As New York Congestion Pricing Turns a Corner, Experts Point to Lessons From London

On Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the revival of a program that aims to ease New York City’s notoriously high levels of traffic and improve air quality by charging drivers a toll to enter certain areas. 

Known as congestion pricing, the tolling strategy will channel funding directly into the city’s ailing public transit system. The decision comes five months after Hochul, a Democrat, paused congestion pricing, citing the potential economic impact for working families. She previously stated that stalling the program had nothing to do with backlash the plan had received from political leaders, primarily in the Republican Party. 

The newly resuscitated plan comes at a 40 percent lower price tag for drivers than the original proposal, charging passenger cars $9 once a day to enter Midtown and Lower Manhattan during peak hours. Environmentalists still mark the decision as a tentative win that could help reduce New York’s air pollution and carbon footprint by supporting public transit. Meanwhile, a coalition of Republicans has pledged to do whatever it takes to block congestion pricing if President-elect Donald Trump can’t nix it himself after his January inauguration. 

Though New York’s approach is the first of its kind in the nation, it’s not the first in the world. Across the Atlantic, London has been running a congestion pricing program for more than two decades, which experts say can help other cities like New York understand what these fees can achieve—and what they cannot. 

Across the Pond: In 2003, London’s then-mayor, Ken Livingstone, launched England’s first congestion pricing structure. It charged drivers a daily fee of £5 to enter a zone in the city’s center during working hours. 

A year later, the program was hailed as a smashing success. Traffic congestion within the central zone dropped by a staggering 30 percent, and the government added 300 vehicles to London’s bus fleet, according to Transport for London, the city’s transportation department. 

“This is the only thing that I have done or been associated with in 33 years of public life that has turned out better than I thought it would,” Livingstone said at the time. 

However, as the toll expanded to include more zones and higher tolls over the next two decades, an interesting pattern emerged: Congestion returned to roughly the same level it was before the toll was implemented. City leaders said this was because they had converted several car lanes into walkways, bus lanes and biking areas, which squeezed traffic. 

But David Metz, an honorary professor in the Center for Transport Studies at University College London, offered a different explanation. Congestion pricing worked so well when it was first implemented that the de-clogged toll roads became more appealing for drivers—at least for those who could afford it, he said. 

“The net effect is a kind of a redistribution of road space towards those who are willing to pay and away from those who are less willing or unable to pay,” Metz told me. In the 1990s, Metz spent five years as the chief scientist at the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport, and more recently authored the book “Good To Go? Decarbonising Travel After the Pandemic.”

“When you introduce any new innovation, you have an immediate impact, and then the system settles down and equilibrates,” he said.

But this doesn’t mean the program is failing, experts say. Currently, the congestion pricing toll is £15 (around $19), with exemptions for some travelers, such as taxi drivers. Throughout its lifetime, the toll has funneled the equivalent of around $3 billion into the city’s public transportation system, which includes buses, overground trains and the underground—known by most as “the Tube.” Metz says that tolls and public transport must work in tandem to reduce congestion. 

“Investing in rail, particularly underground rail, is very expensive, and that’s the limiting factor,” he said. “But in general in any major city, if you invest in rail, this is well used, and then makes congestion charge more acceptable.” 

Without going over budget, Transport for London has expanded its bus fleets, implemented new train lines that extend to the suburbs and created a large web of cycleways for bike commuters, Curbed reports. Cycling has increased by roughly 20 percent in London since 2019. 

Congestion pricing is part of a larger strategy to change how Londoners get around in the city, in part to lower transportation’s carbon footprint. In 2019, Mayor Sadiq Khan implemented an “Ultra Low Emission Zone” in central London, which requires people with cars that do not meet emissions standards to pay a £12.50 daily charge to drive within the area. The zone was expanded in 2023. 

Conservatives were outraged by the charge, but a growing body of research shows its benefits: Within the first 10 months of the initiative, nitrogen oxides dropped by 35 percent and particulate matter by 15 percent. Both pollutants harm health in multiple ways, from lung damage to heart disease. A study published in September revealed that four in 10 children who traveled to school by car switched to more active modes of transportation like walking or taking public transport since the introduction of the zone in Central London. 

Despite these successes, London remains one of the world’s most congested cities, according to a recent report by analytics company Inrix. As someone who has crammed onto a crowded London bus during rush hour several times over the past few weeks, I can personally attest that traffic here is no joke. 

But there is a city that trumps London, one that is known for its notoriously congested roadways, hours-long traffic jams and fruit-based moniker … New York. 

A Traffic Tale of Two Cities: Anyone who has driven in the Big Apple knows the pain of standstill traffic. In fact, the Inrix report found that NYC drivers spend an average of four full days stuck in traffic annually. That’s bad news for the climate: An idling car can produce enough emissions to fill up 150 balloons per minute. 

In 2019, New York state lawmakers approved a congestion pricing plan to minimize traffic jams and reduce air pollution, while helping raise $15 billion to repair NYC’s dilapidated public transportation system, which has been damaged many times by extreme weather like flooding and heat. 

When the federal government greenlit the program four years later, the city got to work installing infrastructure that could track and charge drivers by their license plate, which my colleague Kristoffer Tigue wrote about last year. But in June, Hochul slammed the brakes on the project just a few months ahead of the presidential election.

Now, congestion pricing is making a comeback. 

“I am cautiously optimistic that congestion pricing will be put into place. It’s something that I’ve been hoping for for a long time. It’s the right policy for New York City—we have too many vehicles,” Sarah Kaufman, the director of New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation, told me. “When we talk about Manhattan south of 60th Street, we’re talking about a heavily congested area with millions of people every day who need to get around. And about three quarters of the street space is used by cars that are either moving or parked when we have the densest mass transit concentration in the country, right here.” 

Under the policy, passenger vehicles will be charged $9 during peak hours to pass through the congestion zone. It could start as soon as Jan. 5, if it passes the federal review process. In a statement to Politico, Trump said through a transition team spokesperson that congestion pricing is a “massive tax” that will “hurt workers, families and businesses, but in particular, anything to do with jobs.” If the plan is not in place by the time Trump is inaugurated Jan. 20, his team could direct federal transportation officials to stall approval, The New York Times reports. 

Gothamist was the first to report on congestion pricing’s reemergence and has a detailed guide for how it could affect drivers, including more about a rebate program for people who live in the congestion zone and earn less than $60,000 a year. 

However, Metz has doubts about the toll’s ability to mitigate traffic.

“I wouldn’t expect the impact on congestion in Manhattan to be much affected once the charge is introduced, and once it settles down,” Metz said. He added that the same income disparity phenomenon that occurred in London could likely happen in New York: If some people with lower income are deterred, “it creates space for people with higher incomes [to] take advantage of that.” 

Earlier this year, health officials and researchers pointed out that while improving air quality in Manhattan, congestion pricing could worsen air quality in other areas that don’t have the tolls, such as the Bronx or Staten Island, as commuters seek ways to avoid being charged. To counter this, the city government committed $155 million to projects like building an asthma center, improving ventilation in schools and completing park renovations, The New York Times reports. 

Overall, Kaufman said that congestion pricing is just one piece of the puzzle for decarbonizing travel in cities—from London to NYC. 

“There is a challenge of people acclimating to the fee and ending up driving once again,” Kaufman said. “And I think that cities have to grapple with what the next steps are, when and if that happens. In an ideal world, there will be enough funding generated from this fee to help bolster mass transit so that people will choose to take the subway and bus over driving because it will be such an appealing option.” 

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