- Manhattan is implementing a congestion pricing plan, with the new toll covering much of lower Manhattan.
- The toll could cost up to $23 a day for entering the zone in a car.
- The revenues from the toll will be used for system maintenance and capital investment in the public transit system.
- There are concerns about the affordability of the toll and its impact on low-income drivers.
- Exemptions and subsidies will be provided for certain groups, such as residents of the Central Business District and people with disabilities.
- The toll will help fund improvements in the MTA's bus network and move towards a more environmentally friendly transit system.
- The toll may lead to increased traffic in certain areas, such as Fort Lee, New Jersey and the Bronx.
- New Jersey is suing the federal government over the toll zone, as none of the funds go to New Jersey.
- Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft will also be subject to additional fees to contribute to the MTA system.
- The toll aims to reduce vehicle miles traveled in the city center and improve air quality.

- Congestion pricing reduces vehicle miles traveled in the city
- Regional planners expect vehicle miles traveled to increase in some parts of the wider region with or without congestion pricing
- Congestion pricing is not anti-car, but aims to provide alternatives to driving
- Cities like London, Stockholm, Singapore, Milan, Paris, and Barcelona have implemented congestion pricing and seen positive impacts on pollution and transit usage
- Supporters hope that congestion pricing will improve mass transit and address transportation inequities
- Continued investment is necessary to maintain and improve congestion pricing systems.

Drivers headed to downtown Manhattan will face a new toll beginning in spring 2024. The final fee, which is still up for debate, is expected to be between $9 and $23 dollars per day for passenger vehicles. Commercial vehicles will be charged upon each entry and exit to the zone. Regional planners believe the toll will nudge some drivers onto transit. The MTA plans to use the proceeds from congestion pricing to shore up its aging infrastructure. Watch the video above to see how New York City is planning to spend the cash raised by the new toll.

Chapters: 
00:00 — Introduction
03:23 — Tolls
05:45 — Environment 
08:24 — Ride-shares and taxis
10:40 — Global cities 

Produced, Shot and Edited by: Carlos Waters
Additional Shooting and Editing by: Liam Mays
Animation: Jason Reginato
Editing Support by: Jack Hillyer
Supervising Producer: Lindsey Jacobson
Additional Footage: Getty Images, New York Metropolitan Transit Authority
Additional Sources: BronxWorks, U.S. Census Bureau, Office of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, Environmental Protection Agency, ESRI, U.S. Federal Highway Administration, MoSAIC Institute of Transportation Studies at University of California Davis, New York City Department of Transportation, Texas A&M, TransCore, Transportation Workers International

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Why New York Will Charge $23/Day To Drive Into Manhattan

Walk the streets of Manhattan and you may soon see hundreds of new cameras covering every lane headed downtown.

They're charging a new toll on congestion.

We are going to be the very first state in the nation, the very first city in America, to have a congestion pricing plan.

The new toll covers much of lower Manhattan.

Entering this zone in a car could cost up to $23 a day.

It's going to be an example for cities all over the country to rethink how they use their street space.

But a plan of this scale will affect millions of people every day.

Most people are only focused on the fact that they are going to have to pay $23 to get into Manhattan.

Pocketbook issues always take priority over the environmental issues or anything else that's related to the problem.

The MTA will use its share of project revenues to secure $15 billion in financing for system maintenance and capital investment.

The public transit system that millions of New Yorkers rely on every single day has been disinvested in almost from day 1.

Many parts of the system have suffered basically a century of deferred maintenance.

Over the last 70 years, the federal government's focusing almost exclusively on investing in our roads, infrastructure, interstate highway system.

We're not going to undo 70 years of policy.

Can higher tolls for drivers fix traffic in Manhattan?

And will they make New York even less affordable?

Manhattan's new toll zone covers all of the routes into the Central Business District.

Some routes into the area already get told.

Others are free until the program begins in the spring of 2024.

And so that discourages people from really driving out of their way for the cheapest route.

The final price of the fee isn't set yet.

The range that is being considered is between 9 and $23.

If it's $23, it means there's lots of exemptions.

I mean, you got to put something into the system to get something back.

Everything is increased in New York, but the pay.

So people are struggling trying to figure out where this money is coming from.

