Gov. Hochul may have pressed “pause” on congestion pricing — but the system’s cameras are still recording.
The half-billion-dollar network of EZ-Pass and license plate readers is up and running, despite there being no tolls to assess.
“The cameras are on — we’re taking information about traffic,” MTA chair Janno Lieber said last week.
“They’re on,” NYC Transit’s senior vice president of buses Frank Annicaro said of the cameras Monday. “But, again, the program is paused right now.”
Asked if the city’s Transportation Department is receiving any traffic data from the half-a-billion dollar system, commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez’s answer was similarly opaque.
“We are in a pause,” he said.
Transcore, the Nashville-based firm that powers toll collection on MTA bridges and tunnels as well as the New Jersey Turnpike, was promised $555.8 million to build and operate the camera system through 2030.
When Hochul announced an indefinite pause on congestion pricing earlier this month in a surprise about-face, the fate of the camera network — and the MTA’s contract with Transcore — seemed uncertain.
Under the congestion pricing plan, traffic data from the camera network was required by federal regulators, and the MTA had committed to making that data public.
But in the absence of a congestion pricing plan, the agency is using the data for testing, an MTA spokesman said.
“Given the pause, we continue to test the system and are collecting and assessing the data within that context,” Aaron Donovan said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Transcore did not immediately respond Monday when asked to whom they were sending traffic data.
The sweeping network of cameras and readers stretches across 60th St. in Manhattan — the northern edge of the planned congestion zone — and clusters around bridge and tunnel landings south of 60th.
Utilizing much of the same technology as the average highway toll plaza, the network would have begun assessing tolls to motorists who entered Midtown or lower Manhattan on June 30th.
Cameras were also placed along the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway, both of which were to be exempted from the congestion pricing plan, in order to track vehicular traffic inside the zone in accordance with federal requirements.
The system has been designed to discriminate between multiple sizes of trucks, as well as cars and buses — which would have been a necessity in order to assess the planned sliding-scale toll.
The system can also reportedly track individual vehicles in order to accurately assess tolls, a capability that has raised concerns among some privacy advocates.
But even in the absence of a congestion toll to assess, the camera network could be very useful for tracking traffic trends, former Traffic Commissioner and Daily News columnist Sam Schwartz said.
“It’s really the first time we’re going to have city street [level] data that’s reliable,” Schwartz told The News. “It’s a good measure of traffic volume.”
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The congestion pricing kibosh comes as Manhattan traffic is reaching historic levels, Schwartz said.
“The past 12 months are the slowest 12 months in history,” he said.
The average speed of a taxi cab in the congestion zone was 6.6 miles per hour, according to GPS data collected by Schwartz.
The traffic guru said Monday that he hoped traffic data garnered from the network would eventually be made public.
“This [network] can give you data, potentially the next day,” he said. “Hopefully it’ll be open source.”
