What the congestion toll did to yellow cabs
On January 5, 2025, Manhattan below 60th Street became the first congestion-priced zone in the United States. The TLC's trip records tracked every yellow cab pickup before and after. Some zones dropped hard. Some barely moved. A few gained.
The toll is $9 for most passenger vehicles entering the Central Business District — the area bounded roughly by 60th Street to the north and the southern tip of Manhattan. Comparing yellow cab pickups across all 49 zones inside that boundary, the picture is uneven.
A line with two sides 🚕
On January 5, 2025, Manhattan below 60th Street became congestion-priced: $9 for most passenger vehicles. The map fills every NYC taxi zone by how its yellow-cab pickups moved from December to February — marigold where pickups fell, cobalt where they rose. The legend is fixed at ±40%, so the same shade means the same change in every frame that follows.
The Central Business District reads marigold; much of the outer city reads cobalt. The toll's shadow has a shape. Next we zoom inside the line and rank the zones that fell the hardest.
The hardest-hit zones
Inside the CBD the drop is uneven. The chart beside the map indexes each zone to its December pickups (= 100) and draws a dumbbell to February — the longer the bar, the steeper the fall. Battery Park leads: 1,371 pickups in December, 824 in February, a 40% drop. These are zones on the toll boundary's edge or heavy on tourism and discretionary, short-haul trips.
Adding $9 to a $60 airport run barely registers. Adding $9 to a $12 cab across downtown makes riders think twice. Three of those zones stack along a single Lower Manhattan corridor — that's where we head next.
The deepest corridor
Three Lower Manhattan zones — Battery Park, World Trade Center, and Lincoln Square East — each lost more than 15% of their pickups. Indexed to December = 100, their slope lines fan downward together: same starting point, three different falls. All three sit on or near the toll boundary and lean on the most price-elastic trips in the city.
That's the inside of the line. Pull back to all five boroughs and the picture inverts.
The other side of the line
Indexed the same way, the boroughs split cleanly: the CBD line drops in marigold while Brooklyn, Queens, and even Upper Manhattan (above 60th Street) rise in cobalt. Upper Manhattan tracking the outer boroughs — not the CBD — is the tell: this is the toll boundary at work, not a general taxi-demand trend.
Whether displaced CBD riders moved to outer-borough destinations, switched to subway, or just stopped taking cabs is a second-order question the trip records alone can't answer. But the spatial contrast is real: the toll's shadow had a shape, and it was the toll boundary itself.
🚕 Citywide Dec → Feb change — marigold fewer pickups, cobalt more
By area, December to February
Volume-weighted % change in yellow cab pickups · Dec 2024 → Feb 2025
Marigold falls below the zero line, cobalt rises above it. Uptown Manhattan (above 60th St) tracked the outer boroughs, not the CBD — confirming the toll boundary, not general taxi-demand trends, drives the divergence.
View underlying data
All Manhattan zones · yellow cab pickups · Dec 2024 vs Feb 2025 · sorted by biggest drop
| Zone | Area | Dec 2024 | Feb 2025 | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Battery Park | CBD | 1,371 | 824 | -39.9% |
| Central Park | CBD | 60,808 | 44,139 | -27.4% |
| World Trade Center | CBD | 20,771 | 16,089 | -22.5% |
| Lincoln Square East | CBD | 126,177 | 104,359 | -17.3% |
| Midtown North | CBD | 110,388 | 94,074 | -14.8% |
| Upper East Side South | CBD | 183,297 | 157,293 | -14.2% |
| Penn Station/Madison Sq West | CBD | 131,204 | 113,389 | -13.6% |
