The Master Plan for Delhi 2047, notified by the Union housing and urban affairs ministry on August 20, has floated the idea of congestion pricing zones, under which authorities would be able to levy a cost on private vehicles entering areas with high traffic volumes.
Importantly, bus speeds inside the zone rose for the first time in years. But the efficacy of the programme has been debated. Studies by Lucas Davis in the Journal of Political Economy on Mexico City, and by Jorge A Bonilla in the World Bank Economic Review on Bogotá, found that the traffic gains eroded as households bought second, older vehicles to work around the restrictions.
But if the proposal moves towards implementation, Delhi can learn from cities that did try to price their way out of traffic gridlocks: An experiment also lined up when an Italian court briefly suspended the scheme in July-September 2012, with researchers using the interruption period to isolate causal effects of the charge. In a 2015 paper published in the Journal of Urban Economics, they said that the charge had measurably cut pollution and traffic. Manhattan’s Central Business District Tolling Program went live on January 5, 2025, after years of legal battles and amid the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to shut it down. Passenger cars pay $9 with an E-ZPass to enter south of 60th Street in peak hours. Governor Kathy Hochul’s office and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported on the programme’s first anniversary that 27 million fewer vehicles entered the zone in 2025 than in 2024, an 11% decline. The MTA said pollution inside the zone fell 22% and crashes fell 7%. The MTA collected more than $550 million in net revenue, which it plans to use as security for $15 billion in new borrowing to fund infrastructure and public transport projects.
Housing and urban affairs minister Manohar Lal Khattar has since said there is no immediate plan to introduce the scheme in Delhi.
