New York’s $9 Congestion Toll Was Sold as Cleaner Air. The City’s Own Health Department Says It Isn’t.
Since January 5, 2025, every driver entering Manhattan below 60th Street during peak hours has paid a $9 toll — New York’s Congestion Relief Zone program, the first of its kind in the country. Cutting gridlock was always the headline goal, but Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) built the program’s public case just as heavily on air quality, promising in December 2023 that “congestion pricing means cleaner air, better transit and less gridlock on New York City’s streets.” On August 14, 2026, New York City’s own Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released the first full, year-over-year study measuring what actually happened to the air New Yorkers breathe — and its conclusion, in the agency’s own words, is that citywide air quality “was not any different because of congestion pricing.”
This is not an outside audit. It is the health department of a Democratic mayor who supports the toll, using EPA-standard monitors and a control-site methodology built to isolate the toll’s effect from weather, wildfire smoke, and seasonal swings — and it still could not find a statistically significant citywide improvement, even with traffic down 11 percent in year one.
The finding lands on top of eighteen months of victory laps from Albany and the MTA, and it reopens a fight over a separate, unpublished Columbia University analysis finding pollution rising at most of its South Bronx monitoring sites. Here is what the government’s own numbers actually show — and what officials on every side are doing with them.
- $9 — the peak-hour toll charged since Jan. 5, 2025, to drive into Manhattan's Congestion Relief Zone south of 60th Street · Source: NYC DOT; Fox News
- 11% — the year-one drop in vehicle traffic entering the zone — the one number even the Health Department credits, without a matching drop in pollution · Source: Fox News; NY1
- $550 million+ — net toll revenue the MTA collected in the program's first year, per Gov. Hochul's own anniversary announcement · Source: Governor Kathy Hochul; MTA
- 14% / 20% — the share of NYC's fine-particulate and nitrogen-oxide emissions that come from vehicles at all — why analysts say even a real traffic drop was never going to move the needle much · Source: NYC DOHMH Environment & Health Data Portal
- 12 of 19 — South Bronx air monitors that recorded rising particulate matter in an unpublished Columbia University analysis, cutting against the city's zone-wide finding · Source: NY1
The DOHMH study is the most rigorous look yet at congestion pricing’s environmental effect, comparing a full year of data before tolling began against a full year after. Researchers tracked four traffic-related pollutants — fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide, nitric oxide, and black carbon — at monitoring sites citywide, measured against a control location, the Van Wyck Expressway, that congestion pricing was never expected to touch, adjusting for temperature, wind, precipitation, and seasonal swings.
The result: “Pollution at all locations held steady or improved slightly,” continuing an 18-year citywide trend that predates the toll by nearly two decades. Health Commissioner Dr. Alister Martin, the Haitian-American emergency physician Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) appointed to run the agency in February 2026, put it plainly: “New Yorkers deserve to know how major policies affect the air they breathe … we now know that air quality across New York City was not any different because of congestion pricing.” Environmental-justice neighborhoods along highway corridors that opponents warned would absorb diverted traffic — the Cross Bronx and Major Deegan Expressways, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the FDR Drive — did not see a measurable pollution increase either, the department found.
MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber, a Hochul appointee, focused his public response on the negative outcome that didn’t happen rather than the positive one that also didn’t: “Before we turned the cameras on, there was concern about the potential for increased pollution caused by drivers looking to avoid the toll. As this study confirms, that didn’t happen, and congestion pricing is already funding additional investments to further improve air quality.” Notably absent from any city or MTA statement: a claim that the toll measurably cleaned the air — the promise that helped sell the program in the first place.
Hochul has never been shy about the environmental sales pitch. Urging the MTA board to approve tolling in December 2023, she said flatly that congestion pricing “means cleaner air, better transit and less gridlock on New York City’s streets.” On the program’s first anniversary, January 5, 2026 — seven months before her own city’s health department published its findings — she went further: “By every measure, this program has met or exceeded expectations: traffic and gridlock are down substantially, people are moving faster, air quality is improved, streets are safer and our economy is stronger.” Days later, on X, she summarized it in three words: “Congestion pricing works.”
Congestion pricing works.
The city’s own health department did not confirm that “air quality is improved” is precisely right — its August report found the opposite: that the change is not statistically distinguishable from ordinary year-to-year variation. Hochul’s office did not walk back the anniversary claim after the DOH report published.
Federal Republicans have made a related point from a different angle. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (R) has called the toll a “slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners” who pay “a fortune” to drive roads their own tax dollars already built, and pushed early in the administration to revoke the program’s federal highway approval.
The federal government and @POTUS are putting New York on notice. Your refusal to end cordon pricing and your open disrespect towards the federal government is unacceptable. Your high tolls and no free road option are a slap in the face to hard-working Americans.