If you're a resident of the CBD and you make under $60,000 a year, you'll get a subsidy.

You know, there's an adjustment, you know, taking a look at what really is happening in the city today.

The MTA received thousands of requests for exemptions from the toll, including from artists, students, civil servants, NYPD, and trade unions.

There's no guarantee these requests will be granted.

If you're a low-income driver and you're on the outer fringes of the outer boroughs, how do you get to the city If you're not going to drive anymore, you're going to put another perhaps 2 hours on that commute.

And when there are many layers of decision making in order to tax ourselves, that's many layers of opportunity for someone to say, hey, no, let's not do this.

The money raised from this zone may bring billions of new dollars worth of investment into an aging MTA system.

It's a massive system that has been under invested for decades.

It's a very old system, in some cases over 100 years old.

And so it really requires a lot of investment just to keep what we have operating.

80 percent of the cash raised from this toll goes toward the city's subways and buses.

Signals is actually 1 of the biggest investments we can make to ensure that we can run more trains more quickly.

been very thoughtful about where those investments will occur.

MTA is building 4 new Metro North stations in the Bronx that will allow people to access Metro North more easily.

New York has the most riders and the slowest buses.

Customers say they would be encouraged to ride more often if wait times improved and if there were fewer people behaving erratically on trains, according to an MTA survey.

Our customers are saying We want faster service.

You know, we have signals that were installed literally in the 1950s that are still sort of, you know, working, thank goodness, but that won't be forever.

Still, the new toll doesn't cover all of the MTA's needs.

Officials say the system needs about $54 billion for new capital assets.

That includes track upgrades, repairs to elevated structures, and replacing power equipment.

Revenues from the toll will also be put towards cleaner transit.

And with the largest bus fleet in America, that's a big deal.

So we have a couple of buses that will be powered by hydrogen that will be on property in 2025.

The MTA is using the funds from congestion pricing to improve its bus network.

Its hydrogen bus pilot will be small, with just 2 buses beginning by the end of 2024.

It wants to make its entire bus fleet emissions free by 2040.

That's going to help reduce the amount of pollution associated with buses themselves.

The region would not exist in the way it does without our transit system.

It allows us to be a very efficient place when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, because so many people are on public transit.

Bumper to bumper traffic is an environmental issue, too.

We know that idling is 1 of the biggest causes of air pollution, which contribute to significant air qualities and smog.

When cars are stopped, they are accumulating more of that rather than when they're moving along.

The toll will improve air quality in many parts of the region, according to traffic simulations.

But areas like Fort Lee, New Jersey and the Bronx could become busier with congestion pricing in place.

The red spots on this map show where planners expect more traffic when the toll is live.

Roads like the Cross Bronx Expressway may have to handle even more vehicles.

A lot of the trucks traveling up and down the East Coast end up using that highway.

That community, you know, it was torn apart by the creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

There's a real historical inequity that's sort of built into that piece of transportation infrastructure that needs to be addressed.

The Cross Bronx Expressway is 1 of those Robert Moses roads that went right through a neighborhood.

1 of the most important federal self-liquidating projects.

Part of this is a subsidy from the federal government.

The rest of it must be amortized by the charge of tolls.

It is an area of New York City that has the highest levels of asthma.

While Robin Moses may have succeeded in building this road, the highway will never defeat the spirit of the Bronx.

So with all that in mind, the government has committed $200 million or so to address potential traffic effects that might result from congestion pricing.

A lot of these things should be done regardless of congestion pricing anyway and probably should have been done years ago.

But it's good to see that, you know, proactive steps being taken now to try and increase investment in a neighborhood that that really needs it.

The state of New Jersey is suing the federal government over this new toll zone.

Just to me, it's it's a very egregious, outrageous plan that hurts New Jersey dramatically.

They like the reliability of having things within their control.

The mass transit alternatives are good when they're working and when they're on time, but the reliability factor is much less than driving your own car.

But I think it's really important to look at some of the numbers.

Over 98% of New Jersey workers closest to the city will not pay a charge.

We should be thinking and fighting hard for the vast majority of New Jersey residents who take transit.

Many people in New York rely on rideshares and taxis, which dominate city streets.

Officials call them for-hire vehicles, or FHVs.

