Effective and Equitable Congestion Pricing: New York City and Beyond

In this paper, we argue that the New York City congestion pricing plan whose implementation was paused in the summer of 2024 had a major shortcoming: as designed, it would have had a much more severe impact on the drivers of personal vehicles than on the passengers of taxis and ride-hailing vehicles, as well as on the clients of delivery services. In addition to being inequitable, this shortcoming would have likely made the congestion pricing scheme ineffective at solving the traffic congestion problem, due to the fact that the drivers of personal vehicles constitute a minority of traffic in the congestion pricing zone. We propose a simple modification to the scheme that addresses this shortcoming.