The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Is NYC Traffic Back (Noam says it is)? Data Gurus on the NYC Congestion Pricing Experiment

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

The Moshes Brothers—Joshua and Benjamin—creators of Congestion-Pricing-Tracker.com, break down the latest developments in New York City’s grand congestion pricing experiment. What does the data suggest about whether this historic policy will succeed? And, why are two college kids the only ones tracking it?

Thursday, 12.39 p.m., 34th Street and West Side Highway in Manhattan. So I was driving home in this vicious West Side Highway rush hour traffic that you see behind me. And I realized I said something stupid in this podcast I'm about to play with the Moschus brothers, Benjamin and Joshua, who are the data gurus who have been tracking congestion pricing in New York City. I realized that I speculated that maybe the reason that the evening commutes have got, gotten quicker while the morning commutes have stayed the same is that people are waiting until after the 9 o'clock hour to go home when the rates drop a little bit. But I realize that can't be it because they pay on the way in. You don't pay when you go out. So now I'm thinking, and you'll have to think about it when we get to that section of the interview,

that maybe it's that in the morning the commutes are busy both ways, but in the evening now people who would come into Manhattan. to go to restaurants and nightlife or whatever it is, are staying home. I don't know. I have to get in touch with our guests to find out more. But look at that traffic. Look at that traffic. That's old school New York City traffic. There was no accident.

There was no road work. That was the traffic to the west side highway. And I should say one more thing, two more things. When I was a kid, the west side highway used to be two levels. and the top level collapsed, and New York City never replaced it. So that made the traffic permanently slower. Second thing is, you know, I made such a super mistake. When you're young, you make super mistakes, you don't give it a second thought.

But now that I'm 60, every time I make a super mistake, I assume that's it. Early Alzheimer's. Your mind's just not working anymore. So that's something that's on the horizon for all of you once you get to be in my age. So enjoy our interview here with Benjamin and Joshua Moschus, the fantastic data gurus behind the congestion pricing tracker. We're going to tell us whether or not congestion pricing in New York City is working. This is live from the table, the official podcast of the world famous comedy seller, available wherever you get your podcasts and available on YouTube, which is the best way to enjoy the show because you get audio and video. And sometimes I do a lot of editing, and I put in a lot of video clips and stuff.

I don't know about it for this episode, but I've worked hard on some of these episodes. No, it puts in the work. By the way, before these guys, we had a lot of views on our last show about the conspiracy theories. Go ahead. So we have with it, first of all, this is Dan Naderman. As you know, we have with us, Nome Dorman. Who's the owner of the comedy seller? And making a bit of a name for himself as a political pundit, he's been.

praised by the likes of Michael Moynihan. My friends. Yeah, Coleman News. Yes, they are your friends, but I think they are legitimately impressed by you. We have Perry Al-Ashan brand here. Let them pay their bill in the olive tree, see if they're raised me. And with us via the miracle of teleconferencing, via Zoom, we have Wunderkins, economic honor students from Brown to find school. in Providence, Rhode Island.

Not a great town, but the school is good. Benjamin and Joshua Moshe's, or Moshe's. Your brothers? Yeah. Are there Mike's working? Let's hear you, fellas. Yes, yes, we are. Except Joshua is from Northeastern.

Northeastern. Oh, correct. I'm reading your bio, Northeastern, but no less intelligent. He just didn't apply himself. Dan doesn't want to do one second more preparation. then he has to. He doesn't even want to read through the introduction. Well, you know, when Kat Timp was on, I read her whole book,

and I was the only one who did so. Yeah. Okay. So go ahead. Yes, they are, they are tracking the effects of congestion pricing in New York, which Noam's always been against my position. Just to preface on congestion pricing has always been the same. It hasn't changed.

I was hoping for the best, rooting for it, but willing to look at the data. And I think that's the only sensible position. Anyway, welcome, Benjamin. and Joshua Moshez to our show. Okay, fellas. I want to get from you what you, if it's working or it's not working. But let me tell you,

I commute and have commuted, you know, most days for many, many years now. And after congestion pricing went into effect on January 5th, I think it was, of 2025, it was a breeze getting to work. I mean, it fell off a cliff. And it was just, I mean, it scared me. But it was just astounding how fast I was getting into work.

And this went on for a few months. For the last two or three months, my commute is 100% back to where it was. My traveling cross town is completely where it was. If there is a slight difference cross town, it's de minimis, one of Dan's favorite words, not that meaning diminus in a sense that I wouldn't have. noticed it if you had been able to do this congestion pricing thing without me knowing about it. I wouldn't say like, hey, why is traffic so light today? It is, uh, does somebody die?

Is it a Jewish holiday? You know, you know, it's just, it is a Jewish holiday. So, yeah. So, uh, that's right today. And today my, my commute was awful. And Ashana Tova to all, uh, all who celebrate. And, uh, then, you know, today I've been going through the data on your website. And I know I'm talking a lot.