App-based FHVs, which the city calls high-volume FHVs, currently provide over 7 million monthly trips that start and or pass through the Manhattan CBD.

And this compares to about 2.5 million trips by yellow taxis.

I think ride share was not properly regulated at the beginning.

You know, it was a tremendous increase in the number of vehicles that we saw on city streets.

A shared car will take trips into Manhattan between 6 to 12 times a day.

Customers of Uber, Lyft, and other ride share apps have paid a small fee for rides in most of Manhattan since 2019.

What we've called for is an additional per trip fee for every 4 hire trip that's taken.

We already have sort of a precedent for that, that money goes directly back into the MTA system.

And so we're calling for a little bit of an additional fee there.

So it should be on the rider of the Uber or the Lyft rather than on the driver.

The planners expect to see fewer vehicle miles traveled in the center of the city.

Vehicle miles traveled is an important metric for road engineers.

It reflects how much driving occurs in the city as a whole.

Under all the tolling scenarios, they will all reduce the amount of vehicle miles traveled, which is the objective.

While the city itself may see less car traffic, regional planners expect vehicle miles traveled to increase in some parts of the wider region with congestion pricing in place or not.

The strategies that we're talking about are not anti-car.

If you don't have any other choice than to drive, that's not a good outcome.

People seem to focus on just like throughput and driving cars fast.

And we've shown what's possible when you look a little differently at our streets and you see what's basically been hidden in plain sight for generations.

A handful of cities around the world have congestion pricing zones like the 1 coming to New York.

It's very much like what you've seen in the kinds of areas in London, same thing in Stockholm, Singapore, Milan.

They put plazas in all of the kind of underserved neighborhoods throughout Milan.

They're looking at a whole series of transit investments.

On the first day that London implemented their congestion pricing scheme, they also released dozens of new buses to increase frequency.

I mean, you hardly wait 1 or 3 minutes for a train on any line in London.

And that kind of frequency and reliability, that's what gets people to take transit.

And in London, they've had a reduction of nearly 20% in particulate matter pollution.

There's a 15% reduction in particulate matter in Stockholm, which resulted in a 50% reduction in asthma.

Supporters hope that the mass transit improvements that come with congestion pricing will keep the city accessible to people who can't afford to live downtown.

For us, giving people a more reliable, faster commute is really a way to kind of address some of the inequities that have developed over time in our transportation system.

So many of us who've been working on this a long time, we want this to continue.

We want congestion pricing to free up street space.

You know, can we get to 6 minute rush hour service everywhere, 8 minute rush hour service?

You know, it's a huge asset, you know, it's worth over a trillion dollars and so it requires constant investment.


Speaker 0: Walk the streets of Manhattan and you may soon see hundreds of new cameras covering every lane headed downtown. They're charging a new toll on congestion.

Speaker 1: We are going to be the very first state in the nation, the very first city in America, to have a congestion pricing plan.

Speaker 0: The new toll covers much of lower Manhattan. Entering this zone in a car could cost up to $23 a day.

Speaker 2: It's going to be an example for cities all over the country to rethink how they use their street space.

Speaker 0: But a plan of this scale will affect millions of people every day. Not everyone is a fan.

Speaker 3: Most people are only focused on the fact that they are going to have to pay $23 to get into Manhattan. Pocketbook issues always take priority over the environmental issues or anything else that's related to the problem.

Speaker 0: The MTA will use its share of project revenues to secure $15 billion in financing for system maintenance and capital investment.

Speaker 4: The public transit system that millions of New Yorkers rely on every single day has been disinvested in almost from day 1. Many parts of the system have suffered basically a century of deferred maintenance.

Speaker 5: Over the last 70 years, the federal government's focusing almost exclusively on investing in our roads, infrastructure, interstate highway system. We're not going to undo 70 years of policy.

Speaker 0: Can higher tolls for drivers fix traffic in Manhattan? And will they make New York even less affordable? Manhattan's new toll zone covers all of the routes into the Central Business District. Some routes into the area already get told. The fees can be over $14 per crossing.

Others are free until the program begins in the spring of 2024.

Speaker 2: And so that discourages people from really driving out of their way for the cheapest route. And right now, tons of people do that.

Speaker 0: The final price of the fee isn't set yet. But the city is working within a range.

