Congestion Pricing and Emergency Medical Service Response: Evidence from New York City

Yulia Chikish, Gregory Colman, Dhaval Dave, Brad R. Humphreys, Zachary Santamaria and Zachary Winship

No 35414, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Large cities worldwide have adopted congestion pricing to reduce urban traffic, with well-documented benefits for travel speeds, accident rates, and air quality. This paper identifies a novel external benefit: faster emergency medical service (EMS) response times. We provide the first evidence on how the congestion pricing program in New York City – the first comprehensive cordon-based congestion pricing system in the U.S. that was implemented on January 5th, 2025 – affects EMS performance. Exploiting the sharp geographic boundary of New York City’s congestion relief zone at 60th Street and a difference-in-discontinuities design, we first document substantial changes in traffic and mobility near the boundary: vehicular traffic declines by roughly 18 to 21 percent, accompanied by increases in pedestrian and bicycle activity. Consistent with these first-stage mechanisms, we find that congestion pricing improves EMS performance, reducing total travel times by 63–70 seconds (approximately 5–6 percent). Effects emerged quickly and show little evidence of displacement to adjacent areas. A concurrent FDNY directive requiring transport to the nearest hospital confounds standard difference-in-differences estimates but not our boundary-based design. These findings suggest that cost-benefit analyses of congestion pricing systematically understate net social benefits by omitting emergency response improvements.

JEL-codes: H41 I11 I18 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-hea and nep-tre
Note: CH EH LE PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35414.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35414

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35414
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().