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What benefit? Less congestion? We won't see such a benefit.
What urban planners call "induced demand" is simply "pent-up demand"; the roads were so oversubscribed that when a new lane or road opens of course it is still at LOS F. The demand wasn't caused by the road; it was caused by the useful things along the road.
Why? It seems unlikely that car journeys are immune to price signals.
Elasticity of demand is very low.
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That is obviously false as seen by the actual massive drop in traffic after the congestion pricing scheme went on.
The major beneficiaries were the tradesmen that bill $150/hr and more than saved paying the fee and chopping 20-40minutes of driving off their day.
The drop doesn't look particularly massive to me at least looking at the NY/NJ MTA ezpass data for January for traffic through Lincoln and Holland tunnels. 2025 is about 7% lower 2024. Adjusting for the number of non-winter-break weekdays in Jan 2024 vs Jan 2025, I'd estimate that the actual drop in traffic is more like 10%. Still, not exactly a huge effect on traffic volume - but that 10% lower traffic volume leads to quite a bit more than a 10% drop in the time vehicles spend on Manhattan roads.
Side note: the ability to embed graphs would be super nice.
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Since they were declaring victory in the first week of the year (always lighter traffic than usual, and with a snowstorm, no less) based on comparing cherrypicked routes on those days to similar days during more normal commute periods, I know they will lie about this and claim a massive drop in traffic regardless of what actually happens.
Do you think the NJ port authority is falsifying the EZPass data they're sharing here?
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What evidence would convince you that traffic has reduced?
There would need to be an analysis by a disinterested observer. Unfortunately, there aren't any.
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Until they get sick of riding in urine soaked public transit with drug addicted homeless people. I mean there’s a reason why no one wants to ride public transit and it ain’t the cost. My city has voted on expanding it all the time no one wants it.. They don’t want the crime, the drugs, the smell.
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Mass transit is so much more efficient at moving people through dense areas. There is certainly demand for transit, but in a healthier society it does not have to be by car. The original plans for federal interstates accounted for this and were supposed to be bypass routes. You are correct about a potential lack of reduction in congestion, only because public transit in NYC is so off-putting an experience. There are no strangers having dissociative episodes in one’s car. Europe and Asia’s more successful mass transit systems absolutely have resulted in less urban congestion than our car culture.
Mass transit, which is typically ambiguously defined, is only better at moving people where the system operates in a hub and spoke system.
If everyone goes to a place for work and then goes home, mass transit is awesome if the place for work is all the same.
However, if there is slight divergence, mass transit loses spectacularly on time. It often even loses spectacularly on price when public subsidies are factored in.
Usually the target for mass transit is a 3-seat ride. Collector, trunk, distributor. This is already bad, but in fact there will be many destinations for which you can't even get that, and they're even worse. Manhattan has some advantages for mass transit; overall density (meaning the walking leg can get you a lot of places) and the linear layout of the island. The linear layout means a one or two seat ride is practical for lot more users than in a typical mass transit system. That there are express tracks helps too, though those could have been built elsewhere; they just weren't.
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Public subsidy is a funny charge. Typically after all fuel taxes from every level of government are accounted for, it adds up to a quarter of the budget for road construction and maintenance in America. Tolls, registration and other fees only provide another 10 percent. 65% of funding is unrelated to usage. Which, this is typically how subsidy is defined when applied to rail networks.
This probably isn't true; it probably fails to count fuel taxes diverted elsewhere (such as mass transit). But note that even if it were, 100% of the operating cost of the rolling stock is covered by users of automobiles. The mass transit target is typically 50%. 100% of the capital cost of the rolling stock is covered by users of automobiles; for mass transit that number is 0%. And even if the amount for road construction collected from drivers is 25%, that number for mass transit is, again, 0%.
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It's efficient at moving large numbers of people who are coming from the same place and going to the same place. It's pretty terrible at anything else.
"Large numbers of people can easily get themselves to an entrance to the transit network and have destinations close to one of the exits of the transit network" describes New York pretty well.
It describes Manhattan pretty well. The Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn badly, and Staten Island not at all.
It describes commuters from some of those places (specifically those with park-and-rides) into Manhattan fairly well.
Of course now park-and-rides are having capacity issues, but that is a problem we can deal with. We're American. Building more parking lots is in our blood.
On the New Jersey side, some years ago they built a very large station one stop from Penn Station... with no commuter parking. Most of the train towns won't allow any more parking, so unless you applied for a permit 10 years ago you probably don't have a spot and are stuck taking a bus (or cab, which gets expensive fast) to the train. If they did build parking you'd get stuck in a traffic jam trying to park, because of course everyone is trying to arrive all at once to get the train.
Or you can take a bus across the Lincoln Tunnel express bus lane, and spend half your morning in bus congestion to get into Port Authority Bus Terminal, and half your evening lining up to get a bus out (that you'll likely be standing on). I've tried all the ways in and out of Manhattan to suburban NJ, and they're all terrible.
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Good for getting lots of people through bottlenecks though. "Everyone commuting to downtown across the same bridge" is a pretty common situation in American cities, and one transit can solve well.
Of course, using congestion pricing just means that all the lawyer software devs working downtown pay the fee just like they all pay to park in the same downtown highrise parking lot. While a guy trying to get across the bridge to his McJob on the city outskirts can't afford it and has to spend 4 hours taking three transfers on the shit bus with all the hobos.
When there's so much economic surplus in jobs downtown (and thus inelastic demand for bridge crossing), congestion pricing doesn't do shit except harvest money for more graft. Which is probably why it's so popular for city governments.
The smart solution would be to find the densest destination zones and target them directly. Get 80 lawyers on a corporate bus because they're all going to the same building, and don't charge Poorfag McMcJob to use the bridge.
Even the lawyers probably end up happier because they were only paying hundreds of dollars a day for downtown parking as a negative-sum status competition, which congestion pricing only exacerbates.
Plus now you have a really funny joke setup if the lawyer bus ever goes off the bridge.
Except not really. You have to collect the people on one end of the bottleneck and distribute on the other, and that introduces more delays and bottlenecks.
Why would they drive, if transit works so well?
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“Same place” is one heck of a strawman. It really depends on the transit network. The rail lines that reach out into the suburbs around Munich, that lots of people in my wife’s extended family use to commute, as an example, are great. And Munich, with comparatively less of its streets dedicated to cars, is pretty great, too.
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