Example of self-organizing system

[Jack Martin Leith]

Thanks for this, Jennifer. Lovely - just Tweeted it.

Warm wishes,

Jack

Jack Martin Leith
Co-Creation Consultant
Bristol, United Kingdom
Mobile: 07582 598548 (+44 7582 598548) <-- *New!*
jack at jackmartinleith.com
Skype: jackmartinleith
Twitter: @jackmartinleith
www.jackmartinleith.com



On 8 March 2011 18:47, Jennifer Hurley <JLHurley at hfadesign.com> wrote:

> The article below has a great example of a self-organizing system at work!
>
> Jennifer Hurley
> __________________________
> 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-28068/
> **
>
> Slugging — The People’s 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 nation’s 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
> they’re 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.
>
> “Horner Road?”
>
> “Horner Road?” repeats the first woman in line.
>
> “Horner Road!”
>
> 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.
>
> “I don’t care where we go,” yells the driver. “I just need two people!”
>
> 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. “Peo*ple are
> coo*perati*ng … to* commute?” says Marc Oliphant, underscoring the novelty
> of what is going on here. “It’s like the opposite of road rage!”
>
> 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: “slugging.”
>
> Their culture exists almost nowhere else. San Francisco has a similar
> casual-carpooling system, and there’s a small one in Houston. But that’s it.
> Even in D.C., slugging exists along only one of the city’s many arteries,
> I-95 and 395, where the nation’s 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, it’s 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.
>
> “To me,” marvels Oliphant, a facilities planner with the Navy, “it’s an
> illustration of the ideal for government.”
>
> He’s 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
> they’ve 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 slugging’s built-in complication. They’d
> 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 People’s 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 master’s thesis at Virginia Tech. (“Slugging is not most
> interesting for what it can teach about carpooling,” he wrote, but rather
> for the trust among strangers it requires and its leaderless organization.
> “Slugging is a contradiction to the everyday culture of America.”)
>
> “Whenever I meet someone new, all I have to do is ask about their commute,
> which I’m often very interested in,” he says. “And I get an immediate
> emotional response. Especially for people in urban areas, it’s like this
> universal problem. No one likes how they get to work.”
>
> 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.
>
> “The way the entire transportation system in this country is set up is to
> support people traveling by their own car,” he says. “So parking is
> subsidized. The incentive with lots of different laws and programs is to
> drive as much as possible.”
>
> 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 “clunker.”
> 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!
>
> “I think your average Joe or Jane who doesn’t know anything about
> transportation thinks things are the way they are because that’s what
> society wants,” Oliphant says glumly. “And that’s not really the case.”
>
> 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, *Ol*iphant 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.
>
> “This guy has basically been running a small public transit system for the
> last 10 years!” Oliphant said, making LeBlanc blush. He is frequently in the
> awkward position of* exp*laining that he doesn’t 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 slugs’ 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 “slug,”
> originally a derogatory reference that has been amiably reappropriated.
>
> The first organized slug line is thought to have formed in the parking lot
> of Bob’s Big Boy restaurant, now a Shoney’s, 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. “He said one of the biggest issues in D.C. is where you’re going
> to live and how you’re going to commute,” LeBlanc says. “A lot of people,
> they try to figure out the commute first.”
>
> 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 others’ 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.
>
> “The light bulb went off,” he says. “Here I am standing in the rain, in
> February, it’s really cold, I’m waiting for a mode of transportation that’s
> 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.”
>
> 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 you’ve 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 199*9, he self-published
> 1,000 copies of Slugging: The Commu*ting Alternative for Washington, D.C.
> (Today, a “collectible” signed copy sells on Amazon for $88.65.) “I wrote
> this book,” he explains in an introduction, “because I don’t want others to
> have to learn about slugging the way I did … through the school of hard
> knocks.” But he put his book out of business with its corresponding we
> bsite.
>
> 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 don’t 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
> “body snatching” — 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 LeBlanc’s
> 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.
>
> “Single points of failure drive me crazy,” 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. Cech’s 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.
>
> “It’s become an international business,” he jokes, “all designed to help me
> get to work faster!”
>
> Cech’s labor, like LeBlanc’s, 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.)
>
> “My day job is trying to eke out seconds and miles and bytes,” he says from
> his office near the Navy Yard. “In order for the system I’m working on to be
