More people are driving cars in New York City than ever before, based on toll data from the MTA and Port Authority — a remarkable feat as the city prepares to implement congestion pricing in the hopes of dissuading motorists from getting behind the wheel in favor of mass transit.
Over 335 million vehicles were recorded crossing the MTA’s nine bridges and tunnels in 2023, which include the Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Cross-Bay, and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridges and the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown Tunnels, among others. That’s a 1.3% increase over the previous record in 2019, when 330.7 million crossings were made, and the most ever seen in 87 years of data collection.
In 1937 — the first year that the MTA Bridges & Tunnels’ predecessor, the Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority, was in operation — the bridges saw only 18.5 million crossings. Back then, the TBTA had only three bridges in its portfolio: the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Bridge, and the Marine Parkway Bridge.
The Port Authority, meanwhile, has this year seen the highest number of vehicle crossings on its six spans — including the George Washington Bridge, Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, and the Bayonne and Goethals Bridges and Outerbridge Crossing connecting Staten Island and New Jersey — since at least 2011. Through October, the latest month that data is available, the Port Authority had recorded just over 102 million crossings.
In its 2024 budget proposal, the Port Authority projected its bridges and tunnels would see 122 million crossings next year.
New York City’s Department of Transportation could not immediately provide numbers for its bridges throughout the city, which include major spans like the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro Bridges and hundreds of short crossings all over the five boroughs. Unlike the MTA and Port Authority, the DOT does not collect tolls.
However, DOT did record that the number of vehicles registered in the city grew more than 10% between 2010 and 2021, according to the agency’s Streets Plan update earlier this year. The numbers for 2022 will be published in early 2024.
2 comments:
Use this toll money for the illegal migrants room service.
Car totalitarians are like a plague of cockroaches infesting the city.
Hopefully, congestion pricing will be like the "Roach Motel" for this infestation.
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