Watershed versus Pooled Models for Transit and Government

The most significant factor contributing to traffic congestion is time on the road (TOTR), a variable strongly correlated with energy consumption. In contrast, the goal of public transit is universal service, which addresses a separate, incompatible problem. Universal service implements a watershed scheme, where arterial routes feed into transfer stations that connect with urban centers, all of which increases patron TOTR while delay penalties mount with distance traveled due to transit stops picking up and letting off passengers.

However, a pooled model minimizes TOTR, conserves energy, and relieves congestion, while eliminating long distance delay penalties, and positively impacts the issues of imported oil and global warming. Only when commuters with the same destination are neighbors do point-to-point ride sharing opportunities exist. One low tech way to promote ride sharing is a street map pinned to a company bulletin board, where pins represent home locations, and then encourage coworkers to become neighbors, and to carpool or van-pool or bus-pool. New behaviors are necessary to put this plan into action. Then tracking changes in fuel consumption at the community level will provide vital feedback on coordinating efforts, while serving as a competitive incentive and raising public consciousness.

Ideas, information, education, tools, feedback, and incentives are all deficient for a coordinated community level response to the problems currently facing us. America's top priority needs to be a major paradigm shift in thinking. The onus on government to deliver watershed answers has eroded personal responsibility and activism. Instead the onus needs to be on pooled efforts, like community organization and personal involvement.

"Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." – Albert Einstein

A serious disconnect exists between conventional solutions and today's problems. Problems get sidetracked by ideologies into ill conceived "solutions" with wasteful implementations that fail to address the underlying problems.

America is suffering from industrial age attitudes. War, mass transit, factory style schools, etc. are technical solutions to social problems, and symptoms of a systemic meltdown. Living in an information vacuum expecting government to deliver watershed solutions to social problems is misplaced loyalty. As a remedy, America needs to embrace information age, coordinated, parallel, distributed paradigms, which require community organization, dissemination of information to appropriate levels, personal involvement and commitment, and frequent reality checks. The pooled model not the watershed model.

Public education is one indispensable role of government. Now more than ever we need to rewrite the textbook. Conventional wisdom got us into this mess. It's going to take unconventional wisdom to get us out of it.

Need for Reporting Community Gas Consumption Statistics

Supply and demand will never fix the oil crisis. Miles per gallon is a pacifier. This narrow focus treats consumers like babies. A broader, adult perspective is warranted thinking in terms of reducing our per capita oil consumption on a community wide scale. Until we do that, government and oil companies will dictate the agenda, while transportation policies falter.

Commuter gas consumption is proportional to time and distance traveled, which aren't directly observable. SOV and SUV drivers are merely scapegoats. With built in time delays, public transit penalizes long distance commuters. So they opt out. But we need commuters to opt in, with time saving alternatives. Time is oil!

Theoretically, great gains in energy conservation are achievable by self-organizing commuters. If those who work in the same vicinity were neighbors, then direct point-to-point bus, van, or carpool service would reduce gas consumption while relieving traffic congestion, when measured at the community level.

Seeing how self-organization works at a job site is simple using this low-tech technique: display a street map with pins marking commuter home locations, so people can organize themselves. Getting people to see problems in a different light is the first hurdle. Moving the pins to cluster together means moving residences. The obstacle to implementing this idea is changing behavior in the real estate market. Raising consumer awareness to new perspectives is just the beginning.

Commuting is akin to a sorting problem. From computer science the fastest sorting algorithm for repetitive sorts is a presort. Let me explain. Take a deck of cards and try to rearrange it into numerical order by suit. If the deck is presorted then it's already in goal order. Anything out of order takes time. The greater the disorder the longer the time penalty. Commuters are the largest transportation segment of repetitive sorting, traveling the same route every workday for months or years. As a group over time, work and home locations change little.

The best theoretical solution is for commuters to live within walking distance of work, but cities aren't designed to support this option. Why not? Rehabilitating disaster areas, like New Orleans after Katrina, should seriously consider this game plan. The next best solution is for commuters, who work in the same vicinity, to live within the same neighborhood. This is the presort solution. A computer disk defragment program is an analogy. Buses line up at park and ride lots to deliver fans to sports games. This is more of the same idea.

Neighborhoods could organize themselves to shop "downtown" or at Wal-Mart en masse, supported by business sponsored point-to-point transportation services. Local governments could tax businesses on the number of parking spots they maintain, offset by the number of pooled transportation patrons they serve. This would get corporate America involved in finding oil smart solutions and aid efforts to modify consumer behavior. Reinforcing policy changes like these are needed at all levels of government.

Using analogies, the weakness of existing public transit alternatives is easy to expose. Scatter a deck of cards face down. Pick four company locations, one for each suit. Design a set of transit lines with stations along the route to serve this mock community. Turn the cards face up and check the results. Repeat this exercise with sports trading cards, which have many more teams to represent companies.

Experiment! Analogies allow us to fathom the incomprehensible, better than any other method. We're missing the big picture on oil policy because the problem space is beyond our grasp. We need to open our minds eye to better solutions than the current batch have hatched. Education leads the way.

How did we get into this mess? The government tax and spend strategy favors mass transit over citizen mobilization efforts. Supply side economics favors disorganized consumers. Effective organization requires better ideas with tailored information so individuals can best serve their own long range interests, not just short term whims. At its core we need a market forces strategy, with better informed producers and consumers.

