked-folly-nycs-misguided-grocery-delivery-ordinance-hurts-new-yorkers/
No offense, but from here it looks like you've made a claim, been asked twice now to back it up, and every time declined to do so, instead making excuses or generalizations.
If prices have increased, but there is no evidence of it, then the increases must have been pretty insignificant, no?
Who do you think pays? Just magically tax revenue appeared? The plan is to raise $1bn/year. That’s a tax on consumers. Add in the deadweight loss (less business activity) and residents will have fewer businesses and less employment.