Six months of congestion pricing: fewer minecarts, a faster Tiger Bus, and a fight over who pays
Traffic into the zone is down eleven percent. Metro ridership is up. Long Island still hates it.
Half a year after the gantries switched on, City Hall released the numbers. Minecart entries into Lower and Central Man A are down 11% against the same six months of 2024. The Tiger Bus loop, which shares the streets, runs its full circuit four minutes faster. Metro ridership at Freedom Street Station is up 14%, and the platform at Cocoa Street is, according to everyone, 'somehow busier'.
The toll has raised 1.9 million emeralds. Most has gone to signals on the Man A–New BK tunnel; the rest is holding open the Atlantic Terminal excavation in Downtown New BK, which the Metro authority now says will finish 'in the Modernization era, broadly'.
Businesses inside the zone report quieter streets and about the same trade; Times Square's screens do not care how you arrive. Outside the zone the picture is mixed. Kings Plaza's construction site in Mill Bergen has become the informal park-and-ride for Long Island, and the Church Avenue stations sell more coal than ever.
The complaints have not moved. Long Island commuters say the bridge is their only road. Mill Bergen says the carts that used to pass through now park. Man A says the air is clearer, though the air in New A has always been the same air.
City Hall's response fits on a sign it has, in fact, printed: 'The toll pays for the tunnel you are standing in.'
Market impact
NASE- OPGSOP Gas+1.5%106.59 +2.77%
- TRGLTriangle Equities+1%296.58 +2.92%
The story’s move on each stock. The NASE prices it in fast — about 74% of it within the hour of publication. 40% of the shock is permanent; the other 60% fades with a 10-day half-life, so 70% of the move is still in the price 10 days later. Right: the price now and today’s change.
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