Example of self-organizing system

Christine Whitney Sanchez cwhitneysanchez at gmail.com
Wed Mar 9 13:31:05 PST 2011


Thanks, Jennifer.  Posted on FB.

OST is like the HOV lane!

Christine

Christine Whitney Sanchez
Partner
Innovation Partners International
480.759.0262
www.innovationpartners.com

On Mar 9, 2011, at 4:16 AM, Jon Harvey wrote:

Ditto – and blogged it too!

Jon

From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Jack  
Martin Leith
Sent: 09 March 2011 09:55
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: Example of self-organizing system

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
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p: 215-988-9440  |  f: 215-988-9441  |  c: 267-971-4598
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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.  
“People are cooperating … 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 fromMiller-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.

Error! Filename not specified.
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 orclean-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 forwork  
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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 theright 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 atridenow.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 onesand 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-testing the catchphrase that might carry this idea elsewhere. “It  
actually works!”
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