And you guys haven't said anything yet. And it doesn't look good. It doesn't look like congestion pricing. doing the job so why don't you i don't know who are you twins we're not twins i'm three years older okay so does the older brother get the privilege or tell us what is your take on congestion pricing is it is it working is it is it working partially is it lived up to his expectations and does it warrant the harsh tax that it actually is on middle class people who have no choice but to pay now because they don't have the option of public transportation so go ahead what

what are your thoughts on it yeah of course and joshua fill in as you see me missing things but i think just to start you know from the very beginning looking at congestion pricing we were always on the side of let's put the data in front of people and let people make their own judgments so we were very like weary of making conclusions ourselves we wanted people to look at the data talk about their own anecdotal experience and then, you know, tell us what they're seeing and then what they think of the data. But at the same time, we've, like, spent a lot of time looking at our own data and analyzing what we've seen. I think from the very beginning, there were three trends that were very visible that I think even until now are still visible in the data, even though, like,

patterns are somewhat changing now that we're, you know, like seven months into the program, the three patterns we saw were one. And this is what you were mentioning. about your commute from work on the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey, from Brooklyn, into the congestion zone, we saw significant differences in traffic that I think are still holding. So a lot, you know, way fewer cars are entering the congestion zone after congestion pricing began. And that was a big difference for people who say like commute to work from New Jersey to New York, they travel via car or like businesses trying to get goods in. For them, this was a big time saver when they were crossing the bridge.

In the congestion zone itself, we did see small decreases, and there's also a smaller volume of cars traveling throughout the zone. But that was, you know, much smaller. And the theories that we've heard about this are, one, that there's a lot more commuter cars that cross from New Jersey or like Brooklyn into the island. But there's way more like lifts and taxis that circulate around. the actual island.

So that's why they were like Manhattan. That's why there was like way fewer, like a smaller decrease of cars and thus traffic on, you know, in Manhattan itself, but still a decrease. And the third trend that we noticed is that on what we called spillover routes. So routes that were sort of like around where the congestion zone was, but not in the congestion zone. So like say like, you know, upper Manhattan or, you know, in parts of Brooklyn, we saw small increases in traffic. So the theory here was that people were sort of driving around the zone now

we're driving on different routes. But those decreases were very small. In some places we saw decreases too. So that was like a smaller. Let me stop you there because let's just I'm just as your by the way, they have a website, congestion hyphen pricing hyphen tracker.com, which amazingly is the only thing there is really that you can look at to see. this. So just to give me an example, you said, I looked at Wednesday, today's Wednesday, Holland Tunnel. Before January 5th, which is before congested pricing, it took 18 minutes at 7.45 a.m. I'm doing rush hour and 15 minutes at 6 p.m. rush hour. Now, according to this, is taking 15 minutes, a 3-minute savings, and at 6 p.m. It's a 2-minute savings.

traffic is three minutes faster. That can't be anybody's depth. And it was much, it had to be. I don't know if you have access to the data like from February. It would be interesting to see. You'd be doing a service if you'd post some of the historical data so that people can see how the trend is changing over time. Your site doesn't allow for that or just if you could just,

if we could download the data set for ourselves. But three-minute savings is not anybody's idea. of a significant difference. And that's from Jersey. So if you had said, we're going to charge everybody $9 bucks or, you know, $200 a month so that we can save three minutes, people say, you can't charge people $9 a month to save three minutes, right? Who could defend that based on that result?

And I'm not cherry-picking. There are some routes here where it's actually busier, as you say. And then I'll get to where the hugest increase in time, you know, decrease in traffic time is. And it's very bad for, I think, congestion pricing advocates. But anyway, first, respond to what I'm saying. This is not a significant speed up as far as I can tell. Yeah. So I'm, oh, yeah, Josh, Josh, go ahead.

I was, I was just going to say that I think my brother and I are trying not to really like excites of whether or not there should be this like like whether it's the cost of the the like congestion policy or like if there shouldn't be this cost or like all of that we just want to put the data out there for everyone to see so we're not really going to be emphasizing whether we agree with it or not are you are you aware of the projections of what people expected the time savings to be at this point in time at the tunnels from Jersey? Can we measure it against what they were, what they, what the model said? Yeah.

So I think because this was done for the first time in the United States, like the projections were sort of like very varied. And I think people did not anticipate the big difference between the tunnel differences and then also the differences in Manhattan. I would point you to take a look at some of the other data points because. Well, I'll look it up. Why do you want me to look at it? I think the Holland Tunnel on a Wednesday might be a little bit of an outlier.

If you look at like the Holland Tunnel on Tuesday or a Thursday or if you look at the Lincoln Tunnel on some of these like peak driving days, you can see the like at peak times, you know, Lincoln Tunnel on Tuesday went from a 12 minute drive to a seven minute drive. And like, you know, Holland Tunnel on a Thursday. Okay. I'll look at Holland Tunnel on Thursday. Where you're at six, at six a.m. I'm sorry, 7 a.m. It went from 20 minutes to 15 minutes, and at 6 p.m. is a big drop, 10-minute drop from 25 minutes. Now, what's, that's on a Thursday. Let's look at a Tuesday. What's interesting, and I get to it now, is that the weekends, Saturdays and Sundays,

okay, here's a Holland Tunnel on Tuesday, because you said Tuesday, actually in the morning commute, It's actually higher. Traffic's gone up on Tuesdays according to what you're showing here, but minuscule by one minute. And again, in the ride home, it's another 10 or 12 minute, depending on where you're looking, 10 or 12 minute difference. So I don't know why maybe, maybe that's because this Tuesday was Jewish holiday. Maybe that's why it was much lower this Tuesday.

