So, if you haven't heard, today is the first day of Manhattan's congestion pricing. The long and short of it is, to enter Midtown and Downtown Manhattan on surface streets or the East River bridges is now $9; the other crossings had their tolls raised by $9. It came to be because the subways melted down in 2017, including fatal crashes. The State needed money to fund the subways, and so a grand bargain was struck to set up new tolls.
A couple of students at Brown set up a bot based on Google Maps data to track drive times between various points into and out of Manhattan, and there's some really interesting data to be sussed out from this.
First, there's been a huge drop in car traffic from New Jersey and the outer boroughs of NYC. This is exactly what you'd expect from other cities' experiences.
Second, drive times within Manhattan are largely unaffected. Their sample commutes are from the Upper East Side to South Ferry and Tribeca to the Lower East Side, and they're basically the same as before. This is something that's going to take some more analysis to figure out. But I suspect it's because there are already plenty of alternatives, so you're really not taking that many cars off the road. As a former resident of the Upper East Side, there's no way in Hell that you could convince me to drive from the UES to South Ferry.
It's going to be real interesting to see how this affects things going forward - but so far, it's taking cars off the roads, which is a win in my book.