Year: 2006

Revenge of the elephant racers

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From today’s Sunday Star, how trucks slow everyone down but actually speed up  traffice through bottlenecks. It sounds fine in principle — like making sure everyone walks when there is a fire alarm clears a building quicker, the key thing is to keep traffic smooth, not to permit high speeds. Does it happen in practice? I don’t do enough highway driving to know.

Link: TheStar.com – Revenge of the elephant racers.

Revenge of the elephant racers
Why truckers on the 401 team up to control traffic, and help everyone else in the process
May 28, 2006. 01:00 AM
ANDREW CHUNG
TORONTO STAR

Has
the thought ever occurred to you on the rig-riddled Highway 401 that
truck drivers were deliberately conspiring to prevent you, humming
along in your sleek little Celica, from getting around them?

Some
drivers thought so last weekend as they approached a bridge
construction zone near Belleville, where the highway lanes narrowed
from two to one. Giant tractor trailers seemed to line up side-by-side,
blocking both lanes, and slow to a speed that left a half-kilometre gap
between them and vehicles farther ahead, which were themselves
following behind another set of trucks doing exactly the same thing.

Eventually,
one truck let the other merge into the single lane, and everyone
slipped past the construction without much fanfare. But it was slow
moving. Some motorists became furious. A few honked their horns.
Others, with teeth bared and nostrils flaring, took to the highway’s
gravel shoulder to bypass the lumbering mechanical beasts.

It
might be easy to flip these truckers the bird and continue on your way,
except that, as construction season begins, you should know that
traffic experts, driving instructors and even the police say these
trucks could be doing everyone a big favour.

Though technically
not legal, their tactics over the Victoria Day weekend on the 401
ensured that vehicles passed through the construction zone faster and
more smoothly than they otherwise would have.

By forcing all the
vehicles leading into the merging lanes to a slower speed, they
prevented the common stop and start "slinky" effect common to
bottlenecks on any major roadway. This, experts say, makes traffic flow
more efficiently.

"If you have a construction site, you have all
this manoeuvring trying to get through, and that can slow things down.
So what the truck is doing is smoothing that flow," says Eric Miller, a
civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto and a
specialist in transportation systems modelling.

At the site of
a merge, you’re going to find people jockeying for position, trying to
get through. This can lead to traffic "turbulence."

"But," says
Miller, "it’s going on behind the truck, which doesn’t affect the rate
at which people are going through because they’re sorted out by the
time they get to the bottleneck."

Miller cautions this is simply a hypothesis, but it makes sense and should be studied mathematically.

"Flows
of vehicles on the roadway are very similar to water flowing through a
pipe or air flowing over an airplane wing," he says. Ideally, you want
the flow to be smooth, or laminar, rather than turbulent.
Yvan
Chartrand, president and founder of the 5th Wheel Training Institute,
which has campuses in Warwick and New Liskeard, Ont., and graduates up
to 700 new truck operators each year, said the technique is simple. He
did it himself.

"They create a buffer zone in front of them so if
the cars ahead do stop, the trucks don’t stop. If they did it well,
these truckers didn’t stop. They kept going, and when it was time to
shrink down to one lane of traffic, they went one behind the other and
went past the construction, and then the cars were allowed to pass,"
Chartrand explains.

In the process, the truckers avoid a
situation where, near a bottleneck, they would have to keep stopping
and starting their trailers, which takes much longer and requires much
more space than a car to do so.

As a driver, he says, "you
don’t take the time to think these things out, you’ll think these
trucks are holding you up. But if you were in a helicopter and saw how
it all plays out, you would see that when it shrank to one lane, there
was no waiting, no stopping; it was easier on the brakes, the clutch,
fuel, and it saved energy and frustration."
Chartrand says
students are not taught such tactics as part of the school’s
curriculum, but instructors pass on their experience when students ask
questions.

Most truckers get paid by the kilometre, not the hour, so
they need to get where they’re going as quickly and efficiently as
possible.

You might conclude, then, that the tactic is less an act of altruism than selfishness.

"I
think it was probably a safe, but selfish act, to keep themselves
moving, and not force themselves to do a dangerous manoeuvre," says Ed
Popkie, the Institute’s executive director.

Of course, car
drivers are selfish, too. They typically don’t let big rigs merge into
their lanes, especially when they’re rushing to get to the cottage on a
long weekend.

So rather than find themselves in a situation
where they might have to wait long periods for a sympathetic car
driver, or get frustrated and possibly cut someone off, truckers
sometimes "take control of the situation," Popkie says.

They’ll use their CB radios to call a trucker near them and arrange themselves to safely and smoothly keep their wheels moving. "You
might call out and say, `Okay, it’s a go, we’re going from two to one
lane up here. Let’s stick side by each. I’ll let you in when we get to
the end, and we’ll make it through,’" Popkie says.

