William Vickrey on congestion pricing, in today's NYT

 William Vickrey won the Nobel prize in 1996, and died of a heart attack, on the road from New York City, before he could go to Stockholm to receive it. (Paul Milgrom gave a Nobel lecture on his behalf.)  But his paper on congestion pricing lives on. (Mike Ostrovsky regularly teaches it in our class on market design.)

Here's his paper:

Vickrey, William S. "Pricing in urban and suburban transport." The American Economic Review 53, no. 2 (1963): 452-465.

Now that congestion pricing has been implemented in New York City, he's in the news again.

Here's today's  excellent NYT story:

The Roller-Skating Economist You Can Thank for Congestion Pricing
Charging drivers to enter Lower Manhattan vindicates the lifelong mission of a Nobel laureate who, as it happened, died behind the wheel of a car.   By Ginia Bellafante

"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.

...

"Two days after he won the Nobel, he was driving to a conference in Cambridge, Mass. On the Hutchinson River Parkway, he suffered cardiac arrest and died. It was a rare excursion by car for him. In the 1930s and ’40s Vickrey had been known at Columbia for taking the train, what is now known as Metro-North, from Westchester to the Harlem stop at 125th Street and then roller-skating to campus."