Monday, March 04, 2013

The Pizza Principle

In my last post, I featured a 2008 video of a bike ride down Broadway in NYC from Central Park to the Battery....I ran into this video of a trip from 1930 down Broad way from the Bronx all the way to the Battery...lots of things have changed, but I'm amazed at how much hasn't!
And here's one way things have changed, yet strangely stayed the same in New York City:
The Pizza Principle, is a humorous but generally historically accurate "economic law" proposed by native New Yorker Eric M. Bram. He noted in 1980 that from the early 1960s the price of a slice of pizza "matched, with uncanny precision, the cost of a New York City Subway token (good for one ride)."
In 1985, the late writer, historian, and film critic George Fasel learned of the correlation and wrote about it in an op-ed for The New York Times. The term "Pizza Connection" was used in referring to this phenomenon and was coined in early 2002 by 'New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman. He made the observation that the theory had been used by New Yorkers to the cost of a slice of pizza would increase by as high as two dollars in midtown Manhattan, and commented on the two earlier publications of the theory in the Times. Though, the subway token has long since disappeared, replaced by the Metro Card, the principle still seems to stand.
In 2005, and again in 2007, Haberman noted the price of a slice was again rising, and, citing the Pizza Connection, worried that the subway fare might soon rise again. The fare did indeed rise to $2.25 in June 2009, and again in 2013 to $2.50.

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