In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution

The order is:

1. brake dust 2. road dust 3. engine emissions 4. tire dust

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...

https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...

Exactly. The noxious tailpipe emissions in a city are usually from diesel trucks, small vehicles like motorcycles (small or absent catalytic converters), modified vehicles (catalytic converter removed or diesel reprogrammed to smoke), but not modern gasoline ICE vehicles.

The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.

PM2.5 is also a broad category of particulates that come from many sources. The PM2.5 levels in the air depend on many sources, with wind being a major factor in changing PM2.5 levels. It’s hard to draw conclusions when a number depends on the weather and a lot of other inputs.

It is different in Africa, where catalytic converters are harvested for precious metals and cars are driven without them.

I've been wondering whether, theoretically, if self driving cars become widely usable and deployed in cities, will they be able to safely operate with harder tyre compounds and harder road surfaces that shed less but don't grip as well?

If nothing else, less aggressive driving should lead to less shedding.

Also, I thought tire particles tend to be larger.

Nothing i would breath in a garage. Nothing i like to breath in while i'm driving.

  Minor nitpick, but tailpipes aren't the primary source of emissions. 

Best they can do now is, “Well, we’re not New York.”

Especially considering that

* Congestion is an opportunity cost in itself already, which is paid in wasted time by all road users, impacting mostly those who spend a long time on the road, which is busses, taxis, professionals and delivery drivers, as they spend the most amount of time actually driving in congested roads

* Congestion pricing forces trips to self-select on cost/benefits in actual dollars, instead of time, so you optimize for wealthier trip takers, short stays or high value trips, where before you would favor long stays (which make looking for parking forever not so bad), and people who don't value their time very much

* Car use remains heavily subsidized, as motorists do not come close to paying the full costs associated with their road usage

Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.

There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.

I've lived all over the world and in NYC for decades so it seems silly to me. Bust most Americans have never seen or ridden an effective form of public transport. So they view congestion pricing as an infringement on their rights and quality of life.

People say they hate socialism, but drivers love car-socialism.

"We should toll roads". This will reliably produce "we should all contribute through tax to the maintenance of roads and they should be considered a public good".

"We should have land value taxes". This will reliably produce "we should not have to pay rent to the government for something that we own".

A simple self-interest model will capture all participants in this discussion. This is why economically optimal policies have such opposition. People don't want to pay the price for their actions. They're ideally hoping to have someone else pay it. It is just as common for a position like funding for SF's Muni.

Propositions J and K made it clear. One said "let's raise Muni spending". The other said "if we raise sales tax, that will go to Muni spending. If we don't, the Muni spending proposition dies". People voted for the first and against the second. Pretty straightforward position: "We should spend more money but from a place that is not me".

The way welfare is organized in the US also shows this. Welfare is the largest sector of the US federal budget, and the ideal is to tax all productive capacity to pay for the aged. This aligns with the increased vote share from the aged. The classic two wolves and a sheep at dinner.

That and right-wing politics where anything that harms the car as a religious symbol is seen as a 'values' based attack.

That's a very hard sell when people all around the country are feeling continuous downward pressure on their lifestyle and financial security while billionaires are seen getting massive tax breaks and pillaging everything they want while escaping accountability for the harms they cause everyone else. Taking a basic task like driving into the city, something many people are forced to do for work, and punishing them for it while once again giving the wealthy a pass was certain to upset people. in fact, by forcing more of the peasant class off the roads it makes driving into the city much more pleasant for the people with enough money to not care about the extra expense. Taking from the poor to improve things for the wealthy resonates with a lot of people.

It also doesn't help that in other contexts, congestion pricing has already hit people's wallets and is seen as an exploitative business model designed to extract as much money from the public as possible. The last thing most people want is seeing congestion pricing and other price-fuckery infesting another aspect of their daily lives, which is why the pushback against wendy's implementing it was so swift and severe that the company had to backpedal even after spending a small fortune on the digital menu boards they needed to enable it.

Take a look at their figure, especially in May 2020—the average appears lower, but, more significantly, there is much less variability in May 2020 compared to earlier years.

The authors' model quite strongly includes their preferred confound (secular decrease in PM2.5) but doesn't explore what other covariates could explain the differences between years.

It's fine to say that one should be skeptical, but one contrary report doesn't invalidate an antecedent report, and the structure of a linear model strongly influences an outcome.

