Example of self-organizing system

[Jennifer Hurley]

The article below has a great example of a self-organizing system at work!

Jennifer Hurley
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HURLEY~FRANKS & ASSOCIATES
1500 Walnut St STE 504  |  Philadelphia, PA 19102
p: 215-988-9440  |  f: 215-988-9441  |  c: 267-971-4598
JLHurley at hfadesign.com  |  http://www.hfadesign.com
Certified WDBE through PA UCP, City of Philadelphia OEO, and NJ UCP

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/slugging-the-peoples-transit-28
068/ 

Slugging ‹ The People¹s Transit

Workers who have come down from the surrounding high-rise offices begin to
line up on a sidewalk in downtown Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from
the nation¹s capital, about 3:30 in the afternoon. They stand in a perfect
queue, iPods and newspapers in hand, and they look, by all indications, like
they¹re waiting for the bus.

Public transit never shows. But, eventually, a blue Chrysler Town & Country
does. The woman behind the wheel rolls down her window and yells a kind of
call-and-response.

³Horner Road?²

³Horner Road?² repeats the first woman in line.

³Horner Road!²

And two women get in the van, heading, presumably, for Horner Road. Several
more cars pull up: a Ford Explorer, a Toyota Camry, a Saturn minivan. Each
collects a pair of passengers and pulls out past the intersection for the
on-ramp onto State Route 110, which leads three miles to the south, past the
Pentagon and onto Interstate 395/95 and its glorious 28 miles of
uninterrupted, controlled-access, high-occupancy vehicle lanes.

The queue of cars eventually backs up around the corner, and the line of
passengers on the sidewalk ebbs. In a few minutes, the balance shifts again.
Within half an hour, nearly 50 cars will have come through, capped by a
dusty Ford F-250 pickup truck.

³I don¹t care where we go,² yells the driver. ³I just need two people!²

And off the three go toward the highway ‹ and the suburbs ‹ complete
strangers, with not the least concern for personal safety, trying to shave
20 or 30 minutes, maybe more, off their afternoon trip home. ³People are
cooperating Š to commute?² says Marc Oliphant, underscoring the novelty of
what is going on here. ³It¹s like the opposite of road rage!²

Oliphant has brought a dozen local and federal transportation officials to
the sidewalk here to gawk at the commuters. No one would believe this sight
unseen: People here have created their own transit system using their
private cars. On 13 other corners, in Arlington and the District of
Columbia, more strangers ‹ Oliphant estimates about 10,000 of them every day
‹ are doing the same thing: ³slugging.²

Their culture exists almost nowhere else. San Francisco has a similar
casual-carpooling system, and there¹s a small one in Houston. But that¹s it.
Even in D.C., slugging exists along only one of the city¹s many arteries,
I-95 and 395, where the nation¹s first HOV lanes were completed in 1975.

Every morning, these commuters meet in park-and-ride lots along the
interstate in northern Virginia. They then ride, often in silence, without
exchanging so much as first names, obeying rules of etiquette but having no
formal organization. No money changes hands, although the motive is hardly
altruistic. Each person benefits in pursuit of a selfish goal: For the
passenger, it¹s a free ride; for the driver, a pass to the HOV lane, and
both get a faster trip than they would otherwise. Even society reaps
rewards, as thousands of cars come off the highway.

³To me,² marvels Oliphant, a facilities planner with the Navy, ³it¹s an
illustration of the ideal for government.²

He¹s drawn to slugging as a creative vision that would begin to ease the
eternal mess of urban gridlock. Society always reaches first for the
infrastructure fix ‹ the costly highway expansion, the new route for the
metro rail. But what if government could just nudge more people to do what
they¹ve done here, creating their own commuting cure within the existing
system? Federal Highway Administration studies suggest that free-flowing
traffic can be restored on a clogged highway simply by removing 10 percent
of its cars.

To get more drivers into a self-sustaining casual carpool, though, officials
would have to confront slugging¹s built-in complication. They¹d have to
figure out how to stimulate slugging elsewhere without spoiling its defining
feature: Government is not involved, or at least it looks not to be.

Slugging ‹ The People¹s Transit from Miller-McCune on Vimeo.

