Not so fast.
Drivers say traffic’s bad as ever nearly two years after congestion pricing was unleashed on Midtown Manhattan — now they’re just paying more to sit in it.
Data from a truck-tracking company shows speeds barely budged even as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority keeps patting itself on the back for the toll, which costs a minimum of $9.
MTA boss Janno Lieber has called the toll an “unqualified success,” saying “all of the metrics” show people are saving time — and the agency is taunting drivers by slapping signs on construction projects that read “made possible by congestion pricing.”
But GPS trucking data showed 16% of the zone actually moved slower while drivers railed their daily commutes are anything but a fairy tale.
“It’s just a money grab,” said Michael, 55, a courier from Queens, who was filling up at a Mobil station at 36th Street and 10th Avenue. “Working people can’t afford it.”
“I’m paying up to four grand, and I’m not getting any benefit,” he said. “Traffic is not flowing.”
Benadon Benmore, 40, an ironworker from Harlem who works in Hell’s Kitchen, said his ride home has not improved since the cash-strapped MTA got its new revenue stream flowing with the help of Gov. Kathy Hochul.
“It still takes me two hours to get home,” Benmore said. “I’m gonna get me a real horse.”
Jhoffre Arevalo, 40, an Uber driver from Flushing, said the streets did ease up when the toll was new.
“When congestion pricing started, you’d see the difference. Traffic went down a lot,” Arevalo said. “But now it comes back to normal. I think I see more traffic now.”
The MTA claimed congestion pricing cut traffic into the zone by 11% in 2025.
But Port Authority counts at the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, two main ways into the zone, showed just a 4.5% drop in vehicle entries that year compared with 2024 before congestion pricing was implemented.
Trucking data doesn’t show traffic in the zone has sped up either.
Geotab, a company that sells software businesses put in their trucks and vans to track vehicle activity, analyzed more than 50,000 commercial vehicle trips in the zone and found that from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., speeds in 2025 were mostly the same as in 2024, before the toll.
Traffic only moved faster along 37% of mileage within the zone, while 46% showed no significant change in speed and 16% was slower, Geotab found.
The way trucks are tolled may be keeping them parked in the zone, Geotab data showed.
Cars pay once a day, but trucks pay every time they come in, which gives truckers a reason to come in once and stay put.
Geotab found the commercial vehicles it tracks are idling more each day as they make more trips.
The company’s software, which counts a trip as over when the engine shuts off or the vehicle sits for more than 3.3 minutes, showed trucks and vans made about 4.6 stops a day in 2025, up from 4 in 2024.
Geotab said those extra trips created more emissions than in 2024.
But Gov. Kathy Hochul has bragged that the toll she shepherded in brought “cleaner air” — a claim refuted by an August city Health Department report that found pollution inside the zone was not significantly different from what it would have been without the toll.
Still, the MTA is getting paid, with the toll raking in $548 million through September of this year and more than $700 million in all of 2025, according to board documents.
A driver with E-ZPass who commutes into the zone at rush hour five days a week pays $45 a week, or about $2,250 a year.
A big truck pays $108 a week, about $5,400 a year for one trip into the zone five days a week — but if drivers had to make two trips into the zone in one day that yearly cost would double to $10,800.
The toll will keep rising, with cars jumping to $12 in 2028 and $15 in 2031.
Drivers said it’s not sustainable.
“The tolls are eating us alive,” Michael said.
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