{"id":290588,"date":"2026-07-08T18:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T18:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/290588\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T18:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T18:50:08","slug":"new-yorks-congestion-pricing-shaved-a-minute-off-ambulance-trips-and-potentially-saved-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/290588\/","title":{"rendered":"New York’s congestion pricing shaved a minute off ambulance trips, and potentially saved lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York City\u2019s congestion pricing program<\/a> has been sold, and fought over, almost entirely for its ability to clear traffic out of Manhattan. A new NBER working paper points to a benefit that rarely comes up in that fight: faster ambulances, plus a wider list of externalities the public debate tends to leave out.<\/p>\n

The paper, released this month<\/a> by six economists including Brad Humphreys of West Virginia University, draws on roughly 1.6 million EMS incidents citywide, narrowed to a Manhattan sample near the boundary for its main results. It finds total EMS travel time inside the congestion relief zone fell 63\u201370 seconds, or by roughly 5%\u20136%, after the toll took effect on Jan. 5, 2025. The economists measured the impact by comparing ambulance runs on either side of 60th Street (where the congestion zone starts or ends depending on how you\u2019re looking at it) rather than the zone against the rest of the city over time.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur research design is sort of spatial,\u201d Humphreys told Fortune. \u201cWe match EMT trips on either side of 60th, above and below, in and out of the congestion zone, because they should be really similar in terms of other characteristics of whatever\u2019s going on with those emergency calls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why a minute matters<\/p>\n

Humphreys argued the time savings aren\u2019t trivial, pointing to research tying ambulance response time to survival odds in the most severe cases. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is economic research that shows that even shaving one minute off an EMT trip for severe cases can generate huge economic benefits, because it\u2019s a life or death situation,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019ve got somebody who\u2019s had a stroke or a heart attack, the value of that is tremendous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Travel time to the incident fell only 7 seconds to 9 seconds, but the the bigger gain of 54 seconds to 59 seconds came in transport from the scene to the hospital, after paramedics had already stabilized the patient.<\/p>\n

The mortality link comes from a 2013 study by economist Elizabeth Wilde: Each additional minute of EMS response time raises the risk of a 90-day mortality by roughly one percentage point, or an 8% to 17% relative increase, depending on the time horizon. Wilde\u2019s data covered response time broadly, not transport time. Thanks to New York City\u2019s excellent public data, Humphreys said another study should be in the works regarding the direct, long-term economic effects of savings people\u2019s lives by getting them to the hospital that much faster. <\/p>\n

\u201cFuture work should seek to quantify these downstream health effects directly,\u201d Humphreys said.<\/p>\n

Despite the naysayers, there\u2019s no car displacement at all, and actually more bikes and pedestrians<\/p>\n

One common argument made by naysayers against congestion pricing is that it doesn\u2019t reduce driving, it just relocates it. Humphreys said that didn\u2019t hold up. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t find any displacement effect,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t find that those EMT calls slowed down north of 60th, or anywhere. Basically people just stop driving. They just stop driving in general.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper\u2019s camera data\u2014from NYC street cameras that snap images every 15 minutes, analyzed by machine learning\u2014found pedestrian counts up roughly 14% and bike counts up nearly 20% near the boundary, alongside a 21% drop in passenger vehicles and 18% drop in trucks, which is consistent with broader MTA data<\/a> showing fewer vehicles and faster travel times since the toll began.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t sell that hard in the paper,\u201d Humphreys said of the bike increase, \u201cbut that\u2019s another positive externality\u2014people were using bikes more, probably because it\u2019s safer to ride in the congestion zone.\u201d The paper\u2019s literature review cites prior accident reductions from congestion pricing in London (2%\u20135%), Stockholm (5%\u20139%), and Milan (20%+).<\/p>\n

Humphreys also flagged foot traffic\u2019s commercial upside as unstudied: \u201cIncreased foot traffic should be associated with increased commercial activity,\u201d he said, adding \u201cthat\u2019s a future research topic.\u201d It should be noted this is in line with the city\u2019s and state\u2019s own economic data<\/a> as well: On the one-year anniversary of congestion pricing, the state governor\u2019s office released data showing an in increase of foot traffic from 2024, which led to a 6% increase in sales tax receipts.<\/p>\n

A directive that complicated the data<\/p>\n

The paper\u2019s biggest technical wrinkle came from outside the tolling policy\u2014and outside the political fight about the toll\u2019s survival<\/a> that dominated early 2025 headlines. In March 2025, FDNY began requiring ambulances to transport patients to the nearest hospital rather than a preferred one, which on its own changes how long transport takes.<\/p>\n

\u201cA couple of our co-authors live in New York City\u2026 and we did some Google News<\/a> searching and identified that policy as an important confounder,\u201d Humphreys said. \u201cSomebody would undoubtedly say, \u2018You\u2019re getting these declines because of that policy change, not the congestion price.\u2019 We felt it was important to address that.\u201d <\/p>\n

The boundary-based design was built to be less exposed to that kind of citywide shock than a standard before-and-after comparison, which picked up the directive\u2019s effects and showed transport times rising after March 2025.<\/p>\n

Humphreys\u2019 broader argument is the debate fixates on the toll itself while ignoring costs and benefits absent from any E-ZPass statement\u2014air pollution, noise, street wear. <\/p>\n

\u201cLower traffic means less air pollution, and that has huge health consequences,\u201d he said, flagging air quality as ripe for a dollar estimate. \u201cThe EPA has a clear methodology for valuing improvements in air quality,\u201d he said, while also referring to the other side effect of traffic: honking. \u201cThere\u2019s evidence that noise pollution reduces property values,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Thanks to this study, Humphreys said the positive impact on ambulances and emergency response times should absolutely be taken into accounts as more cities across the country and around the world consider implementing congestion pricing.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody\u2019s ever done a full cost-benefit analysis of it,\u201d Humphreys said, \u201cbut our results suggest that we probably should\u2026 all they see is, \u2018I\u2019m getting charged to drive into Manhattan.\u2019 They don\u2019t see you\u2019re getting all these benefits. It\u2019s not just the charge.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York City\u2019s congestion pricing program has been sold, and fought over, almost entirely for its ability to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[67325,2700,9,24,55,54,56,2023],"class_list":["post-290588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-autos","tag-car","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-traffic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}