Is Congestion Pricing Working? The MTA’s Revamped Information Workforce Is Figuring It Out

For the New York Metropolis Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s knowledge and analytics staff, January 5, 2025, felt lots like kismet.

Three and a half years earlier, New York state legislators had handed a regulation requiring the MTA to launch “simply accessible, comprehensible, and usable” knowledge to the general public; by January 2022, MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber formally introduced the brand new staff’s formation. In the meantime, New York Metropolis’s controversial congestion pricing program, which tolls vehicles getting into Manhattan’s busiest streets, formally kicked off in 2019 however was chugging by a prolonged setup course of, with the transit company and state preventing lawsuits, politicians, and vocal naysayers alongside the way in which.

So when this system lastly began in January, the MTA’s knowledge and analytics staff had ready. They may see the second the tolling began proper within the spreadsheets. “The day that it turned on, one discipline modified from ‘no income assortment’ to ‘income,’” says Andy Kuziemko, the deputy chief of the information and analytics staff.

A number of days later, the staff was pumping out knowledge on automobile entries into the zone in 10-minute increments, and posting the information on its web site, in order that New Yorkers themselves may resolve whether or not the congestion program was truly decreasing visitors on metropolis streets. The company has been doing it since. You—sure, you—can view and obtain the MTA’s knowledge proper right here.

The net internet pages aren’t flashy, however they characterize a uncommon and complete public transit win for open-data advocates, who argue that entry to well-maintained public datasets is essential to authorities transparency and effectivity.

Since 2022, the MTA’s knowledge and analytics staff has grown to 26 full-time staff, who spend their workdays centralizing info that was as soon as scattered by the whole MTA. The company, to be clear, is massive. The nation’s largest, it carries some 5.9 million riders on subways, buses, commuter railways, and thru tunnels and bridges day-after-day. That’s plenty of numbers to trace.

Actually lots; MTA now publishes greater than 180 datasets. Latest additions embrace greater than a decade’s price of information on the time MTA staff spend on “productive duties,” a new dataset on subway-delay-causing incidents; and bus speeds on Manhattan’s most crowded downtown roads. Kuziemko says 30 extra datasets have gotten publicly obtainable “within the close to future.”

Counter Intelligence

In an interview, Kuziemko and MTA chief of strategic initiatives Jon Kaufman credited a brand new tradition of intra-agency knowledge sharing for the renewed program. In 2023, management inspired managers throughout the company to permit their knowledge to be ingested into the MTA’s “knowledge lake,” which may be refined, stripped of figuring out info, and ultimately printed brazenly. (A number of the MTA’s knowledge incorporates the personally identifiable info of commuters; the company says this particular knowledge shouldn’t be printed for the general public.) The company has additionally began utilizing new in-house software program and instruments, which give them technical capabilities they didn’t have earlier than. “We’ve paid for zero hours of consulting time, which is a factor we’re actually happy with—that we truly constructed in-house experience within the public sector,” says Kuziemko. “It’s actually cool.”

“It’s uncommon for a authorities company to share this stage of information granularity,” says Sarah Kaufman, who directs the NYU Rudin Heart for Transportation and as soon as led the company’s open-data program. The truth is, it’s one thing like an about-face for the MTA, which earlier than 2009 made a behavior of legally pursuing builders who scraped system timetable and route knowledge to construct rider-friendly apps.