The College Kids Tracking Your Decongested Commute

Congestion pricing’s first month has offered New Yorkers plenty of immediate ways to measure its impact: their E-ZPass bills, the decrease in honk-inducing gridlock outside their windows, the number of exclamation points in a bridge-and-tunnel uncle’s Facebook posts. For more detailed analysis, the Times and other publications have turned to the Congestion Pricing Tracker, a Web site that collects data on commute times and displays them in a series of before-and-after line graphs. The data compilers, Benjamin and Joshua Moshes, are college-age brothers from Newton, Massachusetts, near Boston, who built the site during their winter break. “We feel like honorary New Yorkers, of a sort,” Benjamin said recently. The brothers sometimes visit Brooklyn and Staten Island to see family. “But they usually don’t drive into Manhattan, so they don’t have really strong feelings,” Benjamin added.

The other day, the brothers convened on Zoom. Joshua, a freshman studying computer science at Northeastern, wore a scarlet school hoodie in front of a blank whiteboard on campus. Benjamin, in a gray T-shirt, was at their parents’ house, beneath wall-mounted maps, on the eve of his final semester at Brown. Their project was inspired by Benjamin’s study of taxi-fare data for an econometrics competition held at the University of Chicago. Back at school, his thesis adviser, the economist Emily Oster, suggested that he look into the upcoming congestion-pricing program. With his brother’s help, Benjamin began pulling drive-time estimates for nineteen different city routes from Google Maps. Most choices were easy: tunnels, bridges, major thoroughfares across the congestion zone. When Benjamin wanted a Brooklyn route with lots of rush-hour traffic but less traffic during the day, he called an outside consultant—a friend who grew up in Brooklyn. The result: a journey from South Slope to Dumbo via the B.Q.E. “That was his suggestion entirely,” Benjamin said.

About two weeks before the program launched, Benjamin pitched his brother on building a Web site. One hitch: they were on a family vacation in Japan, visiting ancient temples and sumo halls. “This was, like, a secondary priority for my parents,” Joshua said.

Benjamin was confident that the tolling would have an effect. “It just didn’t seem right to me that you ask people to pay nine dollars and no one changes their behavior,” he said. More surprising was how popular their tracker became: in its first week, it had more than a hundred thousand users. On the Sunday that congestion pricing went into effect, the brothers were fielding messages—and making sure that the tracker stayed tracking—until five the following morning. “I don’t even know how we were functioning,” Benjamin said. Hours later, Joshua had to move back into his dorm and begin classes. “I think I got, like, one or two hours of sleep that day,” he said. “It was tough.” Worse still: he had waited to pack until that morning.

After a few weeks, they began to see clear patterns. During peak hours on the Williamsburg Bridge and other thoroughfares, commute time is down some forty per cent; getting through the Holland Tunnel on a Sunday night, once a thirty-minute slog, now takes ten. “We are very confident that this is not a fluke,” Benjamin said. There have also been more moderate traffic increases in some spillover areas, like the F.D.R. Perhaps most unexpectedly, travel times within the congestion zone have hardly budged.

This mixed bag has allowed observers on all sides to crow. “We’re reading one post that’s, like, ‘Look at this graph of the Holland Tunnel—this is magical!’ ” Benjamin said. “The very next post we see is someone, like, ‘An increase in traffic, just like we expected, in the Carey Tunnel.’ Same exact news source, same exact data.”

During the first weeks of this semester, Joshua spent most of his lectures reading and responding to tracker-related e-mails. “All but one of my classes are computer-science classes, and I’m pretty good at computer science, so I don’t necessarily need to pay attention,” he said. The lone exception is an acting course that fulfills one of his major’s requirements. “I guess they want us to practice talking to people,” he said. Benjamin admitted that the M.T.A. was among those who’d reached out. About what? “We don’t like to comment on that,” he said.

The Moshes’ original data-storage plan cost them six cents for every hundred thousand data requests. The first week’s bill cleared four hundred dollars. “We were worried we would be in debt,” Benjamin said. (They have since started a successful online fund-raiser.) At some point, as congestion pricing becomes a fact of life, they expect to end real-time updates—“Probably when users stop actually looking at the Web site and we see that our traffic is close to nothing,” Joshua said. ♦