Meet the Brown student who created New York City’s popular new traffic tracker
With support from Brown economist Emily Oster, senior Benjamin Moshes and his brother developed a website that visualizes the impacts to drivers of New York City’s recently launched congestion-pricing program.
Brown senior Benjamin Moshes and his brother created a tracker to measure the impact of congestion pricing on vehicle travel times in New York.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When Benjamin Moshes entered an economics research competition in 2023, he had no idea his project would lead to a website that would ultimately become the go-to source for 2025 traffic data in New York City.
But that’s exactly what happened when the Brown University senior and his younger brother launched the Congestion Pricing Tracker, a key source for data on the effectiveness of a new congestion pricing policy that charges a fee on vehicles entering parts of Manhattan during peak hours.
Moshes and his brother created the tracker to measure the impact of congestion pricing on vehicle travel times in New York, developing an online tool that allows users to compare data points across line graphs to see whether commute times have increased or decreased since the policy was implemented.
The tracker calculates traffic times for a chosen route and day of week. The blue and red lines calculate average traffic times prior to and after Jan. 5, 2025, respectively, while the purple line shows real-time data from the current week.
“Everyone had a really favorable reaction, and it actually didn’t depend on whether people were pro- or anti-congestion pricing,” said Moshes, who is pursuing concentrations in applied mathematics-economics and statistics. “They were just thankful for the data existing.”
Enacted in January, the congestion pricing policy aims to reduce traffic, improve air quality and divert more funds to public transportation improvements.
The idea for the tracker stemmed from the University of Chicago’s Econometrics Game — in which teams of one to four undergraduates from universities across the nation are given 12 hours with a dataset to devise and answer a question of economic importance. Moshes has regularly participated in the competition, and in 2023, his assigned dataset was on New York City taxi rides.
“We were looking through that set, and I noticed that there was one variable called the ‘congestion pricing surcharge,’ and I was like, ‘What is that?’” Moshes recalled. “Everything else made sense, but that specific variable was confusing.”
In 2023, when Moshes was researching the project, the charge was only applicable to taxis and ridesharing services. Still, it held his interest enough to bring the idea to Brown Professor of Economics Emily Oster in 2024 as a potential thesis topic. Oster was enthusiastic about the idea and advised Moshes that a new version of the program, which would include passenger vehicles and increase the charges, would be rolled out later that year.
Everyone had a really favorable reaction, and it actually didn’t depend on whether people were pro- or anti-congestion pricing. They were just thankful for the data existing.
Benjamin Moshes
Class of 2025
Inspired by Oster’s ideas for the project, Moshes worked under her guidance — and pulled in his brother Joshua, a first-year student at Northeastern University studying computer science — to create the Congestion Pricing Tracker. The tracker uses real-time traffic data from Google Maps to calculate commute times for certain routes in and out of the congestion zone. According to Moshes, he and his brother collected Google Maps traffic data for 19 different routes, finding the shortest time to get from “point A to point B” for every route; the site collects data every 15 minutes for each route, resulting in nearly 2,000 data points per day.
“I am incredibly impressed with what Benjamin and Joshua were able to do,” Oster said. “Their work represents the kind of creativity and ingenuity that I love in our students — by being brave and putting themselves out there, they managed to do something that no one else had done, exactly when the public needed it.”
Brown senior Benjamin Moshes, right, and his younger brother Joshua combined their respective skills in econometrics and computer science to create the Congestion Pricing Tracker.
The brothers encountered a potential hurdle in June 2024 when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the congestion pricing program would be indefinitely postponed.
“We were very bummed out,” Moshes said. “But for some reason, we kept the program running and collecting data. I don’t know, maybe there was some intuition that told us that it wasn’t permanently postponed.”
Their intuition served them well. The program was eventually revived, and it went into effect in January 2025, by which time the brothers already had a vast repository of data on commute times ready for the public.
“When the right moment came, we were ready,” Moshes said. “We were there immediately. For the first week or so, we were basically the only source for people to see how it was going — and people were very curious.”
So curious, in fact, that the brothers were shocked by the reception. Moshes said the cost of keeping the site running was modest at first, about six cents per 100,000 data pull requests. But on the day congestion pricing rolled out, the tracker received more than 300 million pull requests, prompting the brothers to set up a donation page to help cover costs.
The support has been overwhelming, especially from the Brown community, Moshes said.
“Both on the donation page or in emails, people would sign off with ‘Brown ’88’ or ‘Brown Class of 1992’ or ‘recent Brown grad,’ and it was really heartwarming to see,” he said. “Even in an interview we recently did, it turns out the fact-checker had just graduated from Brown. We got to talk about campus and the Ratty, and it was really cool connecting to the community in that sense.”
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