New York
New Yorkers Have Little Data but Big Feelings About Congestion Pricing
It’s too soon to know whether New York City’s new congestion pricing plan has succeeded in reducing traffic in Manhattan. And it will be a while before we know if the new fees will raise the billions of dollars proponents have promised. But even before the hard data arrives, New Yorkers (and those who commute to New York) have had lot to say.
Some public transit commuters report buses miraculously arriving on time or (gasp) early. Drivers are either steaming mad — or agog at traffic-free bridges. Many pedestrians say they are suddenly less anxious about crossing the street. And some former congestion pricing haters are startled to find themselves reconsidering.
The first-in-the-nation plan took effect this week after years of contentious debate. Most drivers now pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. Money collected from the toll is supposed to be used to improve public transportation.
Congestion pricing arrived at the same time as a stretch of brutally cold weather in New York, so it’s still unclear what has been keeping people out of their cars and off the streets.
But Ilena Robbins, 37, believes congestion pricing has already been transformative.
It is not hyperbole to say that crossing Canal Street, a notoriously clogged east-west thoroughfare with four — and in some places six — lanes, used to make her fear for her life.
Ms. Robbins, who grew up in Manhattan but now lives in Queens, compared navigating the intersection where she works, at Canal and Lafayette Streets, to a game of Frogger — at least in the old days.
“It would stress me out just getting lunch,” she said. Thursday was her first day there post-congestion pricing. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was able to cross safely, and cars weren’t honking. It was like a whole other world.”
Asad Dandia owns and operates a walking tour company, New York Narratives, and conducted his first post-congestion pricing walking tour at noon on Thursday, leading 20 students through Lower Manhattan.
“It was much easier to cross the street,” said Mr. Dandia, a 32-year-old native of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. “Definitely quieter. Definitely calmer.”
Mr. Dandia, who also teaches a New York City history course at CUNY Guttman Community College, added that he saw great potential in congestion pricing. “I think it could lead to a renaissance — a street renaissance.”
Even people who don’t study the streets for a living were swept up in the excitement.
Annie Kaur usually posts videos about fashion on her TikTok account. But from her apartment on the 32nd floor of a building that overlooks Third Avenue, Ms. Kaur, a 27-year-old management consultant, noticed how few cars were on the road during rush hour on Tuesday.
At 5:04 p.m., she filmed a video from her window and posted the clip with the caption, “There’s usually so much traffic during this time of the day!”
By Friday, the video had over three million views — more than any of her other posts.
“It definitely did surprise me,” she said. “This is not my usual content.”
There were also over 3,000 comments, some cranky: “If u have this view u can afford the tolls,” one viewer wrote.
Ms. Kaur said congestion pricing doesn’t really affect her much, except if she takes a cab or Uber at night, when that feels safer than riding the subway.
But her perch gives her an interesting perspective. “I’ve seen a lot of traffic,” she said. “I’ve seen gridlock — just, crazy, stopped.”
On the day that she filmed, she said, the traffic seemed about 25 percent lighter. But, she hedged: “It could just be because it was after the holidays. And it was less than 20 degrees. It was freezing, you know?”
Regardless, down on the streets, some people were ecstatic.
Ramit Sethi, an author and entrepreneur, posted in all caps on social media that his ride on Thursday was “the fastest trip I’ve ever taken to the airport from NYC!!! Thank you congestion pricing!!!”
In an email, Mr. Sethi, 42, reported that his Lyft driver got him from downtown Manhattan to Newark Liberty International Airport in just 23 minutes. “No honking, zero congestion around the Holland Tunnel, no need to leave an extra half-hour early to account for traffic,” he said.
And some drivers admitted they have been forced to change their tune.
On Tuesday, a social media user named Ali Lyles posted a video on TikTok in which he compared being charged a toll as he crossed a bridge to “being robbed without a gun.”
Just a short time later, he posted another video, acknowledging that he had saved half an hour from his commute. “There wasn’t no traffic, bruh,” he said. “I might actually like congestion pricing!”
Marc Jacoby, 64, had a similar experience. He drives from the West Village to the Bronx or Westchester four to five times a week to teach music to people with special needs. He drives instead of taking public transportation because, he said, he carries so much equipment: “Guitars. Puppets. Percussion instruments. Flutes. Whistles. Sometimes toys.”
Before now, Mr. Jacoby had only negative impressions of congestion pricing.
“If someone asked me, two weeks ago, I would say this is going to be a disaster,” he said. “But I was wrong about that. And I’m happy to admit that I was wrong.”
At 42nd Street and the West Side Highway on Thursday at 1 p.m., the consistently clogged streets near the Intrepid Museum and Circle Line Cruises were clear. Mr. Jacoby described the scene as “actually unbelievable.”
There are discounts for low-income vehicle owners, but Mr. Jacoby believes the fee should be set on a sliding scale.
“When Big Brother scans your license plate, they should tie it to your state tax return,” he said. A driver making a half-million dollars a year, he suggested, should pay $50. “And when they see me, maybe I should pay $5 or $9.”
Some people don’t want to pay at all.
On Wednesday, Scott LoBaido, a Staten Island-based artist and activist, posted a video to social media showing himself using duct tape to cover up his license plate and suggesting others do the same, as a way to avoid the toll.
Later in the day, Mr. LoBaido, whose work includes paintings of Donald Trump hugging the Empire State Building in front of an American flag, was arrested after he staged a one-man protest near Columbus Circle.
Still, there was so much congestion pricing buzz — positive, negative or neutral — that even brands and people in other cities were chiming in.
Shake Shack announced a temporary “Congestion Pricing Combo” starting Jan. 13: a burger and fries for $9 — “toll not included.”
And Lauren Walker, a resident of Washington, D.C., wondered if cities should go even further: “My opinion on congestion pricing,” she joked on the social media site Bluesky, “is that it should cost 10,000 dollars to honk your car horn.”
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.
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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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