Welcome to the next fight: is congestion pricing working or is it a terrible failure?
And, more important, should we spend our entire day debunking crazy people and the New York Post (same thing — jinx!) on social media?
Obviously, passions are running high, as opponents try to "prove" the toll is a glitchy disaster like the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson Netflix fight while supporters try to "prove" things are going off without a hitch like the first-ever AEW Dynamite broadcast on Max.
It was impossible to declare anything anything on the first weekday of congestion pricing, given that the prediction of heavy snow clearly scared off many drivers. That didn't stop supporters of congestion pricing from spending a lot of the day skeeting photos of empty car lanes and screenshots of graphs that base their traffic data on numbers from the first Sunday in January and a snowy Monday in New Jersey.
Meanwhile, Fox5 livestreamed "Congestion pricing cams," people on TikTok were acting literally deranged, braindead podcasters are using the start of the toll to demonstrate their racism and ignorance of what the money is for and the New York Post is demonstrating why scabrous Australian newspaper moguls should not be allowed to buy American media outlets and why you shouldn't bother to spend your time trying to rebut every other BS story with which they defile the internet (which is saying something).
Everyone would be best served by taking a few deep breaths and closely following the Pete Alonso free agency situation, which will provide necessary high-stakes drama with a much firmer and quicker conclusion than "Does congestion pricing work?"
There's no real "data" yet; this toll is barely older than the first New Year's babies born in the city.
That being said, as anyone who read the Streetsblog explainer on congestion pricing knows, the MTA is responsible for giving the public a host of details on how congestion pricing is working, including direct traffic impacts, air quality changes and even the status of the capital work to be funding with the toll revenue. Some of those things, especially the air quality impacts, will take a decent amount of time to sort out.
The MTA and city Department of Transportation are also required by law to publish a public report on congestion pricing's effectiveness one year into the program, and the MTA told the federal government it will provide at least a twice-per-year update on the data its agreed to share. MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber told reporters on Sunday that the agency will "put out a lot of data," and agency spokesperson Aaron Donovan added on Monday that there will likely "be formal reporting to our board each month as well."
With some of the congestion pricing metrics, it will take time to lower the noise-to-data ratio, as no less a congestion pricing authority than Charles Komanoff has gone over. Average central business district traffic speeds are updated by the city Department of Transportation every month, and the actual traffic speed bonuses will be pegged to the coming subway improvements and (as anyone who has followed the Second Avenue Subway saga knows) those take time to accumulate.
In the medium-term then, we're simply going to have to wait it out to see how the toll is actually really doing, and whether the Mets just buck up and pay Alonso like they should. That doesn't mean that transparency advocates are letting the MTA off the hook when it comes to at least demonstrating something is happening in the early days of the toll.
"We appreciate that it will take time to fully understand the impacts of the congestion pricing program, particularly concerning air quality, as there are a lot of factors that affect the data," said Reinvent Albany Senior Policy Advisor Rachael Fauss. "At the same time, it is important for public confidence in the program for the MTA to be fast, if not perfect, in releasing data about how congestion pricing is working — similar to how we get preliminary election results from the Board of Elections with the understanding that the data is not yet final."
That being said, if you want to start trying to do some amateur success sleuthing, that will take patience, but the data will be out there for the people who know how to sift through it.
For one, at about 6 p.m. every weekday, the MTA publishes daily ridership numbers from the previous day on the subway, bus and commuter rail. The agency publishes a whole mess of open data including hourly subway ridership (though it lags so only use it as a baseline) and toll facility traffic. The agency also added two congestion pricing-specific data sets for map-makers: taxi and for-hire vehicle trips inside the CBD, the CBD geofence data.
In addition, the MTA includes the previous month's bridge and tunnel crossings in its update to the MTA Board every month; the city DOT shares open data on bicycle counts from bike counters around the city which get updated the next day, and Citi Bike publishes both monthly operating reports with ridership. (Citi Bike also has a real-time data stream you can use if you know how to work with General Bikeshare Feed Specification data.)
The FDNY also publishes emergency response times (but they take two weeks to update) and the Traffic and Limousine Commission publishes gobs of taxi and FHV data that the city's own data wizards use to calculate average traffic speeds inside the CBD. But those also take a few months to be updated.
Give it a week, even a month before you start engaging in arguments with strangers about how congestion pricing is playing out. You'll feel better, promise.
Or you could do what one Council member is advocating: vandalize the toll cameras.
