Elasticity of demand is not magic, so yeah, making something more expensive will likely reduce demand. While I have no doubt it is a success if you consider only reduced traffic, there are other considerations that override that for me:
1) It's a regressive tax on everyone living here -- even if you never use a car. Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding. The MTA rivals Tammany Hall in terms of waste and fraud, and the talks of budget cuts were political crocodile tears.
3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
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Edit: I'm just going to respond to the single point that everyone is making in one place, instead of repeating it: you don't just get to assert that the hypothesized "reduction in transit time" offsets the costs. You have to prove that argument.
You're the one arguing in favor of a new tax. It's not my job to prove the negative.
Ultimately, congestion was itself a cost, but it was a dynamic cost, increasing and decreasing with the amount of congestion to maximize utility of the roads. What the state has done here, effectively, is set the price of driving higher than the market at all times in order to guarantee a marginal reduction in demand.
It's a max of $21 for a truckload of goods, and that's if they deliver during the day. It probably costs the shipper more than that when the driver stops at a gas station to use the bathroom. Obviously the numbers will vary significantly depending on what the vehicle is carrying, but a truckload of groceries might go for around $100,000 retail [1]. The congestion charge is 0.02% of that.
> By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive.
That's not true. There's a tax credit for low-income residents and a full waiver for disabled people. The average person who drives in Manhattan makes $130,000, 40% more than the average income in the city as a whole [2], so letting them do it for free (while creating negative externalities that we all bear) is just a handout to people who don't need it.
— and speaking of truckloads, the truckers & delivery guys love congestion pricing.
After being the most vocal critics for years, they’ve learned that low traffic == more, faster deliveries == more business and more coverage, or same business with fewer drivers.
This is the real reason why I think it'll never get repealed. If anyone tries, the industry lobbies will be arguing to keep it instead.
> That's not true. There's a tax credit for low-income residents and a full waiver for disabled people.
That's a fig-leaf argument. Yes, there's some theoretical tax credit that may or may not offset the costs for particular groups of people -- and it would be insane if they didn't exempt the disabled. But if the tax weren't causing the marginal driver to stop driving, it wouldn't work, by definition.
It's not a "theoretical" tax credit. Here's the application form: https://lidp.mta.info/
Congesting pricing has dual goals of reducing congestion and funding the MTA. Low-income drivers get a break on the charge, so they fund the MTA a little less than other drivers, but they're still less likely to drive than they were before, because it costs more now.
If nobody is inconveniences, then there would be no change.
It is reasonable to say that it achieved its stated goals. Its not accurate to say nobody is experience higher costs or prevented from doing what they want.
> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
Congestion was already priced into all goods and services in NYC, it just came in the form of a deadweight loss (paying delivery workers / tradespeople / professionals to sit in traffic) instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.
> Congestion was already priced into all goods and services in NYC
I agree!
> instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.
Telling me that the money will be set on fire by a public organization with good intent doesn't convince me.
What has happened here -- and mathematically, this has to be true, or it wouldn't work -- is that the city has taken what used to be the market cost of congestion, and set an artificial floor higher than that market. They then captured the difference as revenue.
That's the fundamental argument against the assertion that traffic speed increases will offset the costs. It cannot be true, or people would choose to drive.
> That's the fundamental argument against the assertion that traffic speed increases will offset the costs. It cannot be true, or people would choose to drive.
I think the mistake you're making here is assuming that the value of driving and the cost of congestion are the same to every driver.
For some people, driving is an elastic decision. They mode shift, or time shift to off-peak, or carpool, or combine errands in the city into one trip instead of multiple.
For other people, driving is necessary. They'll benefit from fewer of the first type of person being on the roads during peak hours.
No, I don't need to make assumptions about any of that. It's a complex interplay of factors (like any economic system), and everyone has their own reward function.
I'm just saying that if the marginal driver were still choosing to drive, then the system wouldn't work at all. That seems tautological?
The MTA has to set the price high enough above market that the reduction in demand is X%. Whether someone is driving because of speed, or comfort, or some other factor, the cost has to exceed their personally calculated benefit.
> Whether someone is driving because of speed, or comfort, or some other factor, the cost has to exceed their personally calculated benefit.
It's a dynamic system though; as some drivers opt not to drive, the utility of driving for those other drivers increases. Yes, the market will find an equilibrium somewhere where some people will still drive, but that's kind of the point.
I think the better argument for your side is that a large number of people have a utility function that isn't rational -- or at least, not based on commute time saved.
