What the district
estimates measure.

Calculation specification, published September 13, 2026. The explorer estimates residents whose usual vehicle commute has a home and workplace on opposite sides of the Manhattan congestion-pricing boundary. It applies that boundary to a 2017–2021 baseline. It does not observe actual toll transactions, forecast 2026 commuting, or estimate the program’s effect on traffic, revenue or anything else.

The headline counts people: solo drivers, carpool occupants, and motorcycle commuters. “Vehicle commute exposure” does not mean each person receives a separate bill.

Coverage and denominators

We include districts with populated 2020 Census blocks in the 31-county region used in this analysis. Every estimate covers the full district. Partial regional overlaps are identified in the fact sheets.

There are 326 district geographies: New York has 105 Assembly, 45 Senate and 19 congressional districts; New Jersey has 32 legislative and 11 congressional districts; Connecticut has 87 House, 22 Senate and five congressional districts. New Jersey’s legislative districts serve both chambers. Never sum counts from overlapping chambers.

The displayed percentage uses all resident workers age 16 and over, including people who work from home, from the same CTPP period. The CSV also provides the share of workers who travel away from home. Neither denominator counts daily trips.

The calculation

1. Place residents in districts. Internal points of populated 2020 Census blocks are intersected with full-resolution 2025 TIGER/Line districts. Within each residence tract, block population supplies the joint share in each district and on each side of the zone. The model assumes workers and their mode-specific destinations follow the tract’s population distribution. Zero-population tracts use their representative point as a flagged fallback. Display simplification does not affect calculations.

2. Define commute endpoints. The analytical zone is the main Manhattan island’s land south of the TIGER/Line 60th Street centerline. A straight connection bridges the street gap across southern Central Park; road endpoints extend across the adjacent water. Census area-water geometry separates Manhattan from other islands. Block internal points classify home and job locations. This is an endpoint study boundary, not a legal roadway or toll-gantry map. Frontage access on 60th Street and individual parking locations are unresolved. Excluded FDR Drive, West Side Highway and Hugh L. Carey Tunnel connections require route information; travel solely on excluded roads is not automatically chargeable.

3. Place jobs within split tracts. Census LODES 2021 primary-job counts in Manhattan blocks determine each workplace tract’s job share inside the zone. LODES supplies spatial weights, not commuter-mode counts, and omits some employment, including self-employment. Tracts with no LODES jobs use their representative point; these fallbacks are recorded in the weights.

4. Retain county-level information. CTPP B302103 supplies residence-tract-to-workplace-tract flows (C54) and residence-tract-to-workplace-county flows (C61). For each home tract and mode group, the model applies the job-weighted zone share of its located Manhattan workplaces to all its Manhattan county-level workers. If no local Manhattan tract flow is available, it uses the corresponding share among all located NY–NJ–CT resident flows: approximately 68.7% for solo drivers, 67.8% for carpools, 70.3% for motorcycles, 84.8% for transit and 80.6% for taxicabs. These are modeled allocations, not observed local destinations.

5. Count each commuter once. Let o and i be the home tract’s population shares in a district outside and inside the zone, Z its estimated workers at zone jobs, and T its workers with a known workplace county. The crossing estimate is o × Z + i × (T − Z) for each vehicle-mode group. These terms are inbound and return-home exposure. Wholly internal commutes are excluded. Taxicab commutes with either endpoint inside are calculated separately as o × Z + i × T.

Return-home exposure assumes the usual commute involves returning to the home in the zone. Its frequency is unknown. Transit commuters to zone jobs provide context, not a count of beneficiaries. The taxicab category does not separately identify all app-based ridehailing.

Uncertainty has more than one source

Location sensitivity. The range moves unresolved Manhattan workplaces and workers in split destination tracts between inside and outside the zone. It also allows the nonnegative difference between residence-table mode totals and county-level flow totals to contribute additional crossing commutes. This scenario holds residence allocation fixed. It is not a confidence interval, a toll-liability range, or a bound on current commuters.

Sampling uncertainty. The located-workplace subtotal combines tract-level Manhattan flows and county-level flows to workplaces outside Manhattan. Its approximate 90% margin is the square root of the sum of squared source margins multiplied by their allocation coefficients. Coefficients from the same source cell are combined before squaring. This assumes no covariance across distinct cells. It does not quantify uncertainty in population or job weights, missing-workplace allocation, routes, or subsequent changes. Source disclosure treatment limits interpretation of small flows. A small or zero estimate is not evidence that no one commutes that way.

Rounding and reconciliation. CTPP independently rounds cells: 1–7 to 4 and larger values to the nearest five. Where located Manhattan mode cells sum above their county control, they are proportionally reduced to that control for the subtotal and location range. The headline uses the county-level control. Public counts round to the nearest ten; positive counts below ten appear as “<10.” Components may not sum exactly after display rounding. CSV precision represents calculations, not person-level certainty.

What actual bills would require

Actual district-level toll payment requires residence-linked transactions, exemption eligibility, vehicle occupancy and class, entry dates and times, payment method, routes and crossing credits. The public MTA entry dataset lacks several of these attributes and explicitly warns against revenue calculations. It also does not establish legislative district of residence.

The model excludes through-zone travel with both endpoints outside, non-work trips, deliveries during work, and behavioral changes caused by the program. It cannot identify everyone economically affected. It provides a reproducible baseline for the scale and geography of potential commute exposure.

Comparing this baseline against what actually happened is a natural next step, not yet done here. The MTA now publishes vehicle entries into the zone since tolling began in January 2025. That dataset counts vehicles crossing a gantry, not people or home addresses, so it cannot be mapped to legislative districts directly — but a future update could compare its region-wide entry trends against this baseline's pre-toll estimate, as one check on how much behavior has actually changed. That comparison is not part of this analysis.

Current representation

Each district view and fact sheet names the members serving on September 13, 2026. State legislators come from Open States current-people files; U.S. House members from the congress-legislators roster for the 119th Congress, which matches the 2025 district boundaries. New Jersey legislative districts elect one senator and two Assembly members, so all three are listed. New York Senate District 12 has been vacant since Michael Gianaris resigned on August 7, 2026. Seats change after the November 2026 elections.

For U.S. House districts, the page also lists sponsorship or cosponsorship of the three bills introduced to restrict the program: H.R. 422 (118th Congress), and H.R. 344 and H.R. 351 (119th Congress). None has received a floor vote. This records bill sponsorship only. It does not score public statements, litigation or state-level positions, and the absence of sponsorship is not read as support. Representation plays no part in any estimate.

Primary sources

District estimates · Source register and hashes · Representation by district · Every district PDF

Analysis and cartography by Liam Blank. Independent research; not an MTA or Census Bureau product. All source data retrieved September 13, 2026.