I liked this is well.

What also struck me is that I think this also is an illustration of the impact 
of someone wanting to take control of an Open Space session:

"On July 1, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission changed the toll 
structure in a way that dramatically disrupted the local slugging 
ecosystem".....

Regards,

Keith

Dr K Blundell

Product Development Global Operations
Roche Products Limited
Welwyn Garden City
Hertfordshire
AL7 1TW

Office:   +44 (0) 1707 36 6618
Mobile:  +44 (0) 7990 777 127
Mail to:  [email protected]

-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Rory O'Connor
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 11:57 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Example of self-organizing system

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!
> [email protected]
> Skype: jackmartinleith
> Twitter: @jackmartinleith
> www.jackmartinleith.com
>
>
>
> On 8 March 2011 18:47, Jennifer Hurley <[email protected]> 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
> [email protected]  |  http://www.hfadesign.com
> Certified WDBE through PA UCP, City of Philadelphia OEO, and NJ UCP
>
> http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/slugging-the-peoples-transit-28068/
>
> Slugging - The People's Transit
>
> Workers who have come down from the surrounding high-rise offices begin to 
> line up on a sidewalk in downtown Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the 
> nation's capital, about 3:30 in the afternoon. They stand in a perfect queue, 
> iPods and newspapers in hand, and they look, by all indications, like they're 
> waiting for the bus.
>
> Public transit never shows. But, eventually, a blue Chrysler Town & Country 
> does. The woman behind the wheel rolls down her window and yells a kind of 
> call-and-response.
>
> "Horner Road?"
>
> "Horner Road?" repeats the first woman in line.
>
> "Horner Road!"
>
> And two women get in the van, heading, presumably, for Horner Road. Several 
> more cars pull up: a Ford Explorer, a Toyota Camry, a Saturn minivan. Each 
> collects a pair of passengers and pulls out past the intersection for the 
> on-ramp onto State Route 110, which leads three miles to the south, past the 
> Pentagon and onto Interstate 395/95 and its glorious 28 miles of 
> uninterrupted, controlled-access, high-occupancy vehicle lanes.
>
> The queue of cars eventually backs up around the corner, and the line of 
> passengers on the sidewalk ebbs. In a few minutes, the balance shifts again. 
> Within half an hour, nearly 50 cars will have come through, capped by a dusty 
> Ford F-250 pickup truck.
>
> "I don't care where we go," yells the driver. "I just need two people!"
>
> And off the three go toward the highway - and the suburbs - complete 
> strangers, with not the least concern for personal safety, trying to shave 20 
> or 30 minutes, maybe more, off their afternoon trip home. "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 from Miller-McCune on Vimeo.
>
> Oliphant, a trim and animated 30-year-old, spent six months on loan from the 
> Navy last year thinking about just this question as a Federal Highway 
> Administration transportation policy fellow. He began studying slugs three 
> years earlier for a master's thesis at Virginia Tech. ("Slugging is not most 
> interesting for what it can teach about carpooling," he wrote, but rather for 
> the trust among strangers it requires and its leaderless organization. 
> "Slugging is a contradiction to the everyday culture of America.")
>
> "Whenever I meet someone new, all I have to do is ask about their commute, 
> which I'm often very interested in," he says. "And I get an immediate 
> emotional response. Especially for people in urban areas, it's like this 
> universal problem. No one likes how they get to work."
>
> Including him. He used to bike from his home in Virginia to his office at the 
> Navy Yard in Southeast Washington. But last summer was even hotter than the 
> usual D.C. steam bath, and his new office had no shower. His wife tried 
> dropping him off by car (20 minutes door to door), with a return trip home at 
> night by metro (1 hour, 10 minutes door to door). On mornings when Oliphant 
> uses public transit, he gets on a bus about a block from his house, rides to 
> the local metro stop, takes a subway into the city, transfers once, then 
> walks 10 minutes on the other end to his office. In more than an hour, he 
> covers about six miles.
>
>
> The benefits of slugging: For the passenger, it's a free ride; for the 
> driver, a pass to the HOV lane, and both get a faster trip than they would 
> otherwise. (Monica Lopossay)
>
> But a driver who hops on the HOV from Horner Road, 23 miles south of the 
> city, can cover that distance in about 30 minutes.
>
> "The way the entire transportation system in this country is set up is to 
> support people traveling by their own car," he says. "So parking is 
> subsidized. The incentive with lots of different laws and programs is to 
> drive as much as possible."
>
> In America, he says, cars have become an extension of houses. Most people 
> would no sooner think to let a stranger into the back seat than they would 
> let the same stranger into their living rooms. Americans drive cars 
