If you suddenly made it much faster to get around New York City, New York suddenly becomes so much more efficient and so much more valuable.

There's all sorts of new activity that can take place.

The value of New York as a network environment grows.

Welcome to Web 3 with A16Z. I'm your host, Robert Hackett.

And today we're talking about congestion pricing, an area of mechanism design that's aimed at alleviating something everyone hates.

Traffic.

Now, you may have heard this term recently since New York adopted its

own version of congestion pricing at the beginning of the year. This is the first program of

its kind in the U.S., and it's got supporters and detractors. We'll talk about that, and we're also

going to talk about much more. In the first part of today's episode, we'll trace the history

of the economic ideas that got us here.

In the middle, we'll dig deeper into the details of putting congestion pricing into practice, plus technological alternatives.

And in the final part, we'll explore parallels to and implications for crypto networks.

Our guests are Michael Ostrokes, a Stanford economics professor who specializes in this area,

and who's done research on congestion pricing in New York.

We're also joined by A16 Z crypto research partner Scott Commoners, who's a professor of business

administration at Harvard Business School, where he teaches market design and entrepreneurship.

As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice.

Please see A16Z.com slash disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

I was hoping today we could talk about congestion pricing.

You two are experts on the subject.

Maybe we could get into just the history of this proposal itself.

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