Speaker 1: The range that is being considered is between 9 and $23. If it's $23, it means there's lots of exemptions.

Speaker 6: I mean, you got to put something into the system to get something back. Everything is increased in New York, but the pay. So people are struggling trying to figure out where this money is coming from.

Speaker 7: If you're a resident of the CBD and you make under $60,000 a year, you'll get a subsidy. People with disabilities won't pay. You know, there's an adjustment, you know, taking a look at what really is happening in the city today.

Speaker 0: The MTA received thousands of requests for exemptions from the toll, including from artists, students, civil servants, NYPD, and trade unions. There's no guarantee these requests will be granted.

Speaker 8: If you're a low-income driver and you're on the outer fringes of the outer boroughs, how do you get to the city If you're not going to drive anymore, you're going to put another perhaps 2 hours on that commute.

Speaker 9: It's not popular to tax ourselves. And when there are many layers of decision making in order to tax ourselves, that's many layers of opportunity for someone to say, hey, no, let's not do this.

Speaker 0: The money raised from this zone may bring billions of new dollars worth of investment into an aging MTA system.

Speaker 5: It's a massive system that has been under invested for decades.

Speaker 2: It's a very old system, in some cases over 100 years old. And so it really requires a lot of investment just to keep what we have operating.

Speaker 0: 80 percent of the cash raised from this toll goes toward the city's subways and buses.

Speaker 5: Signals is actually 1 of the biggest investments we can make to ensure that we can run more trains more quickly.

Speaker 0: 10% goes to the Long Island Railroad. And the final 10% to the Metro-North. I think we've

Speaker 5: been very thoughtful about where those investments will occur.

Speaker 1: MTA is building 4 new Metro North stations in the Bronx that will allow people to access Metro North more easily.

Speaker 4: It's going to save people tons of time. New York has the most riders and the slowest buses. And it's a huge shame.

Speaker 0: Customers say they would be encouraged to ride more often if wait times improved and if there were fewer people behaving erratically on trains, according to an MTA survey.

Speaker 5: Our customers are saying We want faster service. We want more reliable service. You know, we have signals that were installed literally in the 1950s that are still sort of, you know, working, thank goodness, but that won't be forever. It requires investment.

Speaker 0: Still, the new toll doesn't cover all of the MTA's needs. Officials say the system needs about $54 billion for new capital assets. That includes track upgrades, repairs to elevated structures, and replacing power equipment. Revenues from the toll will also be put towards cleaner transit.

Speaker 5: And with the largest bus fleet in America, that's a big deal. We're also piloting hydrogen. So we have a couple of buses that will be powered by hydrogen that will be on property in 2025.

Speaker 0: The MTA is using the funds from congestion pricing to improve its bus network. Its hydrogen bus pilot will be small, with just 2 buses beginning by the end of 2024. The agency has big goals, though. It wants to make its entire bus fleet emissions free by 2040.

Speaker 1: That's going to help reduce the amount of pollution associated with buses themselves.

Speaker 2: The region would not exist in the way it does without our transit system. It allows us to be a very efficient place when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, because so many people are on public transit.

Speaker 0: Bumper to bumper traffic is an environmental issue, too.

Speaker 1: We know that idling is 1 of the biggest causes of air pollution, which contribute to significant air qualities and smog. When cars are stopped, they are accumulating more of that rather than when they're moving along.

Speaker 0: The toll will improve air quality in many parts of the region, according to traffic simulations. But areas like Fort Lee, New Jersey and the Bronx could become busier with congestion pricing in place. The red spots on this map show where planners expect more traffic when the toll is live. Roads like the Cross Bronx Expressway may have to handle even more vehicles.

Speaker 2: A lot of the trucks traveling up and down the East Coast end up using that highway. That community, you know, it was torn apart by the creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway. There's a real historical inequity that's sort of built into that piece of transportation infrastructure that needs to be addressed.

Speaker 1: The Cross Bronx Expressway is 1 of those Robert Moses roads that went right through a neighborhood.

Speaker 10: 1 of the most important federal self-liquidating projects. Part of this is a subsidy from the federal government. The rest of it must be amortized by the charge of tolls.

Speaker 1: It is an area of New York City that has the highest levels of asthma.