| Upper West Side South | CBD | 107,092 | 93,951 | -12.3% |
| Midtown East | CBD | 127,817 | 113,721 | -11% |
| Upper East Side North | CBD | 163,108 | 148,093 | -9.2% |
| Clinton East | CBD | 94,336 | 85,688 | -9.2% |
| Sutton Place/Turtle Bay North | CBD | 62,168 | 56,521 | -9.1% |
| Midtown South | CBD | 86,029 | 78,529 | -8.7% |
| Garment District | CBD | 55,352 | 50,974 | -7.9% |
| Financial District South | CBD | 11,446 | 10,541 | -7.9% |
| Times Sq/Theatre District | CBD | 124,265 | 114,528 | -7.8% |
| Lenox Hill West | CBD | 84,223 | 78,905 | -6.3% |
| Seaport | CBD | 7,276 | 6,874 | -5.5% |
| Upper West Side North | CBD | 71,675 | 68,741 | -4.1% |
| UN/Turtle Bay South | CBD | 39,783 | 38,497 | -3.2% |
| Randalls Island | CBD | 124 | 120 | -3.2% |
| Yorkville West | Uptown | 68,995 | 66,926 | -3% |
| Gramercy | CBD | 75,288 | 73,268 | -2.7% |
| Manhattan Valley | CBD | 28,931 | 28,151 | -2.7% |
| Murray Hill | CBD | 99,368 | 97,271 | -2.1% |
| East Chelsea | CBD | 97,161 | 96,956 | -0.2% |
| Yorkville East | CBD | 49,195 | 49,558 | +0.7% |
| Midtown Center | CBD | 160,149 | 161,411 | +0.8% |
| Battery Park City | CBD | 21,433 | 21,669 | +1.1% |
| Financial District North | CBD | 20,885 | 21,186 | +1.4% |
| Lincoln Square West | Uptown | 39,749 | 40,700 | +2.4% |
| Flatiron | CBD | 56,691 | 58,123 | +2.5% |
| Lenox Hill East | CBD | 69,966 | 71,771 | +2.6% |
| Union Sq | CBD | 99,815 | 102,637 | +2.8% |
| Greenwich Village North | CBD | 51,851 | 53,756 | +3.7% |
| West Chelsea/Hudson Yards | CBD | 63,565 | 66,273 | +4.3% |
| SoHo | CBD | 30,989 | 32,336 | +4.3% |
| Little Italy/NoLiTa | Uptown | 40,016 | 41,899 | +4.7% |
| Bloomingdale | CBD | 9,255 | 9,725 | +5.1% |
| TriBeCa/Civic Center | CBD | 47,961 | 50,716 | +5.7% |
| Clinton West | CBD | 20,437 | 21,612 | +5.7% |
| Meatpacking/West Village West | CBD | 34,531 | 36,720 | +6.3% |
| Hudson Sq | CBD | 18,066 | 19,292 | +6.8% |
| West Village | CBD | 77,622 | 86,263 | +11.1% |
| Chinatown | CBD | 6,390 | 7,104 | +11.2% |
| Kips Bay | CBD | 36,765 | 41,092 | +11.8% |
| Greenwich Village South | CBD | 52,115 | 58,407 | +12.1% |
| East Harlem South | Uptown | 21,857 | 25,720 | +17.7% |
| Lower East Side | Uptown | 37,702 | 44,767 | +18.7% |
| East Village | CBD | 79,532 | 96,580 | +21.4% |
| Morningside Heights | Uptown | 17,125 | 21,817 | +27.4% |
| Roosevelt Island | CBD | 205 | 271 | +32.2% |
| Central Harlem | Uptown | 10,112 | 14,296 | +41.4% |
| East Harlem North | Uptown | 8,206 | 11,897 | +45% |
| Stuy Town/Peter Cooper Village | CBD | 5,032 | 7,792 | +54.8% |
| Two Bridges/Seward Park | CBD | 4,910 | 8,018 | +63.3% |
| Manhattanville | Uptown | 2,541 | 4,177 | +64.4% |
| Hamilton Heights | Uptown | 3,146 | 5,224 | +66.1% |
| Alphabet City | CBD | 5,971 | 10,660 | +78.5% |
| Central Harlem North | Uptown | 4,659 | 8,499 | +82.4% |
| Marble Hill | Uptown | 71 | 132 | +85.9% |
| Washington Heights South | Uptown | 2,708 | 5,452 | +101.3% |
| Inwood | Uptown | 359 | 799 | +122.6% |
| Washington Heights North | Uptown | 843 | 2,018 | +139.4% |
What this data doesn't say
December is NYC's busiest yellow cab month; February is among the quietest. Any December-to-February comparison shows a decline — toll or no toll. A cleaner test would be February 2025 vs February 2024 to control for seasonality; that data is available but wasn't used here. These numbers should be read as a first look, not a causal finding.
The TLC data also can't distinguish between "trips that didn't happen" and "trips that happened by subway, bus, or FHVHV (Uber/Lyft)." The displacement question requires matching against MTA ridership and FHVHV filings for the same zones — a reasonable follow-on study.