New York
Companies could pass on the cost of congestion pricing tolls to consumers.
Congestion pricing arrived in New York City exactly one second after midnight on Sunday.
And despite the freezing temperatures, a crowd of about 100 people gathered at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 60th Street in Manhattan to mark the occasion.
It was mainly supporters who showed up to clap and chant, “Pay that toll! Pay that toll!” But one opponent tried to drown them out by banging a cowbell. And the exchanges grew a bit testy at times across the congestion pricing divide.
The tolling program, the first of its kind in the nation, finally became reality on New York streets after decades of battles over efforts to unclog some of the most traffic-saturated streets in the world. In the weeks leading up to its start, the program survived multiple legal challenges seeking to derail it at the last minute, including from the State of New Jersey.
It will most likely be some time, however, before it becomes clear whether congestion pricing works, or whether it can withstand continuing attempts to overturn it by a broad array of opponents, including President-elect Donald J. Trump, who takes office later this month.
Noel Hidalgo, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, was among the first drivers to pay the toll. As he drove his Mini Cooper across the threshold, toll supporters cheered and clapped from the curb.
Another driver posted a photo on social media of a silver car with metal cans dangling from the rear bumper. “Just tolled” was written on the rear windshield.
Most passenger cars are now being charged $9 once a day at detection points set up along the borders of the new tolling zone, from 60th Street to the southern tip of Manhattan.
Shortly after noon, about 12 hours after tolling began, transportation leaders declared that the plan had rolled out without a hitch, but cautioned that the tolling system was complicated and that it was too soon to know how it was faring.
“We will start to know specific numbers and have some comparatives within a few days, and we’re going to share that information publicly,” said Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency overseeing the program.
So far, the M.T.A. does not intend to make any adjustments to the program, Mr. Lieber said.
Traffic data for the congestion zone was mixed on Day 1. The average travel speed initially inched upward 3 percent to 15.1 miles per hour at 8 a.m. Sunday, compared with 14.6 m.p.h. at the same time on the first Sunday in January last year, according to INRIX, a transportation analytics firm. But by noon, the travel speed had fallen to 13 m.p.h., slightly slower than in 2024.
Still, the real test for the tolling program will come during the workweek. The M.T.A. said it had chosen to introduce the program on a Sunday to be able to work out any kinks while traffic was sparse. Light snow was forecast for the region on Monday, which could affect commuter data if fewer people choose to drive.
On a typical weekday, at least half a million vehicles enter the congestion pricing zone, a metric that officials will be tracking “very, very closely,” Mr. Lieber said.
Manoj Bhandari’s car will no longer be among them. Though he normally drives into his Midtown office at least twice a week from New Jersey, he said he would now only take the train. “It’s expensive for me and it’s expensive for everybody,” said Mr. Bhandari, 54, who was parked outside the Lincoln Tunnel on Sunday. “We won’t be using our car anymore.”
Transportation officials have projected that congestion pricing will reduce the number of vehicles entering the congestion zone by at least 13 percent.
Other drivers seemed to accept that there was no way around the new tolls. Oscar Velasquez, 54, a carpenter who lives on Long Island, said he was going to have to pay more now to haul his tools to jobs around the city. “One of these days, they’re going to charge you for walking,” Mr. Velasquez said as he idled on West 66th Street in his Chevy pickup truck.
The tolls are expected to help generate $15 billion to pay for crucial repairs and improvements to New York’s aging subway system, buses and two commuter rail lines. The work includes modernizing subway signals, making stations more accessible for riders with disabilities and expanding the city’s electric bus fleet.
Those upgrades could improve the commute for Emily Rose Prats, 36, of Brooklyn, who supports congestion pricing. She has spinal degradation and standing for long periods can cause her great discomfort, so she has avoided the subway and the bus, which can be unreliable.
“The improvements from congestion pricing are supposed to be an upgrade to the signals, which will mean faster trains, shorter headways, shorter commutes, less wait times,” Ms. Prats said. “All of that is something that will help me be able to take advantage of a public amenity that we pay for.”
Congestion pricing is being introduced in New York at a time when traffic has surged on city streets since nearly disappearing five years ago in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. New York was named the world’s most congested city, beating out London, Paris and Mexico City, in a 2023 traffic scorecard compiled by INRIX.
Though congestion policy has successfully reduced traffic in other global cities, including London, Stockholm and Singapore, it has never gotten far in this country. Besides New York, a handful of other cities, like Washington and San Francisco, have explored the concept.
The program has been unpopular in the polls, and some transit experts noted that neither Mayor Eric Adams nor Gov. Kathy Hochul had commented on the start of congestion pricing by Sunday afternoon even though it will have a major impact on the city and state.
Mr. Adams has supported the plan while expressing reservations about it, and is running for re-election this year. Ms. Hochul paused the program in June over concerns that it would hurt the city’s recovery and brought it back in November with a 40 percent reduction in the tolls, down to $9 from $15.
The tolls will increase to $12 by 2028, and to $15 by 2031. The new plan is set to generate about $500 million per year during its first three years, and then $700 million when fees first go up, then close to $1 billion when the original toll is restored. The money will be used to secure $15 billion through bond financing, which would be paid back with tolling revenue.
Mr. Lieber of the M.T.A. said that officials did not expect New Yorkers to change their behavior overnight.
“Everybody’s going to have to adjust to this as more and more people become aware of it and start to factor it into their planning,” he said.
At a coffee shop near Lincoln Center, Terry Kotnour, a retired consultant, praised congestion pricing. “That’s the cost of living here,” said Mr. Kotnour, 82, who gave up his car long ago. “We have fairly good mass transit, so use it instead.”
Another supporter, Kevin Chau, 27, a software engineer from Queens who rides Citi Bike, said that he hoped Manhattan would become safer for cyclists. “Less cars on the road means it’s less dangerous for sure,” he said.
But many critics, including suburban commuters, said the program will do little to reduce traffic while punishing drivers who live outside Manhattan.
On the same day that congestion pricing began, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey also began to charge drivers higher fees to travel between New Jersey and New York on bridges and tunnels, which it controls. (The rate is now $16.06 for passenger vehicles during peak hours, up by 68 cents from the previous fee.)
Roselyn Cano, 21, just bought a car last week to commute from the Bronx to her job at an exercise studio on East 59th Street in Manhattan because she did not feel safe taking the subway. “And then a couple of days later we get hit with the congestion toll,” said Ms. Cano, who sat at a reception desk at the studio tallying up the costs of the new toll along with her car payment, auto insurance, parking and the toll she already pays crossing from the Bronx into Manhattan.
Some New Yorkers were already devising workarounds to avoid paying the new tolls.
Cynthia Jones, who lives on the Upper West Side, was taking an exercise class at the studio. Her husband had dropped her off at 61st Street, one block north of the tolling zone. “I walked the rest of the way here,” she said.
Reporting was contributed by Wesley Parnell, Bernard Mokam, Nate Schweber, Olivia Bensimon, Anusha Bayya, Camille Baker, Sean Piccoli and Emma Fitzsimmons.
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
More in Theater
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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