Research Question
On January 5, 2025 the Central Business District Tolling Program (CBDTP), also known as Congestion Pricing or Congestion Relief, went into effect. This program charges drivers for most vehicular traffic south of 60th Street via the use of license plate scanners installed throughout midtown and lower Manhattan. This program has received a large amount of political and social opposition, both within New York as well as neighboring states whose commuters travel into Manhattan for work and pleasure. The primary stated goal of this program is to reduce traffic in midtown and lower Manhattan by incentivizing commuters to make use of the abundant public transit options in the form of ferries, busses, commuter trains, and the subway.
My primary question is: Does the data collected by the New York City 311 complaint database provide any evidence that this program is having the intended effect of reducing the amount of traffic in the congestion relief zone?
Dataset and Selected Complaints
The New York City Open Data Portal has a freely accessible 311 Complaint Dataset that covers approximately 43 million complaints since 2010. Members of the public may lodge a complaint with the 311 service via phone, mobile device, or internet. The 311 Complaint Dataset is updated nightly and each row in the dataset represents one complaint. These complaints are assigned to appropriate departments or agencies of the city and are thoroughly documented. I began by reviewing the Complaint Type and Descriptor fields to build a list of complaint data which could serve as a proxy for measuring the amount of traffic in the Congestion Relief Zone. The combination of search criteria used for this project are:
| Field | Selected Values |
|---|---|
| Created Date | >=January 1, 2022 12:00 AM * <= February 28, 2025 11:45 PM |
| Complaint Type | Illegal Parking Noise – Commercial Noise – Vehicle Traffic |
| Descriptor | Blocked Bike Lane Blocked Crosswalk Blocked Hydrant Blocked Sidewalk Commercial Overnight Parking Double Parked Blocking Traffic Double Parked Blocking Vehicle Overnight Commercial Storage Parking Permit Improper Use Posted Parking Sign Violation Car/Truck Horn Car/Truck Music Engine Idling Congestion/Gridlock Drag Racing |
| Incident Zip | 10001 10002 10003 10004 10005 10006 10007 10009 10010 10011 10012 10013 10014 10016 10017 10018 10019 10022 10036 10038 10280 10282 |
Note on Created Date: During the analysis it was determined that January and February 2022 had significantly reduced values as a result of the Omicron wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and were filtered out of the data prior to visualization.
Visualizations
Distribution of Complaint Types
Complaints by Type & Descriptor
The first thing I did was to compare the number of complaints for January and February of each year (2023-2025) to get a baseline for what to expect from the data. Some categories, such as Blocked Bike Lane, have received far fewer complaints, while Parking Permit Improper Use and Posted Parking Sign Violation show increased complaints this year.
It is curious that Posted Parking Sign Violation and Parking Permit Improper Use have increased in the number of reports. I suspect there are many factors which affect a persons likelihood of lodging a complaint and that these complaints are not the ideal proxies for the question at hand, but I still believe them to be important to the discussion.
Complaints by Month
Charting the number of complaints each month since January 2023 shows that the start of 2025 has the lowest number of complaints related to vehicles in the Congestion Relief Zone. This gap grows to an impressive reduction in complaints when the Parking Sign and Parking Permit categories are removed. Either way, this is a positive signal that Congestion Control is having an impact on the number of complaints that are being opened!
Mapping Complaints
From these maps it is easy to see that the number of complaints in January and February 2025 are dramatically lower than the numbers for previous years.
Conclusion
The launch of the Congestion Control program in Manhattan in early 2025 has had a clear impact on the number of complaints related to vehicles that originate in the affected zip codes. Complaints are down across nearly all categories in comparison to 2024.
The future of this program is uncertain, with the current presidential administration applying pressure from the federal government to end this program. If the opposition succeeds we can all look forward to a more crowded, louder, and less convenient experience in the streets of Manhattan.