I don't know. But, okay, so the morning coming in was much, Maybe people in the evening are waiting until after the hour where the price goes down. So they have no choice when they come to work, but then they can wait before they go home. So perhaps they say, ah, you know, it's only 30 minutes until the toll cuts in half or whatever it is. So maybe I'll just go a little bit later. Maybe that explains the difference in rate. But what you're seeing on the weekends, now this is, let me take a Sunday for the Holland Tunnel.

This is very upsetting to me as a business owner, because Saturdays and Sundays, obviously people are not really using the tunnels to come to work. They're coming for their leisure time to go to restaurants, go shopping, this and that. On a Sunday, before January 5th, it took 37 minutes to get into Manhattan, and after January 5th, 15 minutes. more than double. They are gutting the commercial visits to New York, gutting it, which is something they promised us wouldn't happen because those are not people who are using public transportation.

They're staying in Jersey. What are we seeing in terms of the numbers in terms of businesses and revenue and do you have those statistics? they don't so I think I think you know the data is being pulled is that and it's it's really hard to say and it's hard to track what individuals are what kind of decisions individuals are making but it seems like what the data is saying is that you know on the weekends we see that public transportation ridership has gone up car ridership has gone down and then from the data that

is pullable about like you know how many cars are parking like you know visitation and businesses. It seems like businesses have not been impacted as much as people maybe have thought originally. Like, people were very worried about business impacts. People were very worried about trucking things into Manhattan. It seems like businesses are saying, like, things have been okay enough. Some truckers have switched their schedules to come in after 9 p.m., which is like when the congestion surcharge goes down a lot. So, you know, I think like so far the impacts of businesses have not been as bad or, you know, have not been negative at all. I think there might also be some positive impact. If there's less congestion, the streets are nicer to walk around. There's less noise. People

want to be in Manhattan more. I do have to say, though, I was in New York about a week ago, and like, I see what you're saying. But my commutes like up and down Manhattan, I took a lift a couple of times, were very long. It felt, you know, it felt like there was no impact. and even if on average there is some kind of impact for me as like a lived individual taking a lift and you know at at a peak time it was so congested it was so hard to get through Manhattan so obviously it really depends I don't business is down by many reports but I don't want to blame it necessarily on congestion pricing because there's a Trump effect this is you know tourists are not coming in there's all kinds of moving parts the economy you know it's very difficult although

people, sophisticated people who were so, you know, so partisan, they'll do this, they'll say, business is up over last year, therefore its congestion pricing is working, which is insane because business may be up in Oklahoma also, right? And it's just, it's very, very difficult to unwind it. But I would just say as a matter of common sense, when you have the afternoon tunnel traffic cut in the commute times cut in half. Obviously, this has to be bad for business. I don't see any common sense way that anybody in good faith can say,

no, no, I'm sure that has no effect on business. You can say, well, that's the price we pay for this public good of these faster commutes. But that wasn't the way it was sold to us because we did not ever want to harm New York City is a very special place. New York City survives and could die without its special place as the center of the world, as the place where everybody wants to come for restaurants and museums and shows. And if we are creating a disincentive for people to do that so that they start to form other habits and business owners start to open in other place,

to compete with that, we are risking all the marbles for what makes New York special. And I just, I won't, you know, ask you to respond to this, but one of the things that informs my thinking, when I was a kid, there were constant TV commercials. You probably heard the song, I love New York. And then they would cut in with shots of Koch or Sinatra, and they'd say, it's open all night. The city that never sleeps. open until 4 a.m. We sold New York on the fact that it was this raucous, congested open all-night place

where you'd come to have a ball and get drunk and stay out. And now we seem to be intent on turning that ship around for what to save three minutes. Or people say, no, it's to raise all this money to fix the subways. Well, you know what? When those subways get fixed, you'll let me know. I'm here to predict. I'm here to predict they're never getting fixed. Well, it's for those things.

It's for, and not just that. There is also the issue of air pollution, and there's the issue of the pedestrian experience. Then let electric cars not pay the toll like they do in England. Let your cars don't pay. Well, okay. I mean, that's not a bad idea. I'm just saying there's other rationales besides simply.

saving commute times. There's traffic tests, emergency vehicles, pollution, and just a better pedestrian experience. So those are all the posse. And, you know, they are working on the 7th Avenue subway phase two. I don't know if that has anything to do with congestion pricing or not, but I know that's underway.

That's all on one side of the ledger. And again, they don't want to comment on this. The other side of the ledger is the very many stories that I know, that I'm sure everybody knows, of people, middle-class people, who cannot take public transportation to work either because it's not convenient. They have to drop off their kids. Their job doesn't allow for it. They need to pick up kids at daycare.

There's a million. They live in the very many transportation deserts of the five boroughs. There's all sorts of reasons. They're too old. Like I have an 80-year-old woman from me. She doesn't want to walk home at midnight from Riverdale to the subway that you get. You know, so they have to pay this $200 a month tax in my entire, when they used to debate a 50 cent toll on the Brooklyn Bridge when I was a kid, people would freak out. You can't burden people with a 50 cent toll.

And all of a sudden, in one fell suit, ah, give them nine bucks a day. And going up to, what's the goal? Up to 15. They can afford it. It's insane. Mom, Donnie will love it. So go ahead, Dan. Dad's big in the face like I cut them off.

