Abstract

The Central Business District Tolling Program, commonly known as "congestion pricing," was scheduled to begin in June 2024 after years of study and evaluation by the City, MTA, and partners in the federal government. The tolling program includes fees ranging from $1.25 to $2.50 for taxis and for-hire vehicle trips in Manhattan below 60th street. Though the Governor's last-minute decision to delay the program implementation has created uncertainty about its future, the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission’s (TLC) is interested in exploring different structures for congestion pricing that could be applied to TLC-regulated services in the future. Through a collaboration with the Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) at NYU Tandon, the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission’s (TLC) Data Analytics Unit, housed within the Policy Division, aims to explore different structures for congestion pricing that could be applied to TLC-regulated services in the future. Throughout the project students will gain understanding of some of TLC’s key policies such as the Green Rides Initiative and the For-Hire-Vehicle Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles programs. Students will undertake data wrangling efforts, involving data cleaning, integration, and transformation. In the Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) phase of the project students will identify patterns in congestion related to time of day, day of week, and location. Building up on previous project milestones students will develop and refine pricing models to understand the resiliency and elasticity of the taxi and HV (High-Volume) industries through anomaly detection, clustering, times series and traffic demand modeling. Finally, comprehensive policy recommendations based on data analysis and predictive models will be developed, in conjunction with the TLC team.