So far, it looks like it’s working?

A student of the economist and Brown professor Emily Fair Oster and his brother — Benjamin Moshes and Joshua Moshes — have created a Congestion Pricing Tracker, which is collecting Google Maps traffic data for 19 commuter routes, using the shortest time to drive from point A to point B for each route. You can see a snapshot in the chart above, but glancing at the Holland Tunnel route at 7:15a, it was about 10 minutes faster to get through on Wednesday than it was before Jan. 5. (The blue line is pre-Jan. 5; the red is Jan. 5 and after.)

I am then extrapolating to assume that faster times means fewer cars that come out of the tunnel on our side.

To make the tracker, the pair collected pre-congestion pricing data for 16 weeks to serve as the comparison, averaging data for the same weekday across dates in May, June, July, August and December 2024.

Routes 1 to 13 are commuting routes; Route 14 measures congestion on FDR drive, which is excluded from congestion pricing tolls. Routes 15, 17 and 19 are routes within New York City, but outside of the congestion zone, to measure the effect of congestion pricing for those commutes. Routes 16 and 18 are control routes running in Boston and Chicago, respectively.

I think this will be a useful tool to watch as the weeks roll out.

I wanted to know more about the brothers, and why they did it, and sent them an email: “We are not New Yorkers (but feel as though we have become part of the community in spirit tracking this data!),” Benjamin said. “We realized that people would want to stay informed about congestion pricing once it began, so we began tracking NYC traffic way ahead of time to be able to compare traffic once congestion pricing began. We plan to keep going as long as we can! Running the site isn’t cheap, but as long as we can afford it/get some money in donations, we will keep the site up!”