What do you want to say, Dan? I didn't want to say anything. I said, you said that the rationale was a shorter commute time, and I just said that there was more rationale. There's more to it than that. But we asked Alex Matheson and that other woman, Catherine Wilde, both of these people, you know, these names, these were people integral in the planning and the selling of this plan.

And I asked them both in our podcast, how will you know that it's working or when would you admit that it was a failure? And they both said, if traffic comes back, that's all, that's what they both said. If traffic comes back, it's a failure. And now what are they going to say? They're going to say, well, the price wasn't high enough because that's always the liberal line. New York doubled the amount of money that it spends on school kids, and the scores went down. Oh, of course, you needed to triple the money.

That will always be the thing. So, guys, I'm talking a lot. We want to hear from you. come on, say whatever's on your mind about this. Yeah, I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense and the argument you're making is great. I think, like, to play devil's advocate, what people would say about the weekend traffic, for example,

is that, you know, if now, instead of taking 25 minutes to cross the bridge, it takes 12 or 15, then it's all about demand. And so, you know, the people who were on the margin, who probably could have taken public transportation, but because it was free to drive or they didn't pay the toll, they were driving and they were creating traffic. It was making it harder for everyone to get into the city. So people don't want to wait in traffic.

They check ways. They check Google Maps. It's going to take me like 50 minutes in total to get to my destination. I'm not going to go. So if those people are now taking public transportation, which there is good data that they are taking public transportation. On weekends? Because ridership has gone up on public transportation.

Do you have that data for the weekends from Jersey? Do you have that data from the weekends from Jersey, public transportation? Yeah. Well, I don't know if I have specifically like weekends from Jersey on public transportation. We know that like in general, you know, usage of public transportation has gone up. But it was on a trend line up already since COVID. So it's important to say it may be up. I mean, it has to be up somewhat from congestion pricing, of course.

But also it was on the way up. I still don't think it's where it was prior to COVID. So you would, you know, you can put it however you want, but I don't doubt that it's up. But go ahead, go ahead. Oh, yeah. I think there's a lot of validating to do with all of this data and making sure that like congestion pricing is whatever's caught, whatever effect we're talking about, whether it's air pollution or public transportation or like number of cars in Manhattan. We always want to be checking that this is something that is congestion pricing caused and not caused by like the hundreds of different factors that could be causing it. that's actually why on our website we had a second graph where we were comparing traffic

in New York to traffic in Boston and Chicago and seeing if like there was a big there was a difference in the difference between the traffic in New York and Boston and New York and Chicago and we did see that like traffic went down a little bit more than it did in Boston and Chicago over the same period which again was you know pointing to some sort of effect even if it wasn't very large but again what like What the thought can be is that the people who don't really need to be taking a car, they started taking public transportation on the weekends, and the people who actually really need to drive for whatever reason,

their elderly or public transportation is really inconvenient. Now it's much faster for them to get into Manhattan, and so they're more likely to go in the first place because they see that it's faster to get in. You know, that could be a story. There's lots of different stories and lots of different anecdotal situations. So if you argue it, one of the job, Joshua, I don't know what you were thinking on the subject.

Yeah, I think I agree with everything that you said, and there could be like many factors to all of this. One thing I was going to add is that, so we know that the majority of where the traffic went down was tunnels and bridges leading into Manhattan, and so there wasn't as much of a decrease inside, like the first five routes on our website. If you look at them, some of them have decreased on certain days, but a lot of them are also kind of like the same. And so that would mean that like, okay, again, many factors, like many reasons for this to happen, but it could mean that people get in there with public transportation. They use public transportation and then and then they like like they take taxis or whatever within the zone and that also causes the traffic to stay

similar to the way that it was before so let me say two things the first thing I of course it's very important of course there's some of everything so what you're saying I'm sure describes some number of people but since taxis cost almost always more than the extra dollars. I guess then you have to figure where they were parking. I don't know. I can do the math, but parking give me so pricey to be fair. Like, you know, per hour

can totally make up the difference between taking a taxi and driving. So I can't do that math in my head quickly enough to think all of it. The earlier thing you said, I have the very strong gut feeling that families in Jersey

are not getting on a bus with their kids to come in to have brunch in New York City on a Sunday afternoon. I don't buy that. To me, that's something you get in the car, you go into the city, and I – well, let me ask you guys a question, so I know you take donations on there. There is all sorts of data which we'd all like to know. One is, as I said, the historical data, has it – how is it –

track it since January 5th, week by week, the percentage change. Another thing would be what you referred to before, the public transportation from Jersey on the weekends is all sorts of things like that. You guys are working for free now, basically. What would it take to commission you guys in such a way, like to maybe do a deeper dive into the data? I might be willing to put some money. towards that as a public service, as long as you come out the way I want you to.

No, no. Obviously, I'm kidding. But would donations help for that? No one's doing it. There's no, I mean, no what he's doing this. We don't know. And we can't trust Hockel to tell us. Hey, hey, for the right amount of money, we can, I think we can uncover anything you'd like in the data.

