For the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s data and analytics team, January 5, 2025, felt a lot like kismet.

Three and a half years earlier, New York state legislators had passed a law requiring the MTA to release “easily accessible, understandable, and usable” data to the public; by January 2022, MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber officially announced the new team’s formation. Meanwhile, New York City’s controversial congestion pricing program, which tolls cars entering Manhattan’s busiest streets, officially kicked off in 2019 but was chugging through a lengthy setup process, with the transit agency and state fighting lawsuits, politicians, and vocal naysayers along the way.

So when the program finally started in January, the MTA’s data and analytics team had prepared. They could see the moment the tolling started right in the spreadsheets. “The day that it turned on, one field changed from ‘no revenue collection’ to ‘revenue,’” says Andy Kuziemko, the deputy chief of the data and analytics team.

A few days later, the team was pumping out data on vehicle entries into the zone in 10-minute increments, and posting the data on its website, so that New Yorkers themselves could decide whether the congestion program was actually reducing traffic on city streets. The agency has been doing it since. You—yes, you—can view and download the MTA’s data right here.

The online web pages aren’t flashy, but they represent a rare and comprehensive public transit win for open-data advocates, who argue that access to well-maintained public datasets is crucial to government transparency and efficiency.

Since 2022, the MTA’s data and analytics team has grown to 26 full-time employees, who spend their workdays c...