Salocin

Systems and Free Riders

I was interested to note that the UK is introducing HOV (or High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes on certain motorways. I’m absolutely behind such initiatives, and wish there were more like them. It provides an incentive and a significant bonus to those who share cars to work. Since a very large number of cars on motorways have only one person in them, you’ve essentially got almost 3 empty seats going to work with you every day, which you pay for in gas, and everyone else pays for in environmental impact. To the extent that we can encourage people to reduce this without being draconian about it, I think it’s a great idea.

But then you get to the issue of enforcement. If you’re going to have to employ a bunch of police officers to police the HOV lane, and you’re going to have to set up cameras to monitor who’s using it, and set up shop-a-cheat telephone hotlines to catch the abusers, then I think there’s a social cost in terms of what society has to become in order to make the HOV lane work, which is extremely distasteful and imposes a totally different kind of cost, which is even harder to measure than the environmental impact cost of the empty seats.

In principle, a vast majority of people would agree that having a lane dedicated to people who share their car space is a good thing. We would expect that lane to go faster, and we would expect those who use it to get to their destination quicker, and they deserve to because they are doing something that mitigates, to some extent, the environmental impact of their commute to work. But that’s not how we feel when we’re behind the wheel – that simple shift of perspective is fundamental.

All of a sudden, you’re a hard worker, who goes to the office for somewhere between 8 and 15 hours a day, and you really don’t see why you should spend 30 minutes more in the morning, and another 30 minutes extra in the evening, commuting to and from your place of work, when in reality you contribute just as much to the damned economy and work just as hard as that bloody idiot who just zoomed past you in the HOV lane at 3 times your speed.

Of course when we think this, we’re guilty of a cognitive malfunction. We are comparing two things that are essentially not comparable. We’re saying that the time we’re forced to spend on our way to work is somehow inversely related to our worth as an employee. That’s not the case – it’s linked to the environmental cost of our journey. Electric cars should also be allowed to use the HOV lane (unless they’re so slow they clog it up).

Then of course there’s also the gradual encroachment problem. On the first day you obey the rule and stay out of the lane, but on the second day, there’s this really slow car in front of you, and you think, “well, if I just use it to overtake this one car, I’m not really using the lane, and I won’t be getting in anybody’s way because there’s nobody on it at the moment anyway”. This is a selfish delusion, and a classic prisoner’s dilemma game. If everybody thinks the same way at the same time, the HOV lane immediately becomes clogged up. It only works if everyone else obeys the rules, and you’re the only one breaking them – of course we don’t like to think of ourselves as selfish, and so we don’t acknowledge that logic – we simply state the facts as we see them : it’s empty, if I use it, I’m not hurting anyone… In fact, what gets hurt is the system, as everyone else immediately thinks, “well, if it’s OK for him to do it, it’s OK for me to do it”, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

But the biggest threat to such systems are those who are truly selfish: Those for whom the argument in the paragraph above makes no impact, because they simply don’t care. There’s an empty lane right there, and they don’t care if it’s breaking a rule, and they don’t care if they can justify it or not, although they’ll try if you argue with them, but they’re taking that lane. You know these people – if you ski, you’ve seen them cut in line in front of you at almost every ski-lift. They take their skis off, walk all over everyone else’s and move forward twice as fast as everyone else. They’re the self-important suit-wearing businessmen who barge to the front of queues in airports, or charm their way into the frequent flyer’s line rather than wait in line like everyone else. They’re the arrogant poorly-dressed loudmouths in the restaurant who keep complaining in loud voices to the Maitre’d because they want this, or that, or something else, and ruin everyone else’s meal.

The reality is that our society is run through with such systems. They work because enough of us play ball by the rules that it all hangs together despite the free riders who abuse the general public’s honesty. The easy test of a free-rider is simple, and you can do it next time you see someone breaking a rule that looks silly on the surface: ask yourself what the consequences would be if everyone broke that rule at the same time, if the rule didn’t exist. If someone cuts to the front of the queue, what happens if everyone does it? There’s no queue. The only reason one person can do it and the system hangs together is because everyone else in the queue stomachs the fact that they’ll all have to wait a little bit longer. If enough people break the rule, then there’s no point in anyone following it anymore, and the system breaks down, people might as well fight to be the next to be served.

Will the M1 HOV lane work? In the UK, it will work for a while. The British have a reputation for being very good at lining up and being orderly. Apart from their football fans on occasion. There are, like anywhere else, the selfish jerks who will seek to abuse the system, but the remainder of the population has a stronger sense of discipline about such things than in most places, and so the systems tend to survive. I think that over time, however, it will gradually degrade. In a few years, possibly less, you’ll have traffic cameras on the HOV lane, and once again, authority will be required to keep everyone in line.

It makes you wonder by how thin a thread all the order in our society really hangs.

Posted by nlvp at December 10, 2004 12:16 AM