Yes, the market will find a new equilibrium, but if I'm right that the marginal driver is choosing to drive or not based mostly on a function of time saved, then eventually we'll see the market reaching an equilibrium where people are willing to pay up to the amount of money they save by getting somewhere faster via car (ignoring other costs for the sake of argument).
If that is true -- if the market is efficient for time -- then this plan can only ever work by making driving more expensive than the time lost to congestion.
(As an aside, thanks for having a serious, nuanced discussion about this. It's depressing how many people just want to fling insults and downvote/flag/censor stuff that they disagree with. I knew I was going to get ravaged for having a non-canonical opinion, but it's so hard to get people to just engage with the argument in good faith.)
i dont think thats true. the cost can also be much cheaper, but people price differentiate better when they can actually see the number than when they cant.
you can look at 19.99 as an example, vs 20 as example of making people feel a certain way to get them to shop differently, or credit cards - which get people to pay much more for an item than they otherwise would with the interest payments, or with the klarna styled buy now pay later.
its not a tautology that a higher price drives down cost.
i think the government price is likely much less than the cost of congestion, especially once you price in the externalities of pollution, but drivers werent aware of how much cost they were incurring from the congestion, and now that there's a number, they can make decisions based off of it
> 1) It's a regressive tax on everyone living here -- even if you never use a car. Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this.
That's an empirical question, you're going to have to prove it. The time saved by delivery drivers or contractors, for example, has value. If they can make more deliveries, or fix more elevators in the same day those services get cheaper. If the only downside is that the assistant patrol supervisor deputy liaison that would have driven to 1 Police Plaza takes the train instead it's clearly a net savings and economic improvement and makes everything we buy and use in the city cheaper.
> 2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding.
The MTA is chronically starved for cash and unable to do large scale long term projects because of unstable funding. If this policy, which as we saw above might well have literally zero aggregate economic downside, also builds more efficient transit, it's a virtuous circle of winning.
> 3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
Rich people can already drive. Now those rich people give money to transit for everyone else. Working people or people who need to drive (like those with a van full of stuff that needs to be somewhere) are able to do so much more efficiently and most likely face net lower costs.
The "downside" is midly affluent people who do have cars and regularly drive in the central area take fewer trips or take the train a few more times instead. And the other downside is that the tens of thousands of assholes who've been abusing the city parking placard process for decades have to find another way to get to work like the rest of us.
The MTA did prove it. That's how they got approval from USDOT. Here's an 868-page report if you're actually serious about wanting proof: https://www.mta.info/document/93446
If we're talking burden of proof then the only real one that matters is the popularity of the program. It's very clearly popular and a success, so here we are.
> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
Aruguable. It’s very possible that the time saved by not sitting in traffic will outweigh the congestion charge for delivery trucks (which is what I assume you’re referring to).
> An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.
> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.
> Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say.
> Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.
Accounts know nothing about running construction projects. If you want to control costs, use fixed price or GMP contracts instead of cost plus or T&M. You also need to make sure your engineers are accurately representing the work scope in the RFP so you don’t get change ordered to death.
That being said, there is definitely corruption in the NYC construction market that doesn’t exist in the market I operate in, and I’ve read articles specifically about sandhogs inflating contracts and so on. Their union contract could possibly specify certain positions being required that are extraneous to the work being performed that would inflate the cost of the project and line the union’s coffers.
Net margins on a 9 to 10 figure construction contract should be around 3-5% in a competitive market.
> an alternative interpretation is that the union workers know more about how to safely do underground work than accountants and supervisors do.
As someone in New York who supports congestion pricing and public transit, I will say this: yes, there is a ton of waste and mismanagement at the MTA, and the TWU is unfortunately frequently one of the impediments to progress here. They have a history of opposing things like industry-standard safety improvements, sometimes even things which create jobs for their members, for arcane political reasons that require a deep understanding of their internal politics to comprehend. It would be nice if the TWU were a more consistent force for efficiency and progress, but they are not. You can compare to unions elsewhere in the world, or even to other unions in the US, and the TWU still winds up as an outlier in many of these areas.
That said, OP is pointing the finger at the wrong party. The MTA is overseen by the state. The responsibility for these inefficiencies and cost overruns lie with the state legislature and the governor. Andrew Cuomo, who was the governor at the time that article was written, famously washed his hands off the MTA. He was so brazen as to even publicly claim that he had no authority over them, at the same time as he was making unilateral management decisions on their behalf, including ordering the MTA to write a check to an upstate ski resort, to bail the resort out after a low-business season.
