In preparation for their long-awaited court battle with the Trump administration, which kicked off earlier this month, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, officials threw a party back on Jan. 5 to mark the one-year anniversary of congestion pricing in Manhattan’s Central Business District.
There, they sang the praises of the toll zone program: fewer cars, cleaner air, increased traffic speeds, higher fiscal revenues and greater use of public transit. A glossy 108-page marketing brochure was even printed up to celebrate the “transformational success of congestion pricing” in its first year.
Not surprisingly, the Empire State’s numbers don’t add up.
For starters, the MTA is reporting that since the toll cameras were turned on at the beginning of 2025, a daily average of approximately 72,000 vehicles have been taken off the streets below 60th Street, down 11% from the historical baseline. The problem, though, is that the MTA’s baseline numbers include the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway, both of which are roadways specifically excluded from the congestion relief zone, resulting in an apples-and-oranges comparison.
When just vehicle entries into the actual tolled area are included in the analysis, the daily average for the full year 2025 was 493,266, unchanged from the comparable baseline average of 493,529 over 2022-2024. Based on the MTA’s own numbers, during its first year in operation, congestion pricing relieved absolutely no congestion in the congestion relief zone.
Overstated vehicle reductions, in turn, call into question the MTA’s assertions about decreased pollution levels and faster travel times. Based off its flawed estimates of traffic volume changes, the MTA calculated that total greenhouse gas emissions in the relief zone decreased by 6.1% over the first nine months of 2025, even though actual measurements of particulate tailpipe pollution around the city showed no statistically significant movement over the first half of the year.
The MTA has also claimed that bus speeds across the relief zone increased by 2.3% year-over-year between January and September of 2025 — this despite an independent report released by the New York City Comptroller which found that local bus speeds in Manhattan were unchanged post-congestion pricing, still stuck at a snailish 6.5 miles per hour, the lowest across the five boroughs.
On the positive side, perfectly inelastic vehicle demand does maximize tax revenues for the state, which is clearly an overriding priority for New York officials. Governor Hochul has bragged that congestion pricing “has generated over $550 million in net revenue in its first year,” even though the new tax is the fiscal equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
Drilling down into the MTA’s revenue numbers raises still more questions. Why does a largely automated, camera-based tolling system have such a high operating expense ratio (18.4% over the first 10 months of 2025)? Why does the average toll charged work out to only $3.86 per vehicle through October 2025, compared with the headline sticker price of $9.00 per passenger car? This implies significant subsidization of certain drivers (mainly taxis and for-hire vehicles), which further explains why there has been no discernible drop in Manhattan traffic.
All the revenues from congestion pricing have been earmarked for improvements to the public transit system—mainly to pay interest on debt-funded white elephant capital projects like the Second Avenue Subway. Adding further insult to injury, New York city subway and bus fare evasion continues to run at record levels, costing the MTA nearly $1 billion a year in lost revenues—more than offsetting all the windfall annual receipts from the vehicle tax.
Another stated goal of the congestion toll is to force more New Yorkers to use public transit. While both subway and bus ridership increased by roughly 7-8% during 2025, this had nothing to do with the start-up of congestion pricing last year but was more owing to the continuation of the recent post-pandemic trend.
However, to make sure that nothing derails the slow-but-steady recovery in ridership levels—especially with fares just having gone up again—the MTA continues to mislead the public about the level of transit crime, particularly below ground in the subways.
Despite the official protestations to the contrary, overall subway crime is not declining. Focusing exclusively on an “index crime” subset of major felonies misses roughly two-thirds of all subway crime, the majority of which is of a violent and physical nature, regardless of the penal code classification.
In the first nine months of 2025, 1,337 index crimes were reported on the subways, which compares with total criminal complaints of 3,611, on pace for another record year.
For New Yorkers, the only hope of ending all the state-sponsored gaslighting and disinformation about congestion pricing is for the federal government to prevail in court and win a judicial order shutting down the scheme for good.
