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.
December 2024
December is the peak month for yellow cab demand — holiday shoppers, corporate parties, out-of-towners. The map shows every NYC taxi zone as a dot, sized by pickup volume. Manhattan's Midtown core dominates: Upper East Side South alone had 183,000 pickups that month.
This is the baseline. The toll hadn't started yet. Every zone running at its normal winter peak.
December → January 🚕
The toll went live on January 5. $9 for a passenger vehicle entering the CBD. The map zooms to Manhattan and recolors: every zone shaded by how its yellow-cab pickups moved from December to January. Marigold is a drop, fern is a gain. Bigger dots mean bigger swings.
Most of the CBD is marigold by the end of the first month. The size of the drop varies enormously by zone — that's the story this map will keep telling.
The deepest falls were stacked along one corridor
By February, three Lower Manhattan zones had each lost more than 15% of their yellow-cab pickups vs December: Battery Park −39.9% (1,371 → 824 pickups), World Trade Center −22.5%, and Lincoln Square East −17.3% (126,000 → 104,000). All three sit on or near the toll boundary and lean heavily on discretionary trips — tourism, short-haul convenience runs, theater-and-dinner travel.
Adding $9 to a $60 airport run barely registers. Adding $9 to a $12 cab across downtown makes riders think twice. The deepest losses cluster where the trips were most elastic.
The hardest-hit 🚕
Zooming out to view the entire Central Business District, we can see the 15 zones with the biggest December-to-February drop. The map colors highlight the severity of the loss.
Notice a pattern? These are zones on the toll boundary's edge or those heavy on entertainment and tourism. The $9 charge disproportionately affected these specific types of trips across the CBD.
The other side of the line
Pull back to all of NYC. Every borough zone is filled by its December-to-February delta: fern where pickups grew, marigold where they shrank. The outer boroughs — Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx — mostly went up. Manhattan's CBD mostly went down.
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.
🚕 December 2024 — the last month before the toll
By area, December to February
Volume-weighted % change in yellow cab pickups · Dec 2024 → Feb 2025
Marigold falls below the zero line, fern 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.