Oliphant, a trim and animated 30-year-old, spent six months on loan from the
Navy last year thinking about just this question as a Federal Highway
Administration transportation policy fellow. He began studying slugs three
years earlier for a master¹s thesis at Virginia Tech. (³Slugging is not most
interesting for what it can teach about carpooling,² he wrote, but rather
for the trust among strangers it requires and its leaderless organization.
³Slugging is a contradiction to the everyday culture of America.²)

³Whenever I meet someone new, all I have to do is ask about their commute,
which I¹m often very interested in,² he says. ³And I get an immediate
emotional response. Especially for people in urban areas, it¹s like this
universal problem. No one likes how they get to work.²

Including him. He used to bike from his home in Virginia to his office at
the Navy Yard in Southeast Washington. But last summer was even hotter than
the usual D.C. steam bath, and his new office had no shower. His wife tried
dropping him off by car (20 minutes door to door), with a return trip home
at night by metro (1 hour, 10 minutes door to door). On mornings when
Oliphant uses public transit, he gets on a bus about a block from his house,
rides to the local metro stop, takes a subway into the city, transfers once,
then walks 10 minutes on the other end to his office. In more than an hour,
he covers about six miles.


The benefits of slugging: For the passenger, it's a free ride; for the
driver, a pass to the HOV lane, and both get a faster trip than they would
otherwise. (Monica Lopossay)

But a driver who hops on the HOV from Horner Road, 23 miles south of the
city, can cover that distance in about 30 minutes.

³The way the entire transportation system in this country is set up is to
support people traveling by their own car,² he says. ³So parking is
subsidized. The incentive with lots of different laws and programs is to
drive as much as possible.²

In America, he says, cars have become an extension of houses. Most people
would no sooner think to let a stranger into the back seat than they would
let the same stranger into their living rooms. Americans drive cars
everywhere because gas relatively cheap (half what it costs in Europe),
because only 6 percent of the interstate highway system requires tolls,
because insurance rates are unrelated to how many miles people drive. We pay
for the land we live on, but we expect the parking spot out front to come
free of charge. The federal government has lately encouraged drivers with
tax breaks to buy, variously: a new car, a hybrid or clean-diesel vehicle, a
truck or SUV weighing more than 6,000 pounds, or any upgrade from a
³clunker.² Then, regardless of what we drive, the IRS invites lucrative tax
deductions for work travel, now at 50 cents a mile.

Go ahead, all the signs (and car ads) seem to suggest: Buy your own car ‹
and ride in it alone!

³I think your average Joe or Jane who doesn¹t know anything about
transportation thinks things are the way they are because that¹s what
society wants,² Oliphant says glumly. ³And that¹s not really the case.²

What if, instead of one bus with a capacity of 50 that came along every 30
minutes, five cars came along every few minutes, each with a capacity to
carry five people? Looked at broadly, Oliphant says, slugging is a kind of
public transit, because public subsidies pay to pave and restrict the HOV
lanes on which slugging relies.

What the people using HOV lanes really want, apparently, is not to enjoy
their own company in a stylish and spacious single-occupancy vehicle. People
who become slugs just want to get to work and home to dinner as painlessly
as possible.

In late July, Oliphant organized a symposium on slugging in a conference
room of the Arlington County Commuter Services office. The topic had been,
until now, a fringe curiosity, largely ignored by local officials and
transportation academics. The few paying attention had never talked to each
other, but the meeting drew three dozen people: a local politician, a
researcher from the University of Maryland, officials from the district and
staffers from the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Federal
Highway Administration.

Oliphant introduced them all to David LeBlanc, a retired Army officer best
described as a folk hero to the slugging community.

³This guy has basically been running a small public transit system for the
last 10 years!² Oliphant said, making LeBlanc blush. He is frequently in the
awkward position of explaining that he doesn¹t lead the slugs. Slugs
organize themselves.

When LeBlanc moved to the area in the mid-1990s, slugging was already
entrenched. It was born alongside the I-395 HOV in the 1970s. According to
the slugs¹ creation story, drivers quickly realized they could get people in
their cars and qualify for the new lanes by poaching waiting passengers from
bus stops. Bitter bus drivers are credited with coining the term ³slug,²
originally a derogatory reference that has been amiably reappropriated.

