New York I love you, but you’re slowing me down

This month, New York City declared war on traffic. America’s first congestion charge means motorists now pay $9 to drive in the busiest parts of Manhattan at peak times. It’s hoped the toll inspires people to change their travel habits and get off the road.

So what? Traffic is more than an annoyance. It’s a huge problem for a city’s environment and economy. According to Inrix, a traffic monitoring service, typical New York commuters in 2024

• spent 102 hours stuck in traffic;
• crawled 11 miles per hour during the last mile of their journeys; and
• lost $1,826 in time and productivity.

That last figure was the worst for any urban area analysed by Inrix, costing New York City an estimated $9.5 billion.

You are traffic. Reducing congestion is only truly possible by reducing the number of vehicles on the road. Building bigger streets with extra capacity can counterintuitively worsen traffic jams by encouraging more road users to fill the space.

Cities across the world can attack demand in three main ways:

• Draining drivers. A congestion charge’s purpose is to deter commuters. Those like New York’s (which will increase in price in the coming years) promote alternative routes that save motorists money. Other schemes have the same goal. Paris has car-free zones in its city centre. London’s Ulez dissuades owners of certain vehicles from driving into the city altogether. All three cities are in the world’s five worst for congestion.
• Redesigning roads. If planned well, features like dedicated bus and cycle lanes make alternative travel more efficient and attractive. If space allows, road layouts need to be flexible to adapt to changing behaviours. For example, the delivery driver and courier boom poses unique problems requiring their own solutions. These changes are relatively cheap when compared with…
• Public transport power-ups. New York’s new toll aims to raise $15 billion to fund improvements to a public transport network on the verge of collapse – and which only 22 per cent of New Yorkers feel safe on at night. New York is learning from Istanbul, which Inrix deems the worst urban area in the world for traffic. Facing a population boom, Istanbul is investing heavily in its metro network.

Tech can help. Machine learning is being used to better understand and predict travel patterns. Companies such as Waymo operate self-driving taxis in some US cities, removing human hesitation from the equation. But these solutions are small in scale, and won’t work in older cities with medieval layouts.

The best solutions require a combination of approaches, but that isn’t easy because of:

• Money. Cities can only spend what they have, and public transport projects get expensive fast. New York’s hoped-for $15 billion is roughly what Sydney just spent on a single new metro line.
• Geography. Plans can be hemmed in by water, soil types and immovable structures. Unhelpful topography is partly why fewer Underground stations are south of the Thames in London, and why metro lines struggle to connect in Istanbul.
• History. Ancient graveyards or sacred sites discovered below ground, or snafus relating to protected buildings above ground, can slow down or even block redevelopments.
• Politics. Infrastructure investment is politically thankless. Positive results often only emerge in time, and proposals nearly always prompt resistance.

United States of Ameri-car. Early results for New York are positive, but the most difficult challenge facing the US is cultural. Freedom on four wheels is in its DNA.

Even in New York, where public transport is relatively plentiful and commuters are relatively willing to use it, the congestion charge has become a political bullring. The state governor, Kathy Hochul, reportedly delayed the roll-out hoping to avoid damaging Democrats in the 2024 election.

What’s more... Donald Trump vowed to “terminate” the congestion charge in week one of his return to office. The governor of New Jersey – intimately affected by anything that moves (or doesn’t) in New York – has written to the new president for clarification. No public response as yet.