> more effective, the radar’s got to search quicker, the missile’s 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. It’s
> the same kind of thing, trying to address a systems problem.”
>
> 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
> don’t 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.
>
> “Lots of people will pay money for the gas, they’ll pay the money for the
> tolls,” 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. “The thing you can’t buy,” Cech says, “is time.”
>
> He concedes that he’s 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.
>
> Cech’s understanding of the psychology of slugging mirrors one of the
> startling findings of Oliphant’s thesis. Oliphant surveyed 284 participants
> and asked them, among other things, what they liked least about slugging.
> Only 31 people mentioned “riding with strangers.” 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 Washington’s 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. “If you’re a government employee or in the
> military, you’re taught ‘the group,’ not individualism,” suggests Donald
> Vankleeck, a civilian on his way to Bolling Air Force Base one morning in
> September at 80 miles an hour. “So it’s nothing to get in a stranger’s car.
> You may have been all over the world serving with people whose first names
> you never knew.”
>
> Where apprehension does exist, Cech recasts it in oddly bureaucratic terms:
> “It’s not fear for safety; it’s fear for time,” he says. “Are you going to
> be held hostage to someone else’s agenda by riding with them?”
>
> What if a driver swings by the Dunkin’ 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.
>
> “Despite the fact we had all this messaging — we were trying to talk about
> it for months leading up to July 1 — people still just didn’t get it,” says
> Susan Heinrich, the commission’s 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 LeBlanc’s 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?
>
> “Certainly the contentiousness that exists here on the discussion board
> must carry over into our carpools in the morning,” one commenter laments.
> “This is not good for the community.”
>
> “We don’t know exactly how all of this is going to play out yet,” Heinrich
> says. Transit officials did know, however, that one month after the toll’s
> 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 Oliphant’s view, HOV-4 — that is, a requirement that a
> car have four occupants to drive in the high-occupancy vehicle lane —
> doesn’t 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 area’s slugging history — create a slug line from scratch,
> artificially. Washington’s 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
> experiment’s first phase to make the new line stick. Downtown Alexandria
> isn’t 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 slugging’s natural
> conditions don’t already exist.
>
> Once a slug himself, Ortiz knew he’d also have to contend with the
> community’s 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 “ruin” 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.)
>
> “Slugging is its own thing, and I don’t want to have a heavy hand in saying
> ‘Here’s City Hall doing this!’” Ortiz says. “We want to keep things kind of
> low-key.”
>
> Chris Hamilton, the Arlington County Commuter Services bureau chief,
> understands this better than anyone. Sitting in the 11th-floor office where
> he hosted Oliphant’s symposium two months earlier, he confesses that
> Arlington has been quietly funding LeBlanc’s website with an annual $10,000
> grant. For 10 years. The site doesn’t disclose the connection, and Hamilton
> seldom does.
>
> “It’s not public knowledge because we don’t want people to know; it works
> fine the way it is — that people think it’s just this little slugging
> community,” he says. “The slugging community has always had that idea about
> themselves, that this is their own thing, and they’ve created it, and they
> don’t need anybody else to muck it up.”
>
> The $10,000 is not much in Arlington’s $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 doesn’t care how people get to the city, as
> long as they don’t 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?
>
> “Slugging is kind of like a dream come true for someone like Chris
> Hamilton,” Oliphant says. “His 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, ‘Here’s the bus, here’s how you do it!’ In slugging, people are
> lining up on their own to do it; you don’t have to do a thing.”
>
> Oliphant always chuckles at slugs’ insistence that government stay out of
> the way. The whole system wouldn’t work if it weren’t for a crucial official
> outlay: If law enforcement didn’t 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 (“Horner Road,” “Tackett’s Mill”).
>
> “There are more creative ways to generate beneficial behaviors than the
> direct heavy-handed ways,” Oliphant says. “I see it as: Give people lots of
> choices, subsidize the beneficial ones and tax the non-beneficial ones.”
>
> 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 LeBlanc’s website and have held several meetings
> with the slugs.
>
> “Ten, 11 years ago when I first got involved, nobody from government would
> even talk to you about it,” LeBlanc says. “The dynamics have changed a lot
> over the years.”
>
> 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 don’t have to
> tell anyone a thing about yourself — only where you’re 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 else’s (or at the expense of society or the environment).
>
> “It’s like anarchy or chaos, but it actually works,” Oliphant says, road-te
> *sting the catchphrase that might carry this idea els*e*where. “It
> actually works!”*
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