So we can find any answer. Find any answer. But obviously, you mean, within. integrity, right? No, I'm joking. I'm joking. No, like, I think, I think honestly, like looking into what the data that we've collected, we can do that, you know, donation or not. Like, if there were specific questions you were curious about, we can just try to look into it and see what we had before. We basically, the story here is that we started collecting this data back in May of 2024. And then we collected it for an entire summer. We paused for a little while

after the plan was caused, was paused by Governor Hokel, and then we started collecting the data again in late November of 2024, and then, you know, continued collecting the data. So we, you know, we have a large amount of data that, you know, tells different stories. Obviously, at the time in, you know, in the first couple of weeks of January, we were looking at every single day of data and reading into things very close. And then it was particularly clear, like, you know, from. the days of, you know, the week of January 5th compared to the week prior, which, again, there were questions about, like, holidays and whatnot. But, like, even then, it was very clear that, you know, there was a huge difference. But, of course, like, you know, the bigger picture was what was most important.

But if there was a big question. It was huge. I was joking in, like, February. It's like, this is like, I am legend. Like, it was like, it was like the apocalypse. The streets was so empty. And then I would take a taxi to taxi driver, like, they're like, they're. They're going to bankrupt New York.

They're going to put New York out of business. It was so obvious that traffic was gone. And now it's just as obvious that traffic is right back. And you guys, you know, you should crunch the numbers and issue a press release either way. Either say New York traffic is back to where it was or traffic has sustained its low pace. But since you're the only guys doing this and there's tremendous national interest in this, not just in New York City, but other cities that are contemplating the same thing. I would strongly encourage you guys to crunch that data.

I can even connect you with a pretty well-known statistical guy who knows how to do these things for news shows and stuff like that. Again, a lot of integrity. Nobody's trying to be corruptor in any way. But maybe you guys don't even need that. You're very smart kids. What do you want to say? Young men.

I would caution you, no. Wait, Perry, I want to say something. No, I was just curious whose idea this was that, like, are you guys from New York? Like, this is such a niche thing. And it's so interesting that, like, one of you, let alone two brothers were like, let's dive into this, like, insane thing. And the other one was like, oh, yeah, I want to do that, too. I don't think they're from New York. York, judging by their accents, but you'll correct me.

Do we really give Boston that much? Well, you don't give New York. I think here, I'll tell the first half of the story, and then Josh, you tell the second half, like the building part. I think the way that this began is I, as an economics student, was introduced to a data set very early on. It was like two years ago where we were looking at taxis. And it was a big data set on, like, you know, how taxis were operating, like, basically, like, you know, ride by ride data on taxis.

And I noticed that, like, back in 2019, New York City instituted this congestion surcharge to a much smaller scale. And it was specifically on taxis and for higher vehicles, like Uber's and Lyfts, to try to, you know, curb the number of those vehicles a little bit, make it a little bit easier people to commute inside the congestion zone. and I got really curious about this. And by, you know, April, May of 2024, I was thinking about writing an honors thesis, my senior year about this congestion surcharge that was done in 2019 and, like, seeing if there were any impacts

if, like, people were taking fewer taxis or not. So I spoke to my thesis advisor, who's a wonderful professor, Emily Oster. She's just absolutely brilliant. She works at Brown. I was telling her about this, and she was like, this is great, but New York City,

is about to implement this much larger congestion pricing plan in July of 2024. You know, you should think about how can you collect this data or maybe scrape, you know, like collect this data online and try to see what are the effects of this new plan. Like this sounds great, but I don't know how to code. I need someone to help me with this. Okay. So I enlist of my brother who's, you know, a brilliant coder and a brilliant with data. And so we started working and trying to collect the data in advance so we can see, like,

what are the trends with traffic now? And then after July, whenever it was supposed to start, like, what are they going to be? But then about three weeks in advance, Governor Hockel indefinitely postponed the program, we were disappointed, but we still kept collecting the data just in case. And then November rolls around, and the program is back on. So we sort of hop back on this. and again by that point I switched my thesis topic I wrote my thesis about something completely different

or similar but very different but I talked to the professor and she says you know what it would be great if you made a website to showcase the data you have and maybe some people would take interest and again I'm like this is great but a website is not something I can build so you know back to my brother

and then Josh do you want to talk about like what the process was like and like who's the older one again a benjamin or joshua i'm older i'm 30 you're 30 no no no no no i'm 23 years i'm 23 years i'm 22 yeah i was going to say sorry about that yeah joshua hit it yeah so okay so then basically what happened was my brother said that we we scraped it over the summer then we started again late november we had some problems with the graper and we ended up collecting data more like from early

December. So then when my Oster gave my brother the idea that we should make this into a website shouldn't be too hard. So then like I've made the website connected to the

data. We came up with the two graphs that on the website and then publish that and then like Yes, it got a lot of attention because no one else made, like, a visualization of the data. By the way, there is. And the attention was pretty crazy, like, not something we could have anticipated at all. We, you know, we were wondering if, like, you know, if there's going to be 10 people who see it or 100 people.

