Opinion: A Fairer - And Better Way - For Taxi Passengers To Pay The Congestion Toll - Streetsblog New York City

"My mechanism is straightforward: get rid of the flat $0.75 taxi surcharge and the $1.50 Uber and Lyft surcharge. In their place, charge passengers a fee for each minute their trip is inside the congestion zone. The per-minute amount would be calibrated to replicate the congestion revenues now being generated by the flat surcharges."

"This reconfiguration would improve the existing congestion relief by nearly 20 percent, my modeling shows - from an estimated 4.3 percent improvement in average traffic speeds before congestion pricing to 5.1 percent. The boost of 0.8 percentage points may not seem like much, but it equates to an addit[ional benefit]."

"I estimate that five cents a minute for trips in yellows and 10 cents for trips in Ubers and Lyfts - charged only for time in the congestion zone - will match current revenues from the $0.75/$1.50 scheme. As long as the passengers pay no more overall, the tweak in how the fee is calculated can't be considered a toll hike."

Following the federal court's dismissal of the Trump administration's legal challenge to congestion pricing, a reconfiguration of the taxi and Uber surcharges is proposed. The current system charges a flat $0.75 surcharge for taxis and $1.50 for Uber and Lyft trips that enter the Manhattan congestion zone south of 60th Street. The proposal replaces these flat fees with per-minute charges: five cents per minute for yellow taxis and ten cents for Uber and Lyft, applied only during time spent in the congestion zone. This change would be revenue-neutral, generating the same total revenue as the current surcharges while improving traffic speed improvements from 4.3 percent to 5.1 percent, representing a nearly 20 percent boost in congestion relief effectiveness.

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