Given the physical mechanisms involved it is implausible that pollution did not decline. And if you look at their data you see a marked drop in 2020 at day 70

This is March 10 or thereabouts, I think. And there are ZERO high pm 2.5 days for a 20 day stretch or so. This isn't seen in other years. The vast bulk of days are below the trend.

And then for the rest of the year there are some days above the trend line but no high pm 2.5 days.

This fits with people being extra cautious in the early days and then relaxing a bit as things went on.

Now, I'm eyeballing this so I could be incorrect. But:

1. The effect was found in other cities

2. The physical mechanism makes it highly expected that there would be a drop

The study was about the slope of the regression modal, but if you had scrambled the years I'm fairly confident I could have picked 2020 out of the set.

We did this in Times Square and on Broadway, and it's honestly been great. I say this as someone who takes cars far more frequently than most New Yorkers and has a place I lived at full time for over a decade off one of those closed-off sections of Broadway.

It could also be the case that making it viable to drive personal vehicles at all inside a dense city comes with opportunity costs (parking, roads that cut through infrastructure, pollution, noise) that aren't worth it.

And I'd wager that it is the case.

https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/the-...

> Some drivers can apply for Low-Income Discount or Low-Income Tax Credit for Residents.

> A 50% discount is available for low-income vehicle owners enrolled in the Low-Income Discount Plan (LIDP). This discount begins after the first 10 trips in a calendar month and applies to all peak period trips after that for the remainder of the calendar month.

The revenue also goes towards public transit, and the congestion charge applies mainly to the wealthiest part of the wealthiest borough.

Popular truck route from Queens->Bronx was 59th st bridge, left onto 2nd then immediate left onto 59th, and another left onto 1st and take 1st all the way to Willis Ave bridge to beat the RFK bridge (formerly the Triborough) tolls.

this claim has been debunked many times and anyone with eyes can see who the private drivers in NYC are

EWR is in New Jersey, so... not technically the NYC Subway. But taking the subway to Penn Station, then hopping on NJ Transit is pretty easy

LGA is the only one that straight up has no subway/train option.

A parking spot will cost you more than rent in some other cities.

https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/the-cost-of-killing-congest...

Because the poor don’t drive in New York, and to the extent they do, they likely qualify for an exemption.

The whole issue with car dependency is that it is a massive barrier for participating in society.

Public transit is orders of magnitude cheaper, and very viable and often the better option in the New York area.

Have you ever talked to poor people in NYC?

Why? Fewer cars into Manhattan means fewer cars through the boroughs. And even if they all diverted, you’re still looking at less idling and less stop and start braking.

So while this was/is a common sentiment about congestion pricing, looks like it luckily didn't pan out.

The first thing the State of NY did with congestion pricing was halt the plan (arguably illegally) before reintroducing it six months later with a price reduction to $9 down from $15: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/14/congestion-p...

They have, for decades. https://nyc-business.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/description/idling-...

What’s your source for this?

Also, why would a goal matter more than results?

Most certainly regulated. There are people who make a living off of reporting idling trucks and collecting the bounty.

They do, in fact, regulate idling my dude- https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02222

> In New York City, vehicle idling is illegal if it lasts more than 3 minutes or more than 1 minute when adjacent to a school.

There are no highway arteries running through the congestion zone. Building one would require hundreds of billions of dollars of eminent domain.

Manhattan has a $1tn GDP [1], on par with Switzerlad [2]. Its economy is larger than all but 6 states (between Pennsylvaia and Ohio) [3]. More than all of New Jersey. If it crossed the pond it would be the fifth-largest member of the EU, between the Netherlands and Poland [4].

It's a tremendously productive jewel that towers–literally–over the economies of its neighbors. Sacrificing Manhattan to save a few bucks on a trucker who doesn't want to take a highway through the Bronx is absolutely mental from a social, economic and environmental perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City $939bn in 2023

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Is this happening in/around NYC?

> Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.

The are the same, you just have to pay the fee.

Also, for like 90% of NJ you'd be going the southern route into Brooklyn anyway, no congestion pricing involved.

This is a fixable problem. I'm still waiting on someone to do it though. NY is mostly interested in corruption from their preferred interests. (which is why they are working on a law to require a conductor on all subways instead of working to eliminate all that extra labor, instead of fixing their system so it is fast and reliable and then covers more area)

Highways running straight through the middle of major cities is stupid, unnecessary, and harmful. Going to the major cities is fine, but there's no good reason they need to go all the way through them. They should just go around/near the cities instead.