While it may end up helping everybody in a bottleneck, it’s certainly not legal, police say.When
truckers travel side-by-side clogging up both lanes of a highway,
police call it an "elephant race" — because they’re big and slow.

"That’s
an offence," says Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Cam Woolley, adding
the OPP gets occasional complaints about the practice. "It’s failing to
keep right, or unnecessarily slow driving."

Truckers have used blocking in the past to protest high fuel prices, he says, or simply to be mischievous.

Woolley
cautions that it’s not up to truckers to control traffic. "If they
wanted to maintain their own speed, to not stop and start, they should
do that in the right-hand lane."

Chartrand pleads common sense. He says truckers’ actions, like everyone else’s, must be considered in context.

"Is
the trucker’s intent to slow the traffic up, or is it his intention to
make sure everyone gets there better and faster?" he asks. "Even though
technically it may not be legal, what’s wrong with it?"

"It’s
possible," Woolley concedes, "if they were going as fast as they could
without having to stop, it could have been a benefit to traffic, yes."

So the next time you find yourself in an elephant race, it may be useful to remember the story of the tortoise and the hare:

Slow and steady… slow and steady.

Why Europeans Work Less Than Americans

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Steven Landsburg in Forbes Magazine misinterprets what a union is (or could be) — seeing it as a source of coercive rules rather than as a mechanism for coordinating actions, but does have some interesting things to say about how many hours people work in different countries, and why there is a pressure to work a similar amount to everyone else.

Compared
to Europeans, Americans are more likely to be employed and more likely
to work longer hours–employed Americans put in about three hours more
per week than employed Frenchmen. Most importantly, Americans take
fewer (and shorter) vacations. The average American takes off less than
six weeks a year; the average Frenchman almost twelve. The world
champion vacationers are the Swedes, at 16 and a half weeks per year.

This raises more than one interesting question. First,
why do Americans choose to work so much? (Or, if you prefer, why do
Europeans choose to work so little?) Second, who’s happier?

… One
trio of economists (Ed Glaeser of Harvard, Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth
and Jose Scheinkman of Princeton) offers this explanation: When your
wages are cut 20%, you take more vacations. But when your friends’ wages are also cut 20%, you’ll take even  more
vacations, because vacations are more fun when you’ve got friends to
share them with. So a 20% across-the-board tax hike, which affects both
you and your friends, yields a more dramatic response than a 20% cut in
your own wages.

An overlapping trio (Glaeser, Sacerdote, and
Harvard’s Albert Alesina) give some credence to this "social
multiplier" theory…but claim to have identified the primary culprit in European
labor regulations. While 20% of American workers are unionized, more
than 80% of workers are unionized in France and Sweden. And while
American unions have spent the past few decades fighting for higher
wages, European unions have fought for shorter hours.

Is that a
good thing or a bad thing? According to traditional economic theory,
workers are best off when they can decide for themselves how much to
work. Some workers might choose long hours and big paychecks; others
might choose less income and long vacations.

Union-inspired
regulations, by restricting individual choice, can only make those
workers worse off. But here’s what traditional theory overlooks: If you
live in Europe, then union regulations not only force you to work less; they also force your  friends to work less–which can be a blessing if you’re trying to coordinate a camping trip.

So
at least in principle, coercive union rules could be good for everyone.
So, for that matter, could high marginal tax rates, and for exactly the
same reason: The more your friends are taxed, the easier it is to coax
them into taking time off to share your vacation time.

…If European and American paths continue to diverge, we’ll
soon learn a lot more about whether well-rested Frenchmen are happier
than wealthy Americans.

Steven Landsburg is an economics professor at the University of Rochester and the author of The Armchair Economist  and Fair Play.

(Link: Why Europeans Work Less Than Americans – Forbes.com.

Blood and Money

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Stumbling and Mumbling often points me to things I didn’t know. A few days ago he pointed to this:

if you treat everyone as if they were motivated by money alone, you might drive out these higher motives and worsen management-labour relations. There’s some evidence that this happens in blood donations; if you pay people to give blood, some stop giving.

And links to a paper by some Kiwi researchers that shows it can happen. People donate blood for a variety of reasons, but part of it is because we want to be the kind of person who does their civic duty. If you pay people to donate blood, they no longer get this kind of boost. As a result, some people who previously gave blood no longer do. It makes sense, but the idea that paying people to do something makes them stop doing it takes some getting used to.

The original suggestion was made by RIchard Titmuss in 1970, but it was met by what some Swedish researchers refer to (presumably overly-generously) as "skepticism", including rebuttals by two Nobel prize winners (Arrow, Solow).

And yet it looks like Titmuss was right and Arrow and Solow wrong. There have been some recent theoretical studies on it too (Benabou and Tirole). The reasoning is similar to the work by Akerlof and Kranton that is the subject of Chapter 11.

Paradigm-Busting

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I got my author copies of the book today.

Pretty exciting!

It looks good – the cover is the tipped over shopping cart/trolley that I posted a couple of posts down. The colour (turquoise with a touch of grey, if that makes any sense) works, and I like the image a lot.

