The article below has a great example of a self-organizing system at work!
Jennifer Hurley
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HURLEY~FRANKS & ASSOCIATES
1500 Walnut St STE 504 | Philadelphia, PA 19102
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*_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.
Peo/ple are coo/perati/ng 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. Evenin 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 simplyby
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 PeoplesTransit 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 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 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, /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 ina 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 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 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
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 hiveof community wisdom. LeBlanc
posts a code of etiquette, and the denizenshave 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 attendedthe 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-te/sting the catchphrase that might carry this idea els/e/where.
It actually works!/ * *
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