MTA’s Impressive New Trove of Congestion Pricing Open Data Boosts Public Transparency
Re: MTA’s Impressive New Trove of Congestion Pricing Open Data Boosts Public Transparency
Good morning. I am Rachael Fauss, Senior Policy Advisor for Reinvent Albany. We advocate for more transparent and accountable New York government.
So far, it has been a very good year for MTA transparency. The MTA has released a trove of open data related to the implementation of congestion pricing – a commitment made in its Environmental Assessment. It is also continuing to release new datasets to fulfill the requirements of the MTA Open Data Act passed by the State Legislature in 2021. We thank MTA leadership and the MTA Open Data Team for their hard work to quickly publish data related to congestion pricing, which has only been in operation since January 5, 2025.
The MTA is already the gold standard for transit open data and this highly-detailed, easily-accessible, new traffic data is extremely valuable. It will inform everything from evaluating congestion pricing to far better understanding traffic patterns, curb use, and economic activity in the region’s core. This is good stuff and shows the MTA can move fast and effectively when it has the opportunity.
There are now 167 datasets published on the NYS Open Data portal by the MTA, many of which feed in directly to the MTA’s Metrics dashboard. The MTA continues to be one of the biggest contributors among NYS agencies to new data on the portal; in Q4 of 2024, it provided 7 out of 24 new datasets. Some recent, high-value datasets are:
- MTA Congestion Relief Zone Vehicle Entries
- MTA Central Business District Taxi and For-Hire Vehicle Trips
- MTA Bus Time Points (including whether inside or outside CBD)
- MTA 2025-2029 Capital Plan ACEP Projects
- MTA Automated Camera Enforcement (ACE) Bus Route Implementation
- MTA Subway End-to-End Running Times
We continue to urge the MTA to build on the important success of its open data initiative with an overhaul of its capital dashboard. The dashboard was first created in 2009 – 15 years ago – and just like the MTA’s other aging assets, it really needs an upgrade.
Thank you for your consideration.