William Vickrey, Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1996, proposed tolling to control traffic congestion in the 1960s. He was a professor at Columbia University in New York and thought about easing access to Manhattan, with the bottlenecks represented by bridges and tunnels8. Between Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania (where I was a professor), the speaker was taking a long time to arrive and Vickrey stood up and, to entertain the audience, told us a story