By the time that you’re reading this on Monday morning, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm will have announced this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. It’s not one of the five original Nobels like peace, literature and the sciences from 1901 endowed by Alfred, the inventor of dynamite, but was created in 1969 by the Swedish Central Bank. But a Nobel it is and the newest laureate or laureates will be revealed this morning.
It was 27 years ago, Oct. 8, 1996, when that year’s economics winners, Bill Vickrey and James Mirrlees, were honored for their separate work analyzing the consequences of incomplete financial information.
Vickrey, a longtime Columbia professor, wouldn’t have much time to enjoy his achievement and half of the $1.12 million prize. He would die, at age 82, from a likely heart attack three days later.
We celebrate Bill today because he was also the father of congestion pricing, developing the theory in the 1950s of many vehicles efficiently sharing scarce roadway space by charging a fee for use at the busiest times.
He tried to get the Port Authority and the MTA to adopt congestion pricing for their bridges and tunnels, but the bureaucrats never really understood the concept. They weren’t Nobel laureates, after all.
And even though the MTA and its six-member Traffic Mobility Review Board have made huge strides in putting Vickrey’s concept into action by next spring for a Manhattan congestion zone below 60th St., it seems they still need a refresher in Econ 101.
We give them high marks for limiting credits to the four tunnels into Manhattan and not for any of the bridges. But they are foolishly not setting the toll credit to exactly equal the congestion fee.
Unless the toll credit for the Queens–Midtown and Brooklyn–Battery tunnels is the same to the penny as the congestion fee on the four East River bridges (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro), motorists will drive out of their way to save money on the difference. That extra travel creates more congestion and more pollution. Prof. Vickrey would be a tough grader on that.
While the two tunnels from New Jersey, the Holland and the Lincoln, actually don’t need any toll credits, out of fairness (yes, fairness for Jersey), those drivers should get a full toll credit. But that has to be the end of the credits.
Jersey is suing the U.S. Department of Transportation in federal court in Newark that Washington didn’t study the MTA’s environmental repercussions sufficiently. A 4,000 page review is plenty sufficient and the MTA has now asked to be allowed to join the case as an interested party.
Jersey doesn’t want more review. It wants more toll credits, specifically for the George Washington Bridge. That must not and cannot happen, as it undermines the whole scheme (and raises the congestion fee for everyone else).
The Census Bureau has new data on daily commute times. New York was again No. 1, with the 2022 average travel time to work of 33 minutes, up from 31.4 in 2021. Jersey was also pretty high both years. Congestion pricing, by pushing some drivers into transit can dent that. It is not going to lower the commutes around here to fastest-in-the-nation South Dakota (18.2 minutes in 2022, 17.4 in 2021). If that’s your thing, then move to South Dakota.
New York Daily News Editorial Board
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