And then, you know, we got, I think, like, 100,000 impressions on the first day. Wow. And there were, like, news out with the New York Times reached out to us, like, the, you know, the, I think the first evening. because, again, like, no one knew the data, no one was doing what was going on, all these different news sites that we have listed on our sites started reaching out. It was... Did you... And then running the site became so expensive because there were so many people

who were trying to see the data and then, like, you know, create graphs that we were losing a lot of money. That's why we started the donations so that we wouldn't, you know, become indebted because of this project. We're kidding. It was, it was very expensive. Did you have the following experience? you're lying in bed

and say to yourself oh shit I hope I did I get it wrong like there's so much there's so much writing on your data you're the only ones presenting the data did you have this panic that maybe our data is not accurate

maybe we didn't think of this maybe we didn't think of that I think we were we were like thinking about everything the first like 24 hours especially was crazy because we started getting like first it was like 100 views

and we were like whoa who are those people And then it was more and more people. And then we got the email from the New York Times and we were like, whoa, this is crazy. And then basically, I think that day, the first day, we stayed up like four or five a.m. Just like making, checking everything over and I was optimizing the website and my brother was checking that all the data was at. Yeah. So by the way, just. And there were like, and we had like hundreds of people emailing us and these were just like, I mean, across the board, different people.

but asking us questions and, like, curious about the data. And there were obviously some people who were, like, you know, questioning the data and how's it working. And that was great because that made us go back and, like, you know, honestly become more confident in the process we had. We were very concerned about our data being correct and, like, making sure that what we were putting out there is accurate. I think it was great is because, is that we had spent at that point

more than six months working with this data, and we'd spend a lot of time building the site and checking the, graphs and then obviously as we started we were so like you know by the point that the site was out there there have been so many checks that had gone through and then as like anecdotally and like from other sources people were like confirming what we're seeing we became more and more and more confident that what we were showing was was was was very accurate but that was kind of that was that was very important to us to make sure that what we were showing was because a lot of people were seeing it and new sources were citing it and yeah i i would be panicked if I

By the way, just as I was talking to you, there's another website, C2 smarter, C number two smarter, engineering. NYU.edu. And they have some data, but it's spotty. It stops in July. But it shows that all the crossings from the Rylitt, Westchester County, are up. They're all orange, which means up. It shows that the Hugh Carrey Tunnel is down. So, again, I don't see any evidence of a. of a significant success here whatsoever. But this Henry Hudson data, that's where I travel from.

There's like a little bridge. You don't realize there's a bridge. The Henry Hudson's bridge. So can you walk this back? Like if it's not working, are they going to kill this $9? They'll never walk in that. I would never say never. Never.

I would never say never. Well, give me a list of other times government has instituted a tax. Prohibition? I mean, that's not a tax. And then they started spending the money. They started depending their. budgets on it and then they canceled it and blew a hole in their budget. As my father used to say, expenses always rise to meet income. And that's what always happens. And as soon as there's

a stream of money, they start spending it. They get dependent on it. And it doesn't matter whether traffic is attenuated or not, they will never give it up. But what they can do, perhaps, is keep it at $9 and inflate their way out of the burden of it. but I don't think So bad news on that front Okay, it's going up You're hoping that things We're going to stay at $9, they're not

Because there's a clause in the law That I think after three years The price will rise to 12 And then after another years I think it's going to rise to 15 I might be getting the details of the time And then like the amounts wrong But I'm pretty sure that's like

Fairly accurate So it is like there's already a planned rise But that could potentially be changed By a future governor You know, but yeah, online. It took me an hour and a half to get from 33rd and Lex to the Upper West Side last night. Yeah, it just, I mean, I am shocked. And by the way, the people that I spoke to, like, I don't want to name names, but I people who were all for it, I tell them.

And I even, I take, you know, like screenshots of my ways, which tells me exactly how long it's going to take from my. And I say it's an hour and five, hour and ten. And I said, it's right back where it was. It never took me an hour and 20. It always took me like an hour and five, an hour or 10 if I would leave in the middle of the day. It's actually outrageous. And it's exactly right back where it was. And I was like, the only silver lining to me was, as someone who makes a good living, was, well, at least I'll get into work quick.

You know, I think it's terrible what it's done to my employees and everything. But at least I'll get it to work quicker. And I'm not even getting to work any quicker. It's just terrible. And I have to say, congestion pricing are not. which, again, very, you know, clearly a big difference or not difference in what it's doing to traffic. But, you know, commuting around Manhattan, there's so many other factors that are making traffic so much slower than I think it should be, especially when you're going east

to west. The roads are so narrow. And there's a lot of, like, parked vehicles where it probably shouldn't be. There's these, like, truck drivers that will stop in the middle. And I know they need to unload there but that like you know slows down traffic very heavily there's people who honestly like don't follow the rules uh as much and like don't turn when they're in the like turn lane or they they they go in the wrong lane and that makes traffic so much worse no years ago when you combine on these factors there's there's also some like i forget which avenue but it like it used to be three lanes and now it's like two or one a ton of them all of that a lot of them years ago i read an article i don't know how true it is suggesting that bad elevates

were problematic because it just takes longer to get things loaded and unloaded and delivered. And so that leads to double parking and leads to more traffic. So I don't know if there's any truth to that, but linking bad, bad elevators to traffic. That sounds like a freakonomics theory. You know what I would do? This is probably dumb. But like my inclination was set of charging $9, set up a few cross-town streets and charge $30, $40.

You know, let the people, there's plenty of millionaires in New York. Let them pay much more money to get cross-town if they want to. And really, like, that's the progressive way to do it. Let all the rich people pay a lot of money to get around fast. Well, either rich people or poor people that really need to get home to go. to go to the bathroom. There have been situations where I need fast transportation, and I can't get it. And I would like that option, even if it costs a lot of money.

