The first U.S. congestion pricing system results in a dramatic drop in traffic in New York

Unlock Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

New Yorkers are traveling much faster across Manhattan’s bridges and tunnels since their city implemented its long-debated congestion pricing plan earlier this month, according to newly available traffic data.

Morning rush hour speeds from New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel, a main route under the Hudson River to Manhattan, have nearly doubled from last year to 28 miles per hour. Evening speeds over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn increased from 13 mph to 23 mph.

If these trends continue, Driver Anyone willing to pay the $4.50 to $14.40 toll to enter the congestion zone in the center of the busiest city in the U.S. will save thousands of hours a year currently spent crawling through smoggy tunnels or wasted over clogged bridges.

New York’s congestion pricing system, which went into effect on January 5, is intended to reduce traffic and help fund $15 billion in urgently needed funding Improvements in local transport.

The toll applies to vehicles entering a “congestion relief zone” below 60th Street in Manhattan, a part of the island that includes Midtown, Greenwich Village, SoHo and the Wall Street area. Most passenger vehicles entering the zone now pay a toll of $9, while trucks pay $14.40 and motorcycles pay $4.50. Some cars, including emergency vehicles, are exempt.

The system means New York joins a small club of major cities with congestion pricing along with London, Milan, Singapore and Stockholm. Traffic in London, which launched its program in 2003, decreased by 14 percent in his zone in the first year. Other cities saw declines of more than 20 percent.

The rise in new York Speeds come from data provided to the Financial Times by traffic monitoring firm Inrix, compiled from anonymized GPS in vehicles, mobile devices and road sensors. The data includes speeds on various routes around the city at different times of the day before and after the toll regime began.

“Fortunately, there are very few access points in Manhattan, and they are limited to bridges and tunnels, so you can really get a feel for what’s going on,” said Inrix analyst Bob Pishue.

Of the eight bridges and tunnels examined, seven experienced significant acceleration during at least one rush hour. Three bridges into Manhattan that are not connected to the congestion zone did not experience similar speed increases.

An FT analysis of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s hourly traffic data also found that fewer vehicles were traveling in the affected tunnels during rush hour. Bridges and tunnels outside the zone carried more vehicles.

A report This week, the MTA also showed significant reductions in travel times, including 30-40 percent for vehicles entering the Manhattan business district. It also turned out that city buses ran faster and their ridership was slightly higher.

According to the Congestion Pricing Tracker, a project by student brothers Benjamin and Joshua Moshes that monitors commute times via Google Maps, peak times through the Holland Tunnel dropped this week from 20 minutes before the toll to nine minutes.

“We’re pretty confident that we’re going to see really big changes in the bridges and tunnels that go into the congestion zone,” Benjamin Moshes said.

Lewis Lehe, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has found that drivers in other cities with congestion pricing respond more strongly to the introduction of a toll than to subsequent price increases – an idea he calls “great elasticity during insertion“.

Lehe was “shocked” by the extent of the impact shown in the initial New York data, but warned that it would take time to fully understand the impact of the new tolls.

At 5 p.m. on a weekday near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in Lower Manhattan, there was just a single car waiting at a traffic light that until recently would have been blocked for blocks. The bold border guards who used to guard the intersection had disappeared. The speed through the tunnel has increased by almost 50 percent.