The first organized slug line is thought to have formed in the parking lot
of Bob¹s Big Boy restaurant, now a Shoney¹s, in Springfield, Va. Its
destination ‹ as with most early slug lines ‹ was the largest single
employment center in the country: the Pentagon. There are 25,000 people who
work there, and the site is a hub for two underground Metro lines and
exponentially more bus routes.

LeBlanc moved to town from Missouri, where he drove four minutes to work
each morning and parked in a spot right out front. A friend in Washington
warned him. ³He said one of the biggest issues in D.C. is where you¹re going
to live and how you¹re going to commute,² LeBlanc says. ³A lot of people,
they try to figure out the commute first.²

The friend suggested slugging. LeBlanc balked at the idea. For several
weeks, he rode the bus 25 miles from Woodbridge, catching it each morning in
the same commuter lot where strangers were hopping into each others¹ cars.
Oliphant often wonders about what pushes people into that position for the
first time.

For LeBlanc, it was a morning in the winter of 1996.

³The light bulb went off,² he says. ³Here I am standing in the rain, in
February, it¹s really cold, I¹m waiting for a mode of transportation that¹s
going to get me to work slower and cost me money. And I could just walk
across the street, and maybe that would get me to work faster, easier. Let
me just try it this one time; give it a try.²

Of course, he never went back. Cars in the HOV lane regularly travel above
the speed limit through a corridor where the average speed during congestion
is 14 miles an hour. Once you¹ve been in that lane, your whole quality of
life changes.

LeBlanc slugged to the Pentagon for months, using the subway to hop two
stops north to his office in Rosslyn. Eventually, he learned there was a
slug line there, too. Up to that time, the slugging culture had sustained
itself for 20 years entirely by word of mouth. You could only learn about
the system from people inside it, and even after you joined a particular
slug line, you might not know about others.

LeBlanc decided slugs needed a book, one that would identify all the lines
and the unwritten rules for how to use them. In 1999, he self-published
1,000 copies of Slugging: The Commuting Alternative for Washington, D.C.
(Today, a ³collectible² signed copy sells on Amazon for $88.65.) ³I wrote
this book,² he explains in an introduction, ³because I don¹t want others to
have to learn about slugging the way I did Š through the school of hard
knocks.² But he put his book out of business with its corresponding website.

A decade later, slug-lines.com is the hive of community wisdom. LeBlanc
posts a code of etiquette, and the denizens have their message boards where
they swap tales of all who violate it. The rules are intricate, if
unenforceable: Passengers don¹t speak unless spoken to; no talk of religion,
politics or sex; no cell phones, no money offered, no smoking; no asking to
change the radio station or to adjust the thermostat; and never, ever leave
a female slug waiting in line alone. Also frowned upon is something called
³body snatching² ‹ cruising a parking lot for passengers to avoid waiting in
the orderly first-come, first-served car queue. And, it should go without
saying, no one wants to watch you put on your makeup or eat your Egg
McMuffin.

One of the more curious slugging behaviors does not appear on LeBlanc¹s
list: Most cars pull up to a slug line and, regardless of its length, pick
up two passengers ‹ and only two.

Jim Cech, who also attended the symposium, gets agitated about the Pentagon
parking lot. He pulls out a legal notepad and begins to sketch a diagram:
Here are the bus bays, the parking spots, the police directing traffic.
There are also eight slugging queues at the Pentagon, heading to more than
15 destinations. The scene is chaotic and not, as Cech fumes, as efficient
as it could be.

³Single points of failure drive me crazy,² he says.

To improve the slugging situation at the Pentagon, last year Cech started a
side business in his basement. He has been driving slugs for nearly 20 years
and figured he could shave a few more minutes off his commute with a sign
mounted to the roof of his car, instantly communicating his destination.
Currently, each driver must negotiate out the window with each potential
passenger to find the right match. Cech¹s business, RUGoingMyWay, would
eliminate those interactions.

He found a company in China to produce his acrylic signs, another in Canada
to make the roof-mount magnets, an outlet in Florida to print the stickers,
and a webmaster in India to host his site.