President Trump has pressed the same argument on Truth Social — celebrating “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD” when Duffy’s move went out in February 2025, and returning to it that November, calling the toll a burden that had left Manhattan “a ghost town” and asking Duffy to “take a good, long look at terminating” the program outright.
CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!
Posted after Secretary Duffy moved to revoke the program's federal highway approval. Source: quoted verbatim via The White House (@WhiteHouse) on X and multiple news outlets including ABC7 New York.
New York City is getting KILLED by her ridiculous CONGESTION PRICING, where people have to pay a fortune to come into Manhattan - So they just don't come! The place is a ghost town. I am going to ask our Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, to take a good, long look at terminating New York City Congestion Pricing.
Excerpted from a longer post also addressing New York energy prices; quoted verbatim as reported by Newsweek. Source: Newsweek.
Reporting the DOH findings, Fox News put the political stakes plainly: the report “could backfire and provide fresh ammunition to critics who have blasted congestion pricing as an expensive burden on commuters, small businesses and working families in America’s largest city.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) — championed congestion pricing since 2023 and continues to say it “works” and that “air quality is improved.”
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D, DSA) — whose own Health Department produced the report undercutting Hochul’s air-quality claim.
Janno Lieber — MTA Chair and CEO, a Hochul appointee overseeing toll operations and revenue.
Dr. Alister Martin — NYC Health Commissioner, a Mamdani appointee who oversaw the August report.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) — represents Bronx corridors at the center of the South Bronx pollution dispute.
Sean Duffy (R) — U.S. Transportation Secretary; led the federal push to revoke the toll’s highway approval.
Whatever the air-quality report shows, the toll’s other purpose — funding transit — has performed almost exactly as billed. The MTA collected more than $550 million in net revenue in the program’s first year, meeting its monthly targets closely enough to bond out roughly $15 billion in capital projects: subway signal upgrades, station accessibility, and new rolling stock.
Some of that revenue has been redirected specifically toward the pollution complaints the city insists the toll didn’t cause. On April 1, 2026, Hochul announced a package of congestion-pricing-funded environmental investments aimed at the Bronx: $20,000,000 for a Bronx Asthma Initiative, $15,000,000 to replace diesel refrigeration units at the Hunts Point produce market, $25,000,000 for park and greenspace renovation in environmental-justice neighborhoods, and $10,000,000 each for roadside vegetation and school air-filtration units. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), whose Bronx district includes several of the monitoring sites in question, explained the need bluntly: “The Bronx has some of the worst asthma rates in the country, and dirty diesel trucks are a big reason why.”
It is a strange position for the program to be in: collecting a toll justified by a clean-air promise its own health department can’t confirm, while simultaneously spending tens of millions of toll dollars mitigating a pollution problem it says its own data doesn’t show.
The city’s zone-wide numbers are not the only air-quality data New Yorkers have. In May 2026, NY1 reported on an unpublished, not-yet-peer-reviewed analysis by Columbia University Ph.D. student Alexander De Jesus, built on community air sensors: 12 of 19 South Bronx monitoring sites recorded increases in particulate matter after congestion pricing began, averaging a 0.22 microgram-per-cubic-meter rise. “While 0.22 may sound small, this is a significant figure,” De Jesus said. Mychael Johnson of the advocacy group South Bronx Unite was less measured: “They went on with their project, saying that increase is manageable if we mitigate it. We don’t feel it’s mitigatable when our children are going to hospitals today because they’re sick.”
MTA and Health Department officials dispute a causal link, noting some of the affected crossings saw traffic patterns consistent with normal seasonal variation while other nearby routes saw volume fall. The Columbia findings and the DOHMH’s official August report reach opposite conclusions about the same neighborhood using different methodologies — De Jesus’s community-sensor data against the department’s EPA-standard, control-site design — and neither has been reconciled in public. The city has funded the asthma-mitigation programs anyway rather than wait for the dispute to resolve.
Strip away the press-release language on every side and the empirical record is genuinely underwhelming: New York’s own health department, using its most rigorous methodology yet, could not find that a policy sold explicitly on cleaner air produced any measurable cleaner air, citywide or in the corridors that mattered most. It also could not confirm the South Bronx got worse, though a separate academic analysis says it did. Gov. Hochul (D-NY) continues to tell the public “air quality is improved”; her own mayor’s health department says otherwise. Drivers keep paying $9 a trip regardless of which claim is true, and the MTA keeps collecting — over $550 million in year one alone — while spending tens of millions more chasing a pollution problem it insists its own data can’t find. The traffic really did drop 11 percent. The air, on the government’s own numbers, mostly didn’t change.
“New Yorkers deserve to know how major policies affect the air they breathe … we now know that air quality across New York City was not any different because of congestion pricing.”
Dr. Alister Martin, NYC Health Commissioner — Aug. 14, 2026
Last updated August 17, 2026