We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning (2024)

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

Here’s what we saw:

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.