³It¹s become an international business,² he jokes, ³all designed to help me
get to work faster!²

Cech¹s labor, like LeBlanc¹s, speaks to a key element of the system: Absent
any real organization, slugging thrives on the compulsion of individuals who
are extremely interested in finding small efficiencies. This is, not
coincidentally, what Cech also does by day as an engineering consultant
working on naval radars. (Like LeBlanc, he is also retired military.)

³My day job is trying to eke out seconds and miles and bytes,² he says from
his office near the Navy Yard. ³In order for the system I¹m working on to be
more effective, the radar¹s got to search quicker, the missile¹s got to fly
straighter, the time to solve the solution has got to go quicker, the data
rate has got to be more efficient. The errors have got to be reduced. It¹s
the same kind of thing, trying to address a systems problem.²

He explains that slugs are, above all, motivated by time saved, not money
pocketed ‹ and certainly not by any regard for the environment. A Prius is a
rare sight pulling into a slug line. Those ostensibly eco-conscious drivers
don¹t need slugs to reach a three-person HOV threshold; hybrid owners in
Virginia are eligible for a special clean-fuel license plate that gives them
a free pass into the HOV.

³Lots of people will pay money for the gas, they¹ll pay the money for the
tolls,² Cech says. Some of them will even pay to risk the HOV as a
single-occupancy vehicle. The first infraction costs $150, and it quickly
escalates to $1,000. ³The thing you can¹t buy,² Cech says, ³is time.²

He concedes that he¹s not likely to recoup in minutes saved in the Pentagon
parking lot all the hours he has invested in his basement business. He took
on the project after retiring as the president of his homeowners
association. RUGoingMyWay has become, in place of that responsibility,
something of a personal challenge.

Cech¹s understanding of the psychology of slugging mirrors one of the
startling findings of Oliphant¹s thesis. Oliphant surveyed 284 participants
and asked them, among other things, what they liked least about slugging.
Only 31 people mentioned ³riding with strangers.² In the three-decade
history of the activity, there has not been a single known incidence of
violence or crime. When safety was cited as a concern, slugs worried about
safe drivers, not personal attacks.

The homogeneity of Washington¹s work force may play a role in this casual
acceptance of strangers in cars. With so many federal employees and military
personnel, people here even look alike, sporting uniform haircuts, black
briefcases and government IDs. ³If you¹re a government employee or in the
military, you¹re taught Œthe group,¹ not individualism,² suggests Donald
Vankleeck, a civilian on his way to Bolling Air Force Base one morning in
September at 80 miles an hour. ³So it¹s nothing to get in a stranger¹s car.
You may have been all over the world serving with people whose first names
you never knew.²

Where apprehension does exist, Cech recasts it in oddly bureaucratic terms:
³It¹s not fear for safety; it¹s fear for time,² he says. ³Are you going to
be held hostage to someone else¹s agenda by riding with them?²

What if a driver swings by the Dunkin¹ Donuts drive-through before getting
on the highway?

The casual-carpooling system that thrives across the country in San
Francisco betrays any notion that slugging could exist only in Washington.
The Bay Area network grew up in similarly organic fashion in the 1970s,
although more as a response to public transit service disruptions and rising
gas prices.

Today, slugging exists on the HOV corridor on Interstate 80 between the East
Bay and, across the Bay Bridge, San Francisco. In addition to time savings,
commuters scored an additional advantage: Most cars crossing the Bay Bridge
westbound into the city paid a $4 toll. Carpools passed through for free ‹
until last summer.

On July 1, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission changed the toll
structure in a way that dramatically disrupted the local slugging ecosystem.
Now, everyone must pay a toll to cross the Bay Bridge. Three-person carpools
owe $2.50, which must be paid through an electronic transponder usable only
in the HOV lane. Everyone else pays a variable rate ‹ $6 per car during rush
hour and $4 during the off-peak times. Carpools without the transponder must
stop and pay the full rate, in cash, at a toll booth.

