Congestion pricing has not only reduced gridlock in Manhattan — new research shows it could also be saving lives.
A new paper published Monday by six academics for the National Bureau of Economic Research found the tolls have significantly sped up ambulance response times below 60th Street since January 2025, when the MTA started charging drivers a daily fee to enter the area.
The MTA has touted that congestion pricing has reduced vehicle traffic in the toll zone, and has highlighted research showing the program has also improved air quality in parts of the city. But the new research, which has not yet been peer reviewed, found the time it takes for an ambulance to get from an incident location to the hospital fell by more than a minute after the tolls went into effect.
“ Any increase in the time from the incident to the hospital saves lives and generates lots of cost savings,” said Brad Humphreys, a professor of economics at West Virginia University who co-authored the study. “Congestion pricing wasn't introduced to make it easier for ambulances to get from incident scenes to hospitals, but they do.”
The researchers also found that cycling appeared to increase by 20 percent in the congestion zone, indicating some commuters switched their commutes from cars to bikes, which do not pay a congestion toll.
“Taken together, these patterns paint a coherent picture of behavioral response to the toll: drivers avoided the congestion zone, and at least a portion redirected their trips toward non-motorized alternatives,” the authors wrote.
The report found the drop in ambulance response times “emerged quickly following the January 2025 congestion price implementation.”
It was welcome news to Sam Schwartz, a traffic analyst who’s advocated for congestion pricing for decades. His firm issued a report three months before congestion pricing launched that found ambulance response times had increased nearly three minutes between 2014 and 2024, a trend he blamed on the rise of Uber and Lyft cars in the city during that period.
”In cardiac arrest, every minute reduces the chance of survival by 7 to 10%,” Schwartz said. “So the fact that a minute is saved means quite a few people will survive and will survive with better outcomes.”
The union representing the FDNY's EMTs and paramedics disagreed with the study’s findings.
“ On the ground, we are not seeing a 60 -to 90-second reduction, especially when, for the past, you know, two years, our response time is creeping up every day,” said Michael Greco, president of Local 2507.
Greco said the report was a good starting point, but wanted to see more peer-reviewed research that better accounts for the variety of traffic patterns in Manhattan.
Humphreys said one of the goals of the paper was to offer insight to leaders in other cities who might be considering congestion pricing of their own.
“You're gonna have improved health outcomes,” he said. “In a city like New York, we've got a large number of EMT calls. So those savings add up over the many, many thousands of calls that occur in New York City, and that's an important unexamined aspect of congestion pricing policies.”