> everywhere because gas relatively cheap (half what it costs in Europe), 
> because only 6 percent of the interstate highway system requires tolls, 
> because insurance rates are unrelated to how many miles people drive. We pay 
> for the land we live on, but we expect the parking spot out front to come 
> free of charge. The federal government has lately encouraged drivers with tax 
> breaks to buy, variously: a new car, a hybrid or clean-diesel vehicle, a 
> truck or SUV weighing more than 6,000 pounds, or any upgrade from a 
> "clunker." Then, regardless of what we drive, the IRS invites lucrative tax 
> deductions for work travel, now at 50 cents a mile.
>
> Go ahead, all the signs (and car ads) seem to suggest: Buy your own car - and 
> ride in it alone!
>
> "I think your average Joe or Jane who doesn't know anything about 
> transportation thinks things are the way they are because that's what society 
> wants," Oliphant says glumly. "And that's not really the case."
>
> What if, instead of one bus with a capacity of 50 that came along every 30 
> minutes, five cars came along every few minutes, each with a capacity to 
> carry five people? Looked at broadly, 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 the right match. Cech's business, RUGoingMyWay, would 
> eliminate those interactions.
>
> He found a company in China to produce his acrylic signs, another in Canada 
> to make the roof-mount magnets, an outlet in Florida to print the stickers, 
> and a webmaster in India to host his site.
>
> "It's become an international business," he jokes, "all designed to help me 
> get to work faster!"
>
> Cech's labor, like LeBlanc's, speaks to a key element of the system: Absent 
> any real organization, slugging thrives on the compulsion of individuals who 
> are extremely interested in finding small efficiencies. This is, not 
> coincidentally, what Cech also does by day as an engineering consultant 
> working on naval radars. (Like LeBlanc, he is also retired military.)
>
> "My day job is trying to eke out seconds and miles and bytes," he says from 
> his office near the Navy Yard. "In order for the system I'm working on to be 
> more effective, the radar's got to search quicker, the missile's got to fly 
> straighter, the time to solve the solution has got to go quicker, the data 
> rate has got to be more efficient. The errors have got to be reduced. It's 
> the same kind of thing, trying to address a systems problem."
>
> He explains that slugs are, above all, motivated by time saved, not money 
> pocketed - and certainly not by any regard for the environment. A Prius is a 
> rare sight pulling into a slug line. Those ostensibly eco-conscious drivers 
> don't need slugs to reach a three-person HOV threshold; hybrid owners in 
> Virginia are eligible for a special clean-fuel license plate that gives them 
> a free pass into the HOV.
>
> "Lots of people will pay money for the gas, they'll pay the money for the 
> tolls," Cech says. Some of them will even pay to risk the HOV as a 
> single-occupancy vehicle. The first infraction costs $150, and it quickly 
> escalates to $1,000. "The thing you can't buy," Cech says, "is time."
>
> He concedes that he's not likely to recoup in minutes saved in the Pentagon 
> parking lot all the hours he has invested in his basement business. He took 
> on the project after retiring as the president of his homeowners association. 
> RUGoingMyWay has become, in place of that responsibility, something of a 
> personal challenge.
>
> Cech's understanding of the psychology of slugging mirrors one of the 
> startling findings of Oliphant's thesis. Oliphant surveyed 284 participants 
> and asked them, among other things, what they liked least about slugging. 
> Only 31 people mentioned "riding with strangers." In the three-decade history 
> of the activity, there has not been a single known incidence of violence or 
> crime. When safety was cited as a concern, slugs worried about safe drivers, 
> not personal attacks.
>
> The homogeneity of Washington's work force may play a role in this casual 
> acceptance of strangers in cars. With so many federal employees and military 
> personnel, people here even look alike, sporting uniform haircuts, black 
> briefcases and government IDs. "If you're a government employee or in the 
> military, you're taught 'the group,' not individualism," suggests Donald 
> Vankleeck, a civilian on his way to Bolling Air Force Base one morning in 
> September at 80 miles an hour. "So it's nothing to get in a stranger's car. 
> You may have been all over the world serving with people whose first names 
> you never knew."
>
> Where apprehension does exist, Cech recasts it in oddly bureaucratic terms: 
> "It's not fear for safety; it's fear for time," he says. "Are you going to be 
> held hostage to someone else's agenda by riding with them?"
>
> What if a driver swings by the Dunkin' Donuts drive-through before getting on 
> the highway?
>
> The casual-carpooling system that thrives across the country in San Francisco 
> betrays any notion that slugging could exist only in Washington. The Bay Area 
> network grew up in similarly organic fashion in the 1970s, although more as a 
> response to public transit service disruptions and rising gas prices.