I mean, within reason, of course. But not just to go to the bathroom, but for various reasons, if I have another spot to do, I'm a comedian, sometimes I have a spot here, and then I have to go to Dangerfield, which is another club of more upscale club. I'm kidding. And I have to get there fast. I just don't have that option. I'd like to be able to pay an extra $30.

You pay 50 bucks? Maybe not 50 bucks. But the point is, I would like the option to pay more money to get somewhere faster, and I just don't have that option. Yeah, see, it wasn't there a way that they could charge. And, you know, the price could vary by demand the way like Uber, what do they call that peak demand? Surge pricing. Surge pricing.

And, you know, as I said, put it on certain streets, certain avenues, certain lanes even. They can, you know, the technology allows for so many things now. and allow the people who can't afford it to avoid it. That seems to me at least try it. I mean, it couldn't be any less effective than what we're seeing now with people saving three or four minutes. It's outrageous. It's just like a total failure, huh?

It's an interesting idea that I haven't heard proposed. Yeah, why don't they do it then? Because it's never been about actually congestion. It's about New York running out of money. Well, but they would make money under your scheme as well. Maybe not as much. Maybe not as much. So you guys are from Boston?

Yes. Yes. They don't have like heavy Boston. They don't have heavy Boston. Like where were you guys born? Boston, like Framingham, Massachusetts. At least I would. We were born in the same hospital, right?

Oh, interesting. Dan's fishing for Israel. No, no. I thought I, well, I thought I sensed like an almost Eastern European accent, but very subtly. Were you raised by immigrants? Yeah. Yeah, our parents are from Russia originally, but they immigrated 30 years ago. You know, I think you might have caught it, caught some of that.

Yeah. I do think that. Well, listen, fellas, that's, that's, I wish you guys were a little bit more, you know. Do you speak Russian? Disagreable, but a little bit more, you know, ornery. Do you speak Russian, Dan wants to know? Yeah, we both speak Russian. I think somebody's leaking over into your English.

you think so yeah i do especially uh joshua when he speaks i don't say something i don't i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to make you self-conscious because i don't think there's anything wrong with it i will break you you guys know what that by the way can i ask joshua you're you're the coding guy what's the sense among young people in coding like they tell us that coding is going to be AI can do all the coding. The coding is no longer a lucrative career path. Is that what the sense among young people is?

Well, it's funny because so I do a lot of projects outside congestion tracker. And every time I do something with AI and the AI can do it, of course, I'm annoyed at that they can do something for me. At the same time, I am just so happy that like, oh, my job is saved. for now. But I do think that a lot of jobs are potentially going to be taken by AI because they do many, many things. But I think there's still like a lot of stuff that can't do and it's just not good enough. Well, I feel the same way about comedy. If I try to get AI to write a joke, he can do a reasonable job, but not at the level of a good human being comedian. So at least for now,

as you said. What I find, and Tyler Cowan, you guys know Tyler Cowan is obviously the economist. He refers to AI as witchcraft. And I agree. Sometimes I will ask it to compare and contrast to logical arguments.

And I am just astounded, just astounded at the high level of analysis that this computer program is able to do. If it had taken, I said this before, If I had had to put it in as a question, I had to come back six hours later to get the response, I would still find it impossible to believe. But it spits it out in seconds. I don't understand how it's working.

First people were telling us, no, don't worry about AI. It's just a glorified, you know, predictive text. Predictive text. It's really, it is not a glorified predictive text. This is not predictive text. It is analyzing. Go ahead. You want to say something, Josh?

well okay to that point I also have another example of what I've been working on there's this project I'm currently working on and there was this problem I was facing just so something wasn't like in an editor I was making the format wasn't formatting correctly and so in in like visually in my app and so I'm I'm telling you like and it seems like a very simple simple fix and I told like AI chat GPT like Please fix this, you know? And so, but it can't.

It's just, it's like, every time I give different prompts and very, very detailed, very specific. And it doesn't, it doesn't fix it correctly. It doesn't fix it at all. Sometimes it makes it even worse. And the reason for that is because originally was trying to find code for the thing that I was doing. I was trying to find it online as like an example, like something that I can use and then build off of. I couldn't find anything. it just doesn't exist

and all I'm building is an editor like a text editor like a whizzy wig kind of thing and that what like a whizzy wig text text what you see is what you get yeah yeah yeah exactly and so

like I'm trying to build this this text editor but there's nothing online for me to for me to use and so and AI can't do anything because it doesn't already exist and because it doesn't already exist it doesn't have anything that it can

build off of it can Of course, it can still code in a certain way and based off my instructions that can figure out what I'm looking for. And there is some code out there that resembles what you see is what you get. And so, and then like another thing I've recently read about was that people did this artificial intelligence study where they gave an AI. I'm not sure if it was Chad GPT or something else. they gave it a very, very difficult math problem and step-by-step instructions of how to do the math problem. And it wasn't able to do it because it was,

like, it never saw it before, so it couldn't follow those steps. So I guess that's another thing with AI. Early on, a year ago, I had given it a relatively simple algebra problem, And it could not get it right. And I would tell it, maybe it's gotten better. I know it's a language model, LLM, so maybe that's, you know, math is not what it was built to do. But it certainly seems to reason. Well, I'll tell you guys a story before we go.