³Despite the fact we had all this messaging ‹ we were trying to talk about
it for months leading up to July 1 ‹ people still just didn¹t get it,² says
Susan Heinrich, the commission¹s rideshare and bicycling coordinator. Local
news stations filmed bewildered drivers pulling into the wrong toll lanes
and trying to back out of them, then waving cash at automated transponders.

Back in the East Bay commuter lots, where casual carpools form each morning,
more confusion ensued. The new tolls still give carpools crossing the bridge
a financial incentive, but the existence of any toll at all where once none
existed has dislodged a central tenet of slugging: No money changes hands.
Without tolls, slugging is a perfectly equal exchange between riders and
drivers.

Since July 1, the discussion board at ridenow.org ‹ the West Coast
equivalent of David LeBlanc¹s cyberhub ‹ has been dominated by hundreds of
comments on the topic of who pays for the toll. Should passengers each offer
up a dollar? Does the burden lie with the driver or the rider to broach the
issue? Should drivers who expect a donation advertise that in a window sign?
The debate has thrust the whole premise of slugging into question: Who,
after all, is providing the service here?

³Certainly the contentiousness that exists here on the discussion board must
carry over into our carpools in the morning,² one commenter laments. ³This
is not good for the community.²

³We don¹t know exactly how all of this is going to play out yet,² Heinrich
says. Transit officials did know, however, that one month after the toll¹s
implementation, carpooling was down 26 percent on all area bridges. Heinrich
suspects that the community will eventually settle into a détente, with the
driver paying the toll. Drivers still earn a discount thanks to the added
bodies. And, most important, they still reap the time savings on the HOV.

The toll crisis, however, highlights the delicate balance of interests
essential for a slugging ecosystem to exist ‹ and why this activity thrives
in so few places. In Oliphant¹s view, HOV-4 ‹ that is, a requirement that a
car have four occupants to drive in the high-occupancy vehicle lane ‹
doesn¹t work, but HOV-3 does. HOV-3 lends a sense of security in numbers
that HOV-2 never could. The lanes, preferably separated by physical barrier
from the rest of traffic, must be long enough for time savings to accrue.
The fines for violating them must be steep enough to force compliance.
Parallel public transit must exist as a reliable backup. And employment
nodes must be situated just so, creating dense, communal urban epicenters
that draw workers from across suburbia.

Back on the East Coast, Gabriel Ortiz, the transportation demand management
coordinator for Alexandria, has been trying to do what no municipal official
has done in the area¹s slugging history ‹ create a slug line from scratch,
artificially. Washington¹s slug lines have expanded over the years, always
in response to the demand of the community and with the initiative of some
of its members.

But slugs have never had a government body create a new line for them, and
the proposition entails both logistical and philosophical dilemmas. LeBlanc,
whom Ortiz enlisted as a consultant to the project, warned that he would
have to achieve just the right balance of drivers and passengers in the
experiment¹s first phase to make the new line stick. Downtown Alexandria
isn¹t located immediately off the HOV, as destinations in Arlington and the
district are. So Ortiz was toying with the idea of temporary perks, maybe
Starbucks gift cards, to incentivize people where slugging¹s natural
conditions don¹t already exist.

Once a slug himself, Ortiz knew he¹d also have to contend with the
community¹s deep distaste for meddling. Many slugs told Oliphant that they
thought any type of intervention ‹ the very idea Oliphant is devoted to
encouraging in urban areas outside Washington ‹ would ³ruin² the system.
(Cech points out that there is an irony here, or perhaps just a depressing
commentary on the state of government competence: Many of the slugging
proponents who abhor government involvement work, well, for the government.)

³Slugging is its own thing, and I don¹t want to have a heavy hand in saying
ŒHere¹s City Hall doing this!¹² Ortiz says. ³We want to keep things kind of
low-key.²

Chris Hamilton, the Arlington County Commuter Services bureau chief,
understands this better than anyone. Sitting in the 11th-floor office where
he hosted Oliphant¹s symposium two months earlier, he confesses that
Arlington has been quietly funding LeBlanc¹s website with an annual $10,000
grant. For 10 years. The site doesn¹t disclose the connection, and Hamilton
seldom does.

