When New York introduced congestion-relief pricing in Manhattan last year, it wasn’t hard to see how charging people to drive into the busiest part of the city would make life better for the people who lived there. Not everyone agreed that making life better for the people who actually lived in the city was worth inconveniencing people who didn’t, but it wasn’t exactly controversial to claim fewer cars would mean quieter, safer, cleaner streets. As Bloomberg reports, though, drivers in the suburbs have also benefited far more than you probably expected.
To be clear, we aren’t talking about suburban commuters who still choose to drive into the city even though it still costs money. Yes, more people taking the train means less traffic and shorter commute times for those willing to pay the congestion charge, but that’s also old news. What’s new is the claim that “[t]he majority of drivers’ time savings has accrued to those traveling outside the toll zone entirely — for instance, those commuting from Brooklyn to Queens or within Northern New Jersey.”
Yes, the idea that congestion pricing would be a boon for drivers who never enter the congestion zone may be hard to believe, but that’s also what the National Bureau of Economic Research found in a recently published study. Instead of showing that drivers going out of their way to avoid the charge made traffic worse outside the congestion zone, researchers found that congestion pricing actually cut drive times.
461,000 hours saved every week
Using an anonymized Google Maps data, researchers looked at trips taken between September 2024 to June 2025 to see how drive times changed after New York’s congestion pricing went into effect. But they didn’t just look at Manhattan and the surrounding metro area. They also compared those changes to the changes they saw in other metro areas to give themselves a better idea of what changes could be attributed to congestion pricing and which ones could not.
In the end, they found that having fewer cars on the roads saved those driving into the congestion zone an estimated 83,000 hours per week. That alone would be pretty impressive, but when they looked at trips that never crossed into the congestion zone, they found the time savings was far, far higher. As in, “at least 461,000 hours per week,” higher.
Commuters driving into the city may have saved more time per trip — with the researchers finding drive times were cut by an average of three minutes each, while trips outside the congestion zone were only cut by an average of eight seconds — but because the total number of trips was at least 100 times higher outside of Manhattan, the total time saved added up fast.
As the Kate Slevin, Regional Plan Association’s executive vice president, told Bloomberg, suburban opponents of congestion pricing “probably would have said they expected no effect at all on their [daily] driving,” and yet, “There is a really strong case for everyone in New Jersey to care about this, even if you’re not going to be using the tunnel.”
Wait, but why?
While those suburban and outer-borough drivers who never entered the congestion zone saved the most time in aggregate, researchers also found that drive times were reduced the most on highways near Manhattan. The further away you got from the city, the less drivers saw the benefits of congestion pricing. That probably feels intuitive, but it also helps underscore the researchers’ explanation for why congestion pricing is a benefit for people who never even drive through the congestion zone:
To understand why congestion pricing’s total time savings mostly accrued to those traveling outside Manhattan, consider that most drivers heading into the island traverse roadways outside the congestion relief zone as they approach it from Long Island, New Jersey or wherever they began their journey. By shrinking the number of peak-time cars flowing into the toll zone, congestion pricing reduces traffic on outlying roadways, where remaining drivers — including those who never had Manhattan on their itinerary — can now go faster.
Even all the way out on Long Island, that still translated to drive times being cut by an average of 2.3%. Perhaps more importantly, researchers also found “no evidence of offsetting slowdowns on different road types … suggesting that the policy reduced overall traffic volumes rather than simply displaced congestion.” These findings could also be helpful in addressing future opposition, with Slevin saying, “If you have other drivers moving faster and getting out of your way quicker, as well as more people on transit, it just makes sense that your local trip is going to be quicker.”