Speaker 11: While Robin Moses may have succeeded in building this road, the highway will never defeat the spirit of the Bronx.

Speaker 2: So with all that in mind, the government has committed $200 million or so to address potential traffic effects that might result from congestion pricing. A lot of these things should be done regardless of congestion pricing anyway and probably should have been done years ago. But it's good to see that, you know, proactive steps being taken now to try and increase investment in a neighborhood that that really needs it.

Speaker 0: The state of New Jersey is suing the federal government over this new toll zone. The biggest issue there is the money. None of it goes to New Jersey.

Speaker 3: Just to me, it's it's a very egregious, outrageous plan that hurts New Jersey dramatically. I think a lot of people need to drive. A lot of people like to drive. They like the reliability of having things within their control. The mass transit alternatives are good when they're working and when they're on time, but the reliability factor is much less than driving your own car.

Speaker 7: But I think it's really important to look at some of the numbers. Over 98% of New Jersey workers closest to the city will not pay a charge. We should be thinking and fighting hard for the vast majority of New Jersey residents who take transit.

Speaker 0: Many people in New York rely on rideshares and taxis, which dominate city streets. Officials call them for-hire vehicles, or FHVs.

Speaker 12: App-based FHVs, which the city calls high-volume FHVs, currently provide over 7 million monthly trips that start and or pass through the Manhattan CBD. And this compares to about 2.5 million trips by yellow taxis.

Speaker 7: I think ride share was not properly regulated at the beginning. You know, it was a tremendous increase in the number of vehicles that we saw on city streets.

Speaker 0: A shared car will take trips into Manhattan between 6 to 12 times a day. Customers of Uber, Lyft, and other ride share apps have paid a small fee for rides in most of Manhattan since 2019.

Speaker 2: What we've called for is an additional per trip fee for every 4 hire trip that's taken. We already have sort of a precedent for that, that money goes directly back into the MTA system. And so we're calling for a little bit of an additional fee there. The driver is only needed

Speaker 1: because the rider wants the ride, right? So it should be on the rider of the Uber or the Lyft rather than on the driver.

Speaker 0: The planners expect to see fewer vehicle miles traveled in the center of the city. Vehicle miles traveled is an important metric for road engineers. It reflects how much driving occurs in the city as a whole.

Speaker 1: Under all the tolling scenarios, they will all reduce the amount of vehicle miles traveled, which is the objective.

Speaker 0: While the city itself may see less car traffic, regional planners expect vehicle miles traveled to increase in some parts of the wider region with congestion pricing in place or not.

Speaker 7: The strategies that we're talking about are not anti-car. If you don't have any other choice than to drive, that's not a good outcome. People seem to focus on just like throughput and driving cars fast. And we've shown what's possible when you look a little differently at our streets and you see what's basically been hidden in plain sight for generations.

Speaker 0: A handful of cities around the world have congestion pricing zones like the 1 coming to New York.

Speaker 7: It's very much like what you've seen in the kinds of areas in London, same thing in Stockholm, Singapore, Milan. They put plazas in all of the kind of underserved neighborhoods throughout Milan. They're pedestrianizing things. They're looking at a whole series of transit investments. You see that in Paris.

You see that in Barcelona.

Speaker 9: On the first day that London implemented their congestion pricing scheme, they also released dozens of new buses to increase frequency. I mean, you hardly wait 1 or 3 minutes for a train on any line in London. And that kind of frequency and reliability, that's what gets people to take transit.

Speaker 1: And in London, they've had a reduction of nearly 20% in particulate matter pollution. There's a 15% reduction in particulate matter in Stockholm, which resulted in a 50% reduction in asthma.

Speaker 0: Supporters hope that the mass transit improvements that come with congestion pricing will keep the city accessible to people who can't afford to live downtown.

Speaker 2: For us, giving people a more reliable, faster commute is really a way to kind of address some of the inequities that have developed over time in our transportation system. So many of us who've been working on this a long time, we want this to continue. We want congestion pricing to free up street space.

Speaker 5: You know, can we get to 6 minute rush hour service everywhere, 8 minute rush hour service? You know, it's a huge asset, you know, it's worth over a trillion dollars and so it requires constant investment.

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Why New York Will Charge $23/Day To Drive Into Manhattan