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New Yorkers are cruising much faster along Manhattan’s bridges and tunnels since their city implemented its long-debated congestion pricing plan early this month, according to newly available traffic data.
Morning rush-hour speed from New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel, a main route under the Hudson River into Manhattan, has almost doubled to 28mph compared with a year earlier. Evening speed over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn has increased from 13mph to 23mph.
If these trends hold, motorists willing to pay the $4.50-$14.40 toll to enter the congestion zone in the centre of the US’s busiest city will save thousands of hours per year they currently waste crawling through smoggy tunnels or over clogged bridges.
New York’s congestion-pricing scheme, which went into force on January 5, is meant to cut traffic and help fund $15bn in sorely needed improvements to local mass transit.
The toll applies to vehicles entering a “congestion relief zone” below 60th Street in Manhattan, a chunk of the island that includes Midtown, Greenwich Village, SoHo and the area around Wall Street. Most passenger cars entering the zone now pay a $9 toll, while trucks pay $14.40 and motorcycles, $4.50. Some autos, including emergency vehicles, are exempt.
The scheme means New York joins London, Milan, Singapore and Stockholm in a small club of big cities with congestion pricing. Traffic in London, which introduced its programme in 2003, dropped by 14 per cent in its zone in the first year. Other cities experienced drops of more than 20 per cent.
The increase in New York speeds is evident in data provided to the Financial Times by traffic-tracking firm Inrix, and assembled from anonymised GPS in vehicles, mobile devices and road sensors. The data contains speeds along various routes around the city, at various times of day, from before and after the tolling scheme began.
“Thankfully Manhattan has very few access points, and they’re limited to bridges and tunnels, so you can really get a feel for what’s going on,” said Inrix analyst Bob Pishue.
Of eight bridges and tunnels examined, seven experienced significant acceleration in at least one rush hour. Three bridges into Manhattan that are not connected to the congestion zone did not experience similar speed increases.
An FT analysis of hourly traffic data from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority also showed fewer vehicles in affected tunnels during rush hours. Bridges and tunnels outside the zone carried more vehicles.
A report this week from the MTA also showed significant drops in travel times, including 30-40 per cent for vehicles entering Manhattan’s business district. It also found that city buses were moving faster and that their ridership was slightly higher.
According to the Congestion Pricing Tracker, a project by college student brothers Benjamin and Joshua Moshes that monitors commute times via Google Maps, peak times through the Holland Tunnel fell from 20 minutes pre-toll to nine minutes this week.
“We are pretty confident we are seeing really big shifts in those bridges and tunnels that are leading into the congestion zone,” Benjamin Moshes said.
Lewis Lehe, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has found that drivers in other cities with congestion pricing respond more dramatically to the introduction of a toll than to later price increases — an idea he refers to as “large elasticity at introduction”.
Lehe was “startled” by the size of the effects shown in early New York data, but cautioned that it would take time to fully understand the effects of the new tolls.
At 5pm on a recent weekday near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan, just a single car waited at a stoplight that until recently would have been jammed for blocks. The brazen crossing guards who used to shepherd the intersection had disappeared. Speeds through the tunnel have increased nearly 50 per cent.
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