Fortunately, the money from congestion pricing is legally earmarked by state law and under a settlement from a federal lawsuit (the lawsuit was unrelated to congestion pricing, but the funding was offered up as a settlement term), so there's a lot less wiggle room for things to go wrong.
Congestion pricing is a solid policy win. That doesn't mean the governor (Hochul) and the state legislature don't need to step up and do their jobs - which means real, material oversight - but criticizing congestion pricing on those grounds, when it's one of the few budget items which actually has been legally overseen and structured - is completely off-base.
I think that particular theory is addressed by the "four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world" bit, if it includes the developed world. (Which I strongly suspect it does.)
These new moneys coming in will not buy one new subway car, will not fix one mile of subway track, will not fix one mile of potholes-filled-streets. Will not even paint one mile of street sign. It will all go paying some bureaucrats to create some Tableau dashboards showing how much better something (anything) is.
> These new moneys coming in will not buy one new subway car
I think it is literally being used to buy hundreds of new subway cars as we speak.
Y'all can't just make things up and say whatever you want. I get it, I get it, public sector evil. Unfortunately that's not an argument. Yes, you're going to actually have to try instead of being intellectually dishonest.
Citation needed. It drives me nuts when people treat their own Boomer Facebook-esque rants about "The System, Man" as adequate evidence in what should be empirical discussions about policy tradeoffs.
as far as i can read, your argument is that traffic jams are impossible, because congestion acts as a dynamic cost function to keep the road at its highest utility, when the throughput is highest.
unless you disagree with the that definition of the utility of the road?
how do you explain phenomena like shockwave traffic jams, where otherwise high utility roads get sections of nearly stopped traffic. eg. https://youtu.be/Suugn-p5C1M?feature=shared in a closed system (30s of video)
can you spend some time showing your work, and both propose and prove what the cost function of congestion is? then, it should be clear whether the government set cost is higher or lower, and under what conditions. id especially want to see the limiting behaviour - standstill traffic. my gur sense is that the cost of congestion should be going towards infinity, but im interested in how the constant value from the government is still higher.
Every delivery truck that comes into the city is charged a tax. It's not a matter of "evidence" -- it's how the law works. This cost is passed on to consumers.
I didn't say "gets more expensive on net relative to some hypothetical other universe", because I can't possibly know that. You're the one making the argument that this universe is cheaper than that one. Prove it.
> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
If I buy a cup of coffee, and the cost of the coup goes from $0.05 to $0.10, but the cost of coffee goes down from $1.00 to $0.95, the thing I buy did not get more expensive. The components of its cost changed.
The hot dog delivery truck paid a few extra bucks, averaged out over tens of thousands of hot dogs, and it spent less time stuck in traffic (saving gas and labor costs). This is not a large logical leap. You are arguing that this cannot possibly be the case, which is a large logical leap.
> If I buy a cup of coffee, and the cost of the coup goes from $0.05 to $0.10, but the cost of coffee goes down from $1.00 to $0.95, the thing I buy did not get more expensive. The components of its cost changed.
Great, prove it! You at least agree with me on how taxes work now, so it's up to you to prove that your convoluted tax mechanism actually makes things cheaper. Maybe you're right, and I look forward your evidence.
Barring affirmative evidence for that argument, we should just go with the usual models for taxation that work for everything else, and assume that they end up raising costs for consumers.
A small truck pays $14.40/day. A large truck $21.60/day. That $20ish in fees is distributed across the entire cargo of the truck; I'm sure we agree that the average truck carries more than, say, $20 worth of goods. NYC minimum wage for the driver/delivery person is $16.50/hour.
"Perhaps the most dramatic transformation has occurred outside the toll zone. In Queens, traffic crashes in Astoria and Long Island City have fallen by 27%, with injuries down 31.4%. The reason, Schwartz says, is geographical."
This, of course, all ignores other improvements that are tough to measure. We've seen lower car crash injury rates - what's the per-capita benefit from that? What's the per-capita benefit of less asthma? What's the per-capita benefit of less road noise? (We have concrete evidence that these things are harmful! https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240621-how-traffic-nois...)
> go with the usual models for taxation that work for everything else
What are these magical models of taxation economists have wide consensus on? To my knowledge, tax policy remains a contentious field.
> 15% faster between stops seems highly likely to save that driver an hour or so in their day. Probably some gas, engine wear and tear, etc. too.
