• 1 Technical University of Berlin / Technische Universität Berlin

We show that toric ideals of flow polytopes are generated in degree $3$. This was conjectured by Diaconis and Eriksson for the special case of the Birkhoff polytope. Our proof uses a hyperplane subdivision method developed by Haase and Paffenholz. It is known that reduced revlex Gröbner bases of the toric ideal of the Birkhoff polytope $B_n$ have at most degree $n$. We show that this bound is sharp for some revlex term orders. For $(m \times n)$-transportation polytopes, a similar result holds: they have Gröbner bases of at most degree $\lfloor mn/2 \rfloor$. We construct a family of examples, where this bound is sharp.