New York City’s congestion pricing program has now been in place for over a year, and by most accounts it has been hailed as a smashing success. Traffic is flowing better in the congestion relief zone, the streets are safer, and—to paraphrase Mark Twain—the reports of the death of lower Manhattan were greatly exaggerated. Even some drivers now say the toll is a small price to pay for not being stuck in gridlock.
Below, we asked Climate School experts across diverse disciplines to weigh in on the past, present and future of congestion pricing.
Daniel Westervelt
Westervelt is an associate research professor at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is part of the Columbia Climate School.
Your team has been studying the impact of congestion pricing on New York City’s air quality. Studying street-level pollution in a dense city like NYC seems like a wicked problem. How did you approach this, what data sources did you rely on, and how did you disentangle the effects of congestion pricing from confounding factors like weather variability, seasonal cycles and broader regional pollution trends?
Our research team used publicly available air pollution data both from ground-based monitors owned by the New York City Community Air Survey (NYCCAS) and satellite remote sensing retrievals from NASA. These two data sources complement each other well, and thus are well-suited for studying the impacts of congestion pricing on NYC’s air quality. NYCCAS runs about 18 real-time, street-level monitors across all five boroughs, within and outside of the Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ), that were especially suited for evaluations of the Central Business District Tolling Program (CBDTP.) Though this is impressive data coverage, more monitoring would help improve research findings. Which is where satellite data comes in. With the satellite data we essentially have complete spatial coverage of the five boroughs at high spatial resolution.
To disentangle the impact of confounding factors like weather and other clean air policies, we used a difference-in-difference approach, which treats sites within NYC but outside of the CRZ as control sites, while the sites within the CRZ are the treatment sites. The control sites give us an estimate of how pollution levels change for reasons other than CBDTP.
Daniel Westervelt’s findings on the impacts of the congestion pricing program on air quality in New York City will be published on State of the Planet soon.
Steven Cohen
Cohen is the senior vice dean of Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and a professor in the practice of public affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs.
New York City’s congestion pricing program has now been in place for more than a year. From a public policy perspective, has the program delivered on its goals so far?
Congestion pricing has reduced congestion in Manhattan south of 60th street, reduced air pollution, and generated $550 million dollars in its first year—about $50 million above its goal. These funds will enable the MTA to finance $15 billion of its capital plan to improve mass transit in the region. The fears that congestion pricing would harm local retail have not materialized—in fact, foot traffic has increased in stores due to lower congestion and greater use of mass transit. Bus speed has increased as well. No traffic jams have resulted outside the tolling zone, and parking north of 60th street has not gotten worse than it already was. The fee has survived numerous court challenges.
Political support of congestion pricing has increased as a result of the success of the policy initiative. According to a Sienna College poll, in 2024 only 32% of New Yorkers favored the fee, while 52% opposed it. By March 2025, 42% wanted to keep the fee in place, while 35% wanted it to end. Suburbanites continue to hate the fee and probably always will. But the argument that the fee is an unreasonable and regressive tax on working New Yorkers is ridiculous. Well over 90% of the people traveling into Manhattan’s central business district come in via mass transit. The congestion fee is a small part of the bridge, highway and parking fees paid by people who drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street. You need to have no choice, be wealthy, or be a little crazy to drive into that part of the city during working hours. By spending congestion fees on mass transit, you are simply taxing rich people to subsidize mass transit for everyone. The next step for congestion pricing would be to enable fees to rise on gridlock alert days to encourage commuters to use of mass transit. In sum: congestion pricing has proven to be a very successful public policy.
Michael Gerrard
The founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and one of the foremost environmental lawyers in the nation, Michael Gerrard is an advocate, litigator, teacher and scholar who has pioneered cutting-edge legal tools and strategies for addressing climate change.
New York City’s congestion pricing program recently secured a major legal victory when a judge ruled that the federal government’s attempt to terminate the toll was unlawful. Are there other pending legal challenges that could still jeopardize the program? More broadly, what do the legal battles over congestion pricing reveal about the balance of power between federal, state, and local governments when it comes to shaping transportation or climate policy?
Numerous lawsuits concerning congestion pricing are still pending. Some are at the trial [lower court] level; some are in the appellate courts. Some are in federal court, and some are in state court. Most are in New York, but some are in New Jersey. So far, every one of the decisions handed down has been favorable to congestion pricing. This accumulation of positive decisions makes future decisions more likely to be positive. More importantly, the mounting evidence of the positive impacts of New York’s congestion pricing—in traffic, air quality, safety, transit ridership, revenue for transit improvements, etc.—makes it less likely that any judge will decide to try to shut the program down. So, I would rate the odds that congestion pricing will survive the still-pending litigation to be high.
The numerous lawsuits and their outcomes also show that the courts are bulwarks against the efforts of politicians to defy the law. First [New York Governor] Kathy Hochul tried to block the start of congestion pricing; the lawsuits (in which I was heavily involved) established she didn’t have the power to do that, and she converted to becoming a big supporter. When Donald Trump tried to stop it, he was thwarted at every turn. So was Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey. Congestion pricing was born of a joint effort by the federal, state and city governments; the agreements they forged and the laws they enacted have held up.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.
