The Roller-Skating Economist You Can Thank for Congestion Pricing

William Vickrey, an undergraduate studying mathematics and electrical engineering at Yale in the 1930s, was on a train from New Haven to visit his parents in Westchester County when he had an observation that seemed to clarify his life’s purpose. There were empty seats all around him. Instead of simply enjoying the quiet, he perceived a troubling inefficiency. Surely many of his friends, college students with flexible schedules and tight budgets, would spend an afternoon in New York if the railroads lowered the cost of ticket prices for times of the day when fewer people traveled.

An idiosyncratic academic who spent the entirety of his 60-year career in the economics department at Columbia University, Vickrey is considered the father of congestion pricing, now a fact of Manhattan street life. He is no longer alive, but he would have hardly been surprised by how long it took for his theories to materialize.

Debates about congestion pricing have gone on for decades; in recent years the opposition has focused on the charge that the plan would privilege abstract environmental goals over the financial challenges of everyday workers driving into Manhattan below 60th Street, where the tolling is in effect. Some of the criticism has been caught up in the predictable partisan animosities. Just as the plan was taking hold this week, Vickie Paladino, a Republican city councilwoman from Queens, offered an “important warning” to her supporters on social media, telling them that certain green laser pointers “like the ones you find on eBay for under $30” could disable camera sensors, which seemed less like a note of caution than a call to derail congestion pricing with an army of mischievous cat owners and their saber toys.

Congestion pricing was never an easy sell, obviously; it wouldn’t have taken years to find its place if it had been. But in the 1950s, when Vickrey was first outlining his ideas, the resistance largely centered on logistics. In a society where the highest earners were paying a marginal tax rate of 92 percent and union membership was peaking and the terror of climate change was unknown, neither class warfare nor concerns about carbon emissions animated the public discourse. Like many economists, Vickrey was an optimization zealot — if he was a zealot of anything at all. “In no other major area are pricing practices so irrational, so out of date and so conducive to waste as in urban transportation,” he wrote in an influential paper that appeared in The American Economic Review in the spring of 1963.

About 10 years earlier, Vickrey had been asked by the office of Mayor Vincent Impellitteri to look into the structure of transit fares as a means of slowing the drain on New York City’s finances. Vickrey proposed tiered pricing for riding the subway, with higher costs for rush-hour travel and certain longer distances. One idea — considered far too convoluted but essentially predicting the MetroCard — was to have each passenger deposit a quarter in a turnstile that would issue a metal card that, Vickrey wrote, would “bear notches or perhaps magnetic patterns coded to represent the station or zone of entry.” The passenger would then submit the card to the exit turnstile and expect to get whatever refund was owed.