Example of self-organizing system

[Michael M Pannwitz]

Love your question, Rory!
SO, of course, I think, happens in a manner not fathomable.
Considering the pre-conditions for SO (chaos, diversity, urgency,
complexity etc.) "incentives" are not part of that scenario or maybe
they are incentives...
What was the incentive of the perhaps "chaotic" intervention such as the
strike I mentioned, for people to go the slug route (offering rides
neither for money nor time saved, the latter considered an incentive in
the situation in DC)?
I have seen and used "supplementary" "public" transportation systems in
Karachi, Manila and in Nairobi where the "regular" public transportation
system was not able to handle the diversity nor the chaos... just did
not have an adaptive complex system... but small vehicles, stopping
wherever you hailed them and dropping you off whenever you gave a
signal, travelling on established and non-established routes. This was a
source of income for the drivers and a quick, flexible and less
expensive way of getting around for people...
When training Peace Corps Volunteers on the Big Island back in 1968 I
had people haul up to me the minute I started walking on the highway...
they asked me where I was headed and they took me there sometimes
suggesting to stop by their home for a cup of coffee...there were hardly
buses and it seems that this was a kind of substitute for public
transportation or perhaps it was in a sense public transportation. Now,
it was SO at work but what was the incentive?
Musing in Berlin
mmp


On 09.03.2011 12:57, Rory O'Connor wrote:
> Thanks Jennifer,
>
> What a great example. IWhat I took from the article was that the HOV
> lane was already in place, to stimulate the self-organisation. So in
> other aspects of life and society are there things we can put in
> place that stimulate self-organisation. The flip-side is whether
> 'slugging' would happen without the pre-existence of the HOV lane?
>
> Will be tweeting this aswell.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rory
>
> Rory O'Connor Director&  Co-Founder
>
> The Creativity Hub http://www.thecreativityhub.com
>
> phone: +44(0)28 9085 0628 mobile: +44(0)7740 1000 68 twitter:
> @roryoconnor @storycubes
>
> Rory's Story Cubes - Nominated for Toy of the Year 2011
> http://www.storycubes.com Available now on iPhone/iPod touch:
> http://tinyurl.com/ybl39bp
>
> On 9 Mar 2011, at 09:55, Jack Martin Leith wrote:
>
>> 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 Peoples 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 nations 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 theyre 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 dont 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. People are cooperating  to commute? says Marc
>> Oliphant, underscoring the novelty of what is going on here. Its
>> 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 theres a small one in
>> Houston. But thats it. Even in D.C., slugging exists along only
>> one of the citys many arteries, I-95 and 395, where the nations
>> 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, its 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,
>> its an illustration of the ideal for government.
>>
>> Hes 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 theyve 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 sluggings built-in complication.
>> Theyd 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 Peoples 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 masters 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 Im often very interested in, he says. And I get
>> an immediate emotional response. Especially for people in urban
>> areas, its 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 doesnt know anything about
>> transportation thinks things are the way they are because thats
>> what society wants, Oliphant says glumly. And thats 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, 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.
>>
>> 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 explaining that he doesnt
>> 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 Bobs Big Boy restaurant, now a Shoneys, 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 youre going to live and how youre 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, its really cold, Im waiting for a mode of
>> transportation thats 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 youve 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 collectible signed copy sells on
>> Amazon for $88.65.) I wrote this book, he explains in an
>> introduction, because I dont 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 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 dont 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
>> LeBlancs 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. Cechs 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.
>>
>> Its become an international business, he jokes, all designed to
>> help me get to work faster!
>>
>> Cechs labor, like LeBlancs, 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
>> Im working on to be more effective, the radars got to search
>> quicker, the missiles 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. Its 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 dont 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, theyll 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 cant buy, Cech
>> says, is time.
>>
>> He concedes that hes 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.
>>
>> Cechs understanding of the psychology of slugging mirrors one of
>> the startling findings of Oliphants 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 Washingtons 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
>> youre a government employee or in the military, youre 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 its nothing to get in a strangers 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: Its not fear for safety; its fear for time,
>> he says. Are you going to be held hostage to someone elses 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
>> didnt get it, says Susan Heinrich, the commissions 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 LeBlancs 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 dont know exactly how all of this is going to play out yet,
>> Heinrich says. Transit officials did know, however, that one month
>> after the tolls 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 Oliphants view, HOV-4 
>> that is, a requirement that a car have four occupants to drive in
>> the high-occupancy vehicle lane  doesnt 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 areas slugging history 
>> create a slug line from scratch, artificially. Washingtons 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 experiments first phase
>> to make the new line stick. Downtown Alexandria isnt 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 sluggings
>> natural conditions dont already exist.
>>
>> Once a slug himself, Ortiz knew hed also have to contend with the
>> communitys 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 dont want to have a heavy hand
>> in saying Heres 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 Oliphants symposium two months
>> earlier, he confesses that Arlington has been quietly funding
>> LeBlancs website with an annual $10,000 grant. For 10 years. The
>> site doesnt disclose the connection, and Hamilton seldom does.
>>
>> Its not public knowledge because we dont want people to know; it
>> works fine the way it is  that people think its just this little
>> slugging community, he says. The slugging community has always
>> had that idea about themselves, that this is their own thing, and
>> theyve created it, and they dont need anybody else to muck it
>> up.
>>
>> The $10,000 is not much in Arlingtons $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 doesnt care how
>> people get to the city, as long as they dont 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, Heres the bus, heres how you do it!
>> In slugging, people are lining up on their own to do it; you dont
>> have to do a thing.
>>
>> Oliphant always chuckles at slugs insistence that government stay
>> out of the way. The whole system wouldnt work if it werent for a
>> crucial official outlay: If law enforcement didnt 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, Tacketts 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 LeBlancs 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 dont have to tell anyone a thing about yourself  only where
>> youre 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 elses (or at the
>> expense of society or the environment).
>>
>> Its like anarchy or chaos, but it actually works, Oliphant says,
>> road-testing the catchphrase that might carry this idea elsewhere.
>> It actually works! * *
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--
Michael M Pannwitz, boscop eg
Draisweg 1, 12209 Berlin, Germany
++49-30-772 8000
mmpanne at boscop.org
www.boscop.org


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