Pizza Prices Shadowed Subway Fares

From the early 1960s, the price of a New York City pizza slice tracked the cost of a subway ride with uncanny precision, a pattern a man named Eric M. Bram described in The New York Times in 1980. The humorous economic law later became known as the Pizza Principle and successfully pointed to the fare's rise to $2 in 2003. A 2014 study concluded that the relationship still held after roughly 50 years. Pizza prices later rose faster than transit fares, and by late 2025 the once-reliable principle no longer worked.

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