>
> Today, slugging exists on the HOV corridor on Interstate 80 between the East 
> Bay and, across the Bay Bridge, San Francisco. In addition to time savings, 
> commuters scored an additional advantage: Most cars crossing the Bay Bridge 
> westbound into the city paid a $4 toll. Carpools passed through for free - 
> until last summer.
>
> On July 1, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission changed the toll 
> structure in a way that dramatically disrupted the local slugging ecosystem. 
> Now, everyone must pay a toll to cross the Bay Bridge. Three-person carpools 
> owe $2.50, which must be paid through an electronic transponder usable only 
> in the HOV lane. Everyone else pays a variable rate - $6 per car during rush 
> hour and $4 during the off-peak times. Carpools without the transponder must 
> stop and pay the full rate, in cash, at a toll booth.
>
> "Despite the fact we had all this messaging - we were trying to talk about it 
> for months leading up to July 1 - people still just didn't get it," says 
> Susan Heinrich, the commission's rideshare and bicycling coordinator. Local 
> news stations filmed bewildered drivers pulling into the wrong toll lanes and 
> trying to back out of them, then waving cash at automated transponders.
>
> Back in the East Bay commuter lots, where casual carpools form each morning, 
> more confusion ensued. The new tolls still give carpools crossing the bridge 
> a financial incentive, but the existence of any toll at all where once none 
> existed has dislodged a central tenet of slugging: No money changes hands. 
> Without tolls, slugging is a perfectly equal exchange between riders and 
> drivers.
>
> Since July 1, the discussion board at ridenow.org - the West Coast equivalent 
> of David LeBlanc's cyberhub - has been dominated by hundreds of comments on 
> the topic of who pays for the toll. Should passengers each offer up a dollar? 
> Does the burden lie with the driver or the rider to broach the issue? Should 
> drivers who expect a donation advertise that in a window sign? The debate has 
> thrust the whole premise of slugging into question: Who, after all, is 
> providing the service here?
>
> "Certainly the contentiousness that exists here on the discussion board must 
> carry over into our carpools in the morning," one commenter laments. "This is 
> not good for the community."
>
> "We don't know exactly how all of this is going to play out yet," Heinrich 
> says. Transit officials did know, however, that one month after the toll's 
> implementation, carpooling was down 26 percent on all area bridges. Heinrich 
> suspects that the community will eventually settle into a détente, with the 
> driver paying the toll. Drivers still earn a discount thanks to the added 
> bodies. And, most important, they still reap the time savings on the HOV.
>
> The toll crisis, however, highlights the delicate balance of interests 
> essential for a slugging ecosystem to exist - and why this activity thrives 
> in so few places. In Oliphant's view, HOV-4 - that is, a requirement that a 
> car have four occupants to drive in the high-occupancy vehicle lane - doesn't 
> work, but HOV-3 does. HOV-3 lends a sense of security in numbers that HOV-2 
> never could. The lanes, preferably separated by physical barrier from the 
> rest of traffic, must be long enough for time savings to accrue. The fines 
> for violating them must be steep enough to force compliance. Parallel public 
> transit must exist as a reliable backup. And employment nodes must be 
> situated just so, creating dense, communal urban epicenters that draw workers 
> from across suburbia.
>
> Back on the East Coast, Gabriel Ortiz, the transportation demand management 
> coordinator for Alexandria, has been trying to do what no municipal official 
> has done in the area's slugging history - create a slug line from scratch, 
> artificially. Washington's slug lines have expanded over the years, always in 
> response to the demand of the community and with the initiative of some of 
> its members.
>
> But slugs have never had a government body create a new line for them, and 
> the proposition entails both logistical and philosophical dilemmas. LeBlanc, 
> whom Ortiz enlisted as a consultant to the project, warned that he would have 
> to achieve just the right balance of drivers and passengers in the 
> experiment's first phase to make the new line stick. Downtown Alexandria 
> isn't located immediately off the HOV, as destinations in Arlington and the 
> district are. So Ortiz was toying with the idea of temporary perks, maybe 
> Starbucks gift cards, to incentivize people where slugging's natural 
> conditions don't already exist.
>
> Once a slug himself, Ortiz knew he'd also have to contend with the 
> community's deep distaste for meddling. Many slugs told Oliphant that they 
> thought any type of intervention - the very idea Oliphant is devoted to 
> encouraging in urban areas outside Washington - would "ruin" the system. 
> (Cech points out that there is an irony here, or perhaps just a depressing 
> commentary on the state of government competence: Many of the slugging 
> proponents who abhor government involvement work, well, for the government.)

