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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