Now that New York City has finally flipped the switch on congestion pricing, the big question is: Will it work? If so, what is the effect?

To find out, all eyes turned to an obscure new web tool called the Congestion Pricing Tracker. The tracker, the brainchild of two college-aged brothers, uses real-time traffic data from Google Maps to calculate traffic times for selected routes and dates. The data is presented as a line graph of traffic times before and after the congestion charge took effect on January 5. Compare one route to another and see if travel time increases or decreases.

Not surprisingly, depending on the route and time of day, the new toll scheme appears to be working — maybe even better than expected. Starting Jan. 5, most drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street during rush hour will pay $9, and $2.25 late at night and on weekends. The fee appears to be achieving its original purpose of changing motorist behavior and channeling millions of dollars into necessary transportation improvements.

That's what initially drew brothers Benjamin and Joshua Moshe to the project. Benjamin, a senior majoring in mathematics and economics at Brown, was originally working on a project about taxis when his advisor, Professor Emily Oster, made a suggestion about switching topics.

"She suggested that I also look at the new congestion surcharge that was going to be introduced over the summer and collect data and track how things were going," Benjamin told edge.

Benjamin liked this idea, especially as it related to the concepts of price elasticity and demand. In other words, the more expensive something is, the less willing people are to do it. Historically, driving has cost very little to drivers – in fact, most costs, from road infrastructure to free parking, have been actively subsidized by governments. So if you raise the price of driving a private car into one of the most congested, traffic-heavy areas of the country, maybe you can convince some of those people to stop doing it.

"How long does it take for people to actually change their behavior?" Benjamin asked. "A lot of the theories are that, $9, people need to get to work, people still need to get into the area, public transportation isn't going to cut it, people aren't going to change their behavior. Others say people are going to really change their behavior, transportation It will be reduced a lot.”

He roped in his younger brother, Joshua, who was about to start his freshman year at Northeastern University. Together they began outlining the tool.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul surprised many when she abruptly suspended congestion pricing, citing concerns about the affordability of the new charges and the risks to New York's post-pandemic economy, causing the data project to be delayed. But the pause proved to be temporary, with Hochul reinstating death tolls after President-elect Donald Trump won the November election. The toll was reduced from $15 to $9, and a few weeks later the toll cameras were turned on.

Meanwhile, the tracker launched — and almost immediately, you could find links to it in social media posts from transit advocates, who were delighted to see in real time that fewer cars seemed to be entering the congested zone. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which oversees congestion pricing, has no plans to release its own preliminary traffic data for several weeks. A lot of people want data these days, and Brother's tracker helps fill that need.

When designing the tool, the brothers used Google Maps' API to collect real-time traffic data for 19 routes, each of which took the shortest time to drive from point A to point B. The tracker refreshes the times for each route every 15 minutes, generating 1,824 data points per day. Most of the data comes from the 13 routes directly affected by the congestion charge, with additional routes from outside the region to measure the impact on commutes. They even included a few routes in Chicago and Boston as controls, in case they didn't capture national or historical trends.

In the run-up to congestion charging, one of the ways experts used to measure the effectiveness of new tolls was to quote average speeds within congestion zones. Slower speeds mean more traffic, faster speeds mean less traffic. But Benjamin and Joshua believe commute time is a better metric.

"The good thing about commute time is that you can more easily internalize, 'Oh, now it takes me four minutes to get through the Lincoln Tunnel when it used to take 10 minutes,'" Benjamin said. "If the average speed used to be 19 mph and now I'm doing 21 mph, I think I'd also realize that's a little bit different."

The brothers were surprised by how quickly the tracker took off and were quoted in major media reports this new york times, this economistand Bloomberg. Their tool becomes a clear source of measurement of whether congestion pricing is effective.

"The number of social media posts, Twitter posts, the number of people who have visited the website and people who have donated to us, we're so grateful for it, it's really surprised us in a positive way," Benjamin said.

The brothers said they hope to keep the tracker running - despite the costs associated with web hosting and collecting data. (You can donate to their project here, or just buy them a coffee.) They plan to make improvements, improve their data collection methods, and design better maps. Obviously, this type of project would benefit from more data and a longer life cycle.

"We're trying to keep the website running, the data collection running so that we can actually see if the averages are going up, down, and if there are any changes to what we've seen over the past few days," Joshua said.

But one thing seems certain: Benjamin's essay will probably get a good grade.

“I think this project has been a huge success because information about traffic patterns is immediately available,” Oster, a Brown University economics professor and Benjamin’s adviser, said in an email. "Ultimately, the MTA and other agencies will have access to this information, but the value of the tracker is in providing this information immediately. I'm proud that they were able to put this together."