Congestion Pricing makes getting into Manhattan faster, if pricier: new data
Drive times into Manhattan have dropped dramatically since the institution of New York's congestion tolling program, according to data released Wednesday by the MTA — with the most significant improvements at the Holland Tunnel.
Average morning travel times at all eight river crossings into the congestion zone have gone down significantly, Juliette Michaelson, MTA's congestion pricing czar, said in a briefing to the agency's board.
'Trip times have fallen by 10% to 30% on average,' she said. 'These are just transformative improvements.'
The largest single decrease in travel time, consistently, has been at the Holland Tunnel, where the average time of a trans-Hudson morning jaunt has been cut by 48% — nearly in half.
Average morning rush commutes at the Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges have sped up by 30%.
Travel through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel sped up 18%, Lincoln Tunnel commutes got quicker by 17%, and those traversing the Queens-Midtown Tunnel got to Manhattan 15% more quickly.
Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge travel times fell by 10%.
Michaelson said the speedier commutes are due, in part, to fewer drivers, but also because drivers are choosing a wider range of times to enter the city.
In all, an average weekday saw 553,000 vehicles enter Manhattan south of 60th St. so far since tolling began on Jan. 5 — a 5% drop in traffic compared to historic traffic in the month of January.
Of those, 63,000 entered the zone and immediately got on the FDR drive or West Side Highway and left the congestion zone, leaving an average of 490,000 vehicles within the tolling zone per weekday.
So far, the reduction is less than the 13% reduction officials had predicted the phased-in toll would bring.
But MTA chair Janno Lieber said Wednesday he was satisfied with the results so far.
'The most relevant statistics are the ones about the time savings that are being demonstrably experienced,' Lieber said. 'You're seeing such dramatic time savings and dramatic a increase in speeds.'
'I'm not disappointed at all,' he added.
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The MTA plans to publish its data to a public dashboard Thursday — and will update it weekly, officials said.
The plurality of vehicles entering the tolling zone — 44% — come from points north. Another 40% come across the East River crossings from Queens or Brooklyn. Just 17% of those driving into the tolling zone so far come in from New Jersey.
The majority of vehicles entering the surface streets of the congestion pricing zone —57%— are ordinary passenger vehicles: the cars, pickup trucks or SUVs that get charged the base $9 toll. Taxis, Ubers, Lyfts and other for-hire vehicles make up 36% of the traffic entering the tolling zone.
The toll, which gets higher for larger vehicles like trucks, is required by law to raise enough money to back $15 billion in MTA bonds. Those bonds, in turn, will back a long list of MTA capital projects from the 2020-2024 budget.
Lieber and Michaelson said Wednesday that they were not yet ready to publish any revenue data from the tolls, since Taxi, Uber and Lyft revenue — which is paid through a passenger surcharge — had yet to be compiled.
'Broadly speaking, the level of traffic is in the ballpark of what we projected,' Lieber said when pushed. 'Very, very preliminary, it looks, ballpark, like what we thought it would be.'
The first batch of revenue data is expected to be presented to the MTA's board in February.
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