But I used to do coding. As a matter of fact, we were the first place to take, I think in the world, the first place to take online reservations. At first, I would enter it in. I would have comma delineated emails and I would import into a Microsoft access database and then I like to say I invented cloud computing because I had the idea because computers used to crash all the time in those days

like Windows 95. I said, you know what, I don't know how to take care of a computer. Why don't I put it all online and that way? I figure whoever's in charge of like servers, they're going to do a better job backing up the date and all that stuff than I could ever do. So I had this idea to put it all online and I hired a guy, and I did some myself in PhP, MySQL.

So actually, if you go to the Comedy Seller website now, I make a reservation, much of that is, I coded. But much of it now is coded by a guy named Steve Zeransky, who's a fantastic coder. But I can go in and correct it here. But that's not the story. The story is this. Years ago in the 90s, there was a site, kind of like Yelp was before Yelp was called City Search. And City Search would have. have these once a year. It was a very popular

a site. It would have these once a year polls, like best lounge, best bar, best happy hour, and they were very, very popular. And the winner of the city search poll, this was a highly marketable thing to be able to tell, put a sign out, whatever it is. So I was

just opening a new bar, and all the bars had happy hours. And I wanted to have a happy hour. But, you know, when you have a happy hour, you have to charge half-price drinks. And it's already tough enough make money and when you cut your drinks in half unless you have volume the happy hour is is a killer so I said what am I going to do and I said well I'd like to win city search best happy hour not even open yet so I said let me vote for myself city search best happy but quickly I realized that

it it took a snapshot of your IP address so you can only vote once a day from a particular IP address. So what I did was the following. I got three computers, and I got three modems, dial-up modems. Because every time you disconnect from a dial-up modem, you dials in, you get a new IP address. And I download a program, which is still out there,

called Macro Express, which is a Windows macro program. And I programmed these three computers to dial in, wait a random amount of time between 30 seconds and 10 minutes or something. and vote for the fat like pussycat is Best Happy Hour. And I had these three computers going 24 hours a day. And we won Best Happy Hour.

And then I started my Happy Hour. Have you already won Best Happy Hour? Then I started my happy hour. And we had a line up the block to get in to the have. And that is how I hacked and bootstrapped my bar into relevancy from day one. And then after that, I actually did win. legitimately best music club at the Café Wah. He also plays the Oude, a man of many talents.

But that's pretty... Poding, Oud. I mean, if there's one story to be told my field, I had such satisfaction. I was so satisfied with myself. Well, I would tell it, but you've already told everybody five times. Yeah, yeah. That is so cool.

This is so cool. I know. You guys would like that story. Do you... Are you, so you're looking to get... It might even be legal. I don't even know if it was legal or not. Joshua, you're looking at a career in computers, I guess,

and Benjamin in economics? Something like that, I guess. Well, I predict great success for both of you. You've passed, you see, the only thing can stop you now is mental illness, but you've already passed that hurdle, you know, at your age. If you were going to be schizophrenic, you'd be schizophrenic by now. There's a guy who lived in my neighborhood. Brilliant.

He never went to school. The only time he went to school, he went in, he walked in one day, decided to take the PSATs. Is that still exist? And he became a national merit scholar, and he never went back to school. And his life spiraled and he died at a young age. But that's not you guys. You guys have the brains and the mental, you know, health to go to do great things. And we look forward to.

And they're bilingual. Yes, they're bilingual. And I don't know that Russia, I don't know how useful the language that is, but it may become useful. All right. Before you go, fellas, what do you think about Gaza? I'm just kidding Jesus Christ

Come visit us Come visit us when you come to New York Absolutely We would love to We would love to This hour flew by I don't want to speak for Joshua But I had a wonderful time talking to you guys

I think we covered a lot In a short period of time And you guys are all funny And such a pleasure to talk to So thank you so much for having us That's very nice case Beyond my wildest dreams You guys are terrific

I would love to have you guys come in person you can tell me off the record what you really think about all these political issues and see a show at the comedy seller I'll introduce you to some interesting people We've already met the most interesting person

but so it's all downhill after me but we did have Trevor Noah just before the podcast was hanging out because you've done a show here so one more time it is congestion dash pricing dash tracker dot com

and this is very good work you guys did and and yeah i hope you will i don't know how much work it'll take but it would be really interesting to be able to put the historical data up there or just allow people to download the data set as some sites do um thank you very much fellas see you later shana toa thank you all thank you so much i assume you're jewish right yes yes yes yes yes shanatova shanatova okay thanks guys could you stand for a second till i close the uh oh we're on No, I just want to make sure I'm going to see you. Okay. Thank you all. This was wonderful.

This was wonderful. Yeah, it was great. Thanks. Yeah, this was very. Absolutely. Make sure you get my email address and my phone number so then I come to New York. Okay. All right. All right. Let us. So is that it? Are we going to do a slight debrief? Well, we have John Spencer coming. That's it. As my father would say, nice young men. Oh, they're so great.

Look, I'm mad. I look. I was rooting for congestion pricing, hoping for the best, it doesn't seem like it's, if it doesn't seem like a raging success, you know, if it's a success at all. I think, I think the data experts basically.