³It¹s not public knowledge because we don¹t want people to know; it works
fine the way it is ‹ that people think it¹s just this little slugging
community,² he says. ³The slugging community has always had that idea about
themselves, that this is their own thing, and they¹ve created it, and they
don¹t need anybody else to muck it up.²

The $10,000 is not much in Arlington¹s $8 million commuter services budget.
A model for urban smart growth atop a public transit corridor, the city has
50 people who work in this office trying to prod residents and commuters
into alternative transportation. The city promotes the Metro, carpooling,
bike lanes and walkable development.

Some officials continue to harbor the suspicion that slugging siphons riders
‹ and fares ‹ from public transit (and not from single-occupancy vehicles).
But Hamilton says he doesn¹t care how people get to the city, as long as
they don¹t drive. He also shakes off the suggestion that a city takes on
legal liability the moment it encourages people to ride in cars with
strangers. If the city also promotes buses and bike lines, and someone is
injured using those, is Arlington at fault?

³Slugging is kind of like a dream come true for someone like Chris
Hamilton,² Oliphant says. ³His job is to give people information, to
basically convince them to do anything other than drive their own car. This
is like a miracle to him, because he has to spend all this time and energy
going, ŒHere¹s the bus, here¹s how you do it!¹ In slugging, people are
lining up on their own to do it; you don¹t have to do a thing.²

Oliphant always chuckles at slugs¹ insistence that government stay out of
the way. The whole system wouldn¹t work if it weren¹t for a crucial official
outlay: If law enforcement didn¹t police the HOV lanes, there would be no
incentive for scofflaws to stay out of it, and no time savings for the
carpoolers who go so far out of their way to get in.

Government is also responsible for the free, sprawling park-and-ride lots
that dot the I-95 corridor, several of which have flyovers directly onto the
HOV. Government is, of course, also responsible for designating the carpool
lanes. In short, it has had a hand in creating every element of
infrastructure that gives rise to slugging in the first place. At the
Pentagon and in Arlington, officials have even put up signs for each
slug-line destination (³Horner Road,² ³Tackett¹s Mill²).

³There are more creative ways to generate beneficial behaviors than the
direct heavy-handed ways,² Oliphant says. ³I see it as: Give people lots of
choices, subsidize the beneficial ones and tax the non-beneficial ones.²

This idea resonates increasingly as the funding for heavy-handed
transportation solutions ‹ road expansions, for example ‹ dries up, and as
the available space to construct them in dense urban areas disappears.
Transportation officials could work with what they have, identifying more
HOVs, or converting existing HOV-2s into HOV-3s. They could open more
carpool lots in collar counties and build rain shelters to accommodate
waiting carpool passengers in the city.

The district is now contemplating this last option in a bid to relocate
slugs off of 14th Street, a congested north-south thoroughfare through the
city (this, after an outbreak of moving violations incurred the wrath of the
slug community). District officials have now smartly offered to solicit
community input through LeBlanc¹s website and have held several meetings
with the slugs.

³Ten, 11 years ago when I first got involved, nobody from government would
even talk to you about it,² LeBlanc says. ³The dynamics have changed a lot
over the years.²

Heinrich and Susan Shaheen, a transportation researcher at the University of
California, Berkeley, suspect the change has a lot to do with new
technology. With the ubiquity of smart phones, real-time ridesharing ‹ a
close cousin of the casual carpool ‹ suddenly has much greater appeal to
transportation officials and academics. Theoretically, a driver with a GPS
application could spot passengers standing on any street corner in the city.

Several companies are already deploying pilot programs, although the arrival
of proprietary smart phone technology brings an added complication. Firms
are testing micro-payments between driver and passenger (some of which
companies would skim for profit), criminal background checks and reward
systems.

But all of those ideas make slugging appear that much more elegant in its
simplicity. The system is location-based, not data-driven. You don¹t have to
tell anyone a thing about yourself ‹ only where you¹re heading. And
ultimately, personal goals align with the group dynamic in a rare exception
to the principle that we often pursue our own interests at the expense of
someone else¹s (or at the expense of society or the environment).

³It¹s like anarchy or chaos, but it actually works,² Oliphant says,
road-testing the catchphrase that might carry this idea elsewhere. ³It
actually works!²

*
*
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