Great. Prove it! When you use words like "probably", it indicates that you're speculating.
(I'll just save you some time here: you can't prove it, because no such proof exists. It's fine to just admit that you have a theory.)
> "Perhaps the most dramatic transformation has occurred outside the toll zone. In Queens, traffic crashes in Astoria and Long Island City have fallen by 27%, with injuries down 31.4%. The reason, Schwartz says, is geographical."
Non responsive. I didn't ask you for proof that other things you like might be happening. I asked you to prove that your preferred tax is actually lowering prices.
No it isn't. The government pays for public transit, for the bridges and tunnels that vehicles take into the city, and for the infrastructure that they use when they're here. The government funds its spending with taxes. Either it taxes everyone (payroll/income tax) or it taxes the people who are specifically putting the highest toll on the infrastructure (congestion pricing). The MTA has tried the former — general fund, MTMCT — and it wasn't enough. Now they're trying the latter.
It's clearly a new tax. It didn't exist for the entire history of the city before. So yes, the default is to justify why the change must be implemented.
> So yes, the default is to justify why the change must be implemented.
That was done when the plan was proposed (and reviewed/approved by city/state/Federal government).
We're now in the "confirming the benefits" stage. Which is the point of the article we're discussing; those benefits have, indeed, showed up in the stats. As the justifications for the change suggested they would.
Now's the time for opponents to support their pre-implementation allegations of doom and gloom, with concrete evidence now available because it's an actual thing.
> We're now in the "confirming the benefits" stage. Which is the point of the article we're discussing; those benefits have, indeed, showed up in the stats. As the justifications for the change suggested they would.
No, now you're being slippery. The "stats" you cite have shown improvements in things that I don't care about, and you've provided no evidence to counter the argument I am making.
> Now's the time for opponents to support their pre-implementation allegations of doom and gloom
I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but I didn't have "pre-implementation allegations of doom and gloom", so, perhaps you can go find that person instead.
> The "stats" you cite have shown improvements in things that I don't care about…
You implied you cared about pollution, then claimed that was whimsical when evidence became available.
What do you care about that has measurably worsened with the change? And can you demonstrate it with more than feefees? And will it become “whimsical” if debunked?
Buddy if you are going to make an argument where you make statements, people are going to ask for evidence. You are making statements in the affirmative. So you also have to give proof as well. You are arguing the tax should be removed. Do you have proof that literally everything will become cheaper without this tax?
> I'm just going to respond to the single point that everyone is making in one place, instead of repeating it: you don't just get to assert that the hypothesized "reduction in transit time" offsets the costs. You have to prove that argument.
> You're the one arguing in favor of a new tax. It's not my job to prove the negative.
You ok man? Like, respect for your passion on this issue but you’re also seething pretty hard about New York City having cleaner air and less traffic.
I'm not seething, and I can assure you from the disgusting piles of city dust that accumulate in my apartment that the air is not cleaner in any way that matters to me.
> The New York City health department’s readings of PM2.5, one air quality measure, improved citywide the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2024. The improvement was more pronounced within the congestion zone, but it’s too early to attribute that to the program, or to know if that’s a lasting pattern, experts said.
"My apartment still gets dusty" seems like a pretty desperate anti-congestion charge argument.
Again, in case it's not clear: I was being whimsical. I'm obviously not resting my opposition to this on a one-off argument about dust in my apartment.
I personally don't think the PM2.5 thing would justify the implementation of the system even if it were true, but that's not a debate I want to get into.
1) It's a regressive tax on everyone living here -- even if you never use a car. Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
2) That same regressive tax is used to provide a lifeline for an exceptionally wasteful public organization (the MTA) that needs budget discipline, not additional funding. The MTA rivals Tammany Hall in terms of waste and fraud, and the talks of budget cuts were political crocodile tears.
3) (more minor) By definition, the point of this tax is to make it so that only rich people can drive. As the article notes, of course this is great if you're rich enough to afford it...but the article doesn't quote the people who can't now.
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Edit: I'm just going to respond to the single point that everyone is making in one place, instead of repeating it: you don't just get to assert that the hypothesized "reduction in transit time" offsets the costs. You have to prove that argument.
You're the one arguing in favor of a new tax. It's not my job to prove the negative.
Ultimately, congestion was itself a cost, but it was a dynamic cost, increasing and decreasing with the amount of congestion to maximize utility of the roads. What the state has done here, effectively, is set the price of driving higher than the market at all times in order to guarantee a marginal reduction in demand.