>
> "Slugging is its own thing, and I don't want to have a heavy hand in saying 
> 'Here's City Hall doing this!'" Ortiz says. "We want to keep things kind of 
> low-key."
>
> Chris Hamilton, the Arlington County Commuter Services bureau chief, 
> understands this better than anyone. Sitting in the 11th-floor office where 
> he hosted Oliphant's symposium two months earlier, he confesses that 
> Arlington has been quietly funding LeBlanc's website with an annual $10,000 
> grant. For 10 years. The site doesn't disclose the connection, and Hamilton 
> seldom does.
>
> "It's not public knowledge because we don't want people to know; it works 
> fine the way it is - that people think it's just this little slugging 
> community," he says. "The slugging community has always had that idea about 
> themselves, that this is their own thing, and they've created it, and they 
> don't need anybody else to muck it up."
>
> The $10,000 is not much in Arlington's $8 million commuter services budget. A 
> model for urban smart growth atop a public transit corridor, the city has 50 
> people who work in this office trying to prod residents and commuters into 
> alternative transportation. The city promotes the Metro, carpooling, bike 
> lanes and walkable development.
>
> Some officials continue to harbor the suspicion that slugging siphons riders 
> - and fares - from public transit (and not from single-occupancy vehicles). 
> But Hamilton says he doesn't care how people get to the city, as long as they 
> don't drive. He also shakes off the suggestion that a city takes on legal 
> liability the moment it encourages people to ride in cars with strangers. If 
> the city also promotes buses and bike lines, and someone is injured using 
> those, is Arlington at fault?
>
> "Slugging is kind of like a dream come true for someone like Chris Hamilton," 
> Oliphant says. "His job is to give people information, to basically convince 
> them to do anything other than drive their own car. This is like a miracle to 
> him, because he has to spend all this time and energy going, 'Here's the bus, 
> here's how you do it!' In slugging, people are lining up on their own to do 
> it; you don't have to do a thing."
>
> Oliphant always chuckles at slugs' insistence that government stay out of the 
> way. The whole system wouldn't work if it weren't for a crucial official 
> outlay: If law enforcement didn't police the HOV lanes, there would be no 
> incentive for scofflaws to stay out of it, and no time savings for the 
> carpoolers who go so far out of their way to get in.
>
> Government is also responsible for the free, sprawling park-and-ride lots 
> that dot the I-95 corridor, several of which have flyovers directly onto the 
> HOV. Government is, of course, also responsible for designating the carpool 
> lanes. In short, it has had a hand in creating every element of 
> infrastructure that gives rise to slugging in the first place. At the 
> Pentagon and in Arlington, officials have even put up signs for each 
> slug-line destination ("Horner Road," "Tackett's Mill").
>
> "There are more creative ways to generate beneficial behaviors than the 
> direct heavy-handed ways," Oliphant says. "I see it as: Give people lots of 
> choices, subsidize the beneficial ones and tax the non-beneficial ones."
>
> This idea resonates increasingly as the funding for heavy-handed 
> transportation solutions - road expansions, for example - dries up, and as 
> the available space to construct them in dense urban areas disappears. 
> Transportation officials could work with what they have, identifying more 
> HOVs, or converting existing HOV-2s into HOV-3s. They could open more carpool 
> lots in collar counties and build rain shelters to accommodate waiting 
> carpool passengers in the city.
>
> The district is now contemplating this last option in a bid to relocate slugs 
> off of 14th Street, a congested north-south thoroughfare through the city 
> (this, after an outbreak of moving violations incurred the wrath of the slug 
> community). District officials have now smartly offered to solicit community 
> input through LeBlanc's website and have held several meetings with the slugs.
>
> "Ten, 11 years ago when I first got involved, nobody from government would 
> even talk to you about it," LeBlanc says. "The dynamics have changed a lot 
> over the years."
>
> Heinrich and Susan Shaheen, a transportation researcher at the University of 
> California, Berkeley, suspect the change has a lot to do with new technology. 
> With the ubiquity of smart phones, real-time ridesharing - a close cousin of 
> the casual carpool - suddenly has much greater appeal to transportation 
> officials and academics. Theoretically, a driver with a GPS application could 
> spot passengers standing on any street corner in the city.
>
> Several companies are already deploying pilot programs, although the arrival 
> of proprietary smart phone technology brings an added complication. Firms are 
> testing micro-payments between driver and passenger (some of which companies 
> would skim for profit), criminal background checks and reward systems.
>
> But all of those ideas make slugging appear that much more elegant in its 
> simplicity. The system is location-based, not data-driven. You don't have to 
> tell anyone a thing about yourself - only where you're heading. And 
> ultimately, personal goals align with the group dynamic in a rare exception 
> to the principle that we often pursue our own interests at the expense of 
> someone else's (or at the expense of society or the environment).
>
> "It's like anarchy or chaos, but it actually works," Oliphant says, 
> road-testing the catchphrase that might carry this idea elsewhere. "It 
> actually works!"
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