If you've ever paid to drive in the express lane of Interstate 394, you have Herbert Mohring to thank.
Mohring helped inspire the MnPass lane -- as well as generations of students -- during his 33-year career as a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. He died June 4 in Northfield at age 83.
Mohring, who looked the part of a pipe-smoking academic, was a pioneer in a field known as transportation economics. He was one of the first to come up with the idea of charging highway fees as a way to relieve traffic congestion -- a concept known as "congestion pricing."
His research, say colleagues, helped influence pol-icymakers from Singapore to London.
One of his theories, used to justify public subsidies of mass transit, has even been enshrined on Wikipedia as "The Mohring Effect."
"We tried to point it out to him," said his son, Stephen Mohring, an art professor at Carleton College in Northfield, noting that the Wikipedia entry is one of the first things to pop up when they Google their last name. But "he didn't quite get it."
Mohring was born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1928, and earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He landed at the University of Minnesota in 1961, as the Economics Department was starting to gain national prominence.
Mohring once described the life of a professor as "the world's most wonderful racket." Stephen Mohring said his father loved teaching, and thrived during an era when professors could "sit in front of the classroom and pontificate and smoke your pipe."