The book is a trade paperback size (6" by 10") and its 240 pages are in a well-spaced, good sized, easy to read font (Stone). There’s a continuity between the cover and the inside – the fonts for the headings are repeated on the cover, and the star that is used as a separator between sections is used again on the cover (a reference to Wal*Mart). There’s even a shade of grey inside, used for the chapter numbers, which gives a slightly classier feel.

I hadn’t seen the index (done by yours truly) in final form before, and it looks fine. I didn’t end up putting any of those Easter Eggs in that you see in some indexes (eg, No Logo has an index entry for "index, puzzling self reference to" on page 437 (or something) which is, of course, the page the index entry appears on). Still, there is something oddly personal about indexes – there can’t be too many that have all of the following index entries in them:

asymmetric information
beer
Dirty Pretty Things
focal point effect
gene stacking
hydrogen bomb
intermolecular forces
organized crime
Qin, Emperor of China
Ulysses Unbound (Jon Elster)
van der Waals, Johannes
wildebeeste

And as a bonus, there is a great review comment on the back from Jim Stanford, Canadian Auto Workers economist, Globe and Mail columnist, and an energetic commentator in many places. Here’s what he has to say:

Conservatives dress up their destructive policy prescriptions in the language of ‘individual choice.’ Tom Slee’s paradigm-busting book shows there are other, better ways for society to make choices. Marvelous and timely.

Now that’s a lot better than "uneven" from the other day.

Book Review

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Good news! the first review of No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart has appeared!

Bad news: it’s not what I’d call glowing.

Nevertheless, in the interests of full and fair disclosure, and gritting my teeth, I hereby reproduce the whole thing. I understand that the protocol for real authors is that you don’t criticize reviews, and I’ll do my best imitation of a real author and bite my tongue.

It’s from the June 2006 edition of Quill & Quire, p. 51.

Anyone who has tried to shepherd a child through the endless rows of toys in a department store with the proviso that only one item may be purchased knows the emotional devastation that can be wrought from the dilemma of too many choices. It’s the deceptive nature of choice in our society that provides the focal point for Tom Slee’s philosophical inquiry into how and why we do certain things, even when our decisions conflict with our moral compass.

Slee, a research scientist and software professional, is intrigued by the notion that a society marketing itself as full of wondrous choices is nonetheless marked by a happiness quotient that’s in continual decline.

We do have choices, from whether or not to smoke, drive vehicles with poor safety records, eat foods high in trans fats, or buy certain brands of shoes and clothing. But Slee wonders whether those choices are determined by free will or are driven by a hidden hand, a cultural subtext that provides only the illusion of freedom.

To illustrate his points, Slee creates a number of scenarios in the fictitious community of Whimsley, where Jack and Jill deal with issues such as the conflict between shopping in a suburban big box or supporting downtown independent stores, or the pros and cons of using lawyers during a divorce. All of these things, Slee argues, involve different levels of choice, and in some situations, a lack of choice actually results in a better outcome. He also explores the world of game theory with respect to choice, and analyzes the role of what he calls MarketThink — the logic of the so-called free market that has driven economics for the past few decades (also known as globalization or corporate control).

Unfortunately, Slee’s approach is often difficult to follow as he tries to piece together these various strands. It’s almost as if Slee falls victim to having too many choices with regard to settling on a writing style, making for an uneven text that could have benefited from more coherence and continuity. Slee also makes numerous references to the notion of collective action as an alternative to MarketThink, but this thesis is never really developed, leaving the reader wondering why Slee chose not to explore what seems like a logical conclusion to the book’s central issue. – Matthew Behrens, a writer and editor in Toronto.

Oddly enough, I actually knew Mr. Behrens slightly many years ago.

How could this review be rephrased? how about this?

emotional … philosopical … moral.

Oh well. On to the next one!

Lots of cars => fond of cars?

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I don’t have much to stay about this – I just need a place to keep a quote.

Here is an paragraph from Saturday’s (May 6) Kitchener-Waterloo Record, which ran a survey about the most important issues that Waterloo Region will have to deal with in the next five years.  The big ones are public goods: transport, healthcare, population growth, and clean water. There is a significant fall-off after that to taxes, almagamation, infrastructure, education, and housing.

Anyway, here it is:

Statistics from Waterloo regional police suggest residents here are fond of their cars. Since 1993, the region’s population has increased about 15 per cent while the number of cars registered in the region jumped about 34 percent. Registered vehicles in the region totalled 228,000 in 1993. Today, that figure is 390,000.

You do see this logic all the time. It uses an implicit revealed preference argument: we have bought more cars, so we must like them (be fond of them). It’s at the root of a lot of the claims about consumer sovereignty and the economy.  But it’s wrong, of course. Buying a car (or not) is a reaction to the transport system you live in, not an expression of some kind of fondness, and a small change that helps to shape that transport system.