One of my colleagues pioneered the simple rules for simulating flocking behavior, used in the computer graphics and artificial intelligence fields. But flocking behavior rules, like estimated gas mileage and oil prices, are proving inadequate. We need to model migration behavior, which encompasses a longer range perspective. We need to introduce new attitudes to help visualize how migration is possible, since migration is necessary.

Oil is a non-renewable resource. We need to instill survivable and sustainable habits to better judge our heading in our collective migration forward. Measuring and reporting energy consumption is a start. Successfully avoiding a catastrophic collapse of civilization may depend upon it. A rapid return to normal is impossible. Higher oil prices are the new norm.

Calculating seasonally adjusted per capita gas consumption statistics and reporting them at the local level would help promote a mature, migratory mindset. The data should be available, but it's not in this format or widely publicized. Differing by location, it's the volume of all oil deliveries over time divided by the number of local residents.

Factors like heating and tourism will make spatial comparisons unreliable. Temporal comparisons will be more instructive. Like a report card tracking progress, temporal trends should encourage much needed hope, incentive, innovation, and action. The competition between regions could prove interesting. Just imagine. What would Los Angeles be like if commuters were self-organized?

Congestion Relief: Zoning Reform

Plan and implement measures to integrate our economic and social spheres. Real estate zoning practices segregate commercial from residential property. The current split has weakened our communities. Treatment should heal and reinvigorate public discourse.

Shorten Distance: It is a fallacy to blame traffic congestion entirely on Single Occupancy Vehicles (SOV) and to deny the significance of distance traveled. Daily trip miles translate directly into traffic congestion.

Congestion Relief: Visualize the Future

The future can only be different. Either way, pressures exist to attain lower energy usage levels. Establish a contest and forum to define visions of the future. Post all entries on the Internet. Professionals and university professors will form a panel of judges. Awards will take the form of recognition in categories selected by the judges, which may vary year to year. Post rules on the Internet. Schools will be encouraged to help students, inhabitants of the future, compete as classroom teams. Practicality and novelty should be considered preeminent. Not only the end, but also the means – to achieve it – must be stated and accompany every submission.

Congestion Relief: Urban Colonies

Roads pave over much of the urban landscape. A casual observer realizes the dominance of automobiles in urban planning. Roads and parking facilities fill a disproportionate share of our living space. Prepare an urban renewal agenda to plow under streets, reclaim usable real estate, and establish walking and biking communities, in the liberated area.

Congestion Relief: Track Progress

Keep track of progress on congestion relief goals. Our society is the result of accumulated transformations down through the past and up to the present. Priorities and goals must be monitored and adapted in this changing environment. Measure progress and report it as soon as the information is available. Items to cover include tax revenues and spending; traffic volume, delays, and peek capacity speed, at standardized places; oil consumption, in some practical breakdown; and public participation in congestion relief programs. Conduct public opinion polls. Post all results on the Internet.

Congestion Relief: Task Forces

Establish task force commissions with targeted objectives.

The traffic congestion problem space is too vast to attack on a single front. Divide and conquer is a tried-and-true approach that turns big problems into smaller, manageable ones of narrower scope. Identifying and isolating specialized categories improves the chances of success. Task forces contain the tools to tackle clearly defined objectives: compartmentalized congestion relief goals. For each autonomous task force, guidance is encapsulated in its mission statement - its marching orders, which are the means to govern control and feedback.

Empowerment Task Force: The mission is to advance the vision and goals of congestion relief in the public interest.
Mobility Task Force: The mission is to reduce trip distance and frequency in the public interest.
Optimization Task Force: The mission is to improve our transportation system operating efficiency in the public interest.
Ride Sharing Task Force: The mission is to increase vehicle occupancy in the public interest.

A term format gives each task force chief authority, responsibility, and independence, within defined task force constraints; and accountability, to taxpayer investors. Participatory democracy must be encouraged. Public scrutiny and criticism come with the job. The overall intent is to attract public servants of conviction and sound judgment to serve as task force chiefs.

The primary duty of each task force is to prepare proposals and manage contracts that support the task force mission statement. Stated proposal objectives must be specific and measurable. Proposals must be posted on the Internet and open to criticism. Each task force solicits and evaluates contract bids on its own proposals. Freedom of information is honored and encouraged. Funding competition will take place between proposals. A majority approval of the joint chiefs is required to fund a proposal - subject to available tax funds, of course.

Upon proposal approval, a contract will be awarded and the performance monitored by its originating task force. Contracts must have a limited duration, not to exceed the term limit of the task force chief. As politicians face competition at term boundaries, contracts and contract renewals should be open to competition too. Winners must not be decided by lowest bid alone, but by cost/benefit analysis that takes into account experience and quality issues – the way a savvy investor decides.

Each task force chief manages an independent budget. Task force budgets are approved by a majority of the joint chiefs. Within their budgets each task force is allowed a small permanent staff not to exceed seven in number. The small permanent staff restriction concentrates attention on task force goals and inhibits bureaucratic growth. Permanent staff members perform duties that help create task force policy, generate proposals, solicit and evaluate bids, cost/benefit analysis, award contracts, contract overview, prepare semi-annual reports, etc.

Each task force has an obligation to pursue matching grants. A lone funding source attracts predators and parasites, until it is depleted and dies. Joint funding spreads costs and permits a wider range of proposals to be considered for implementation with outsider checks and balances. It also increases the visibility of task force causes at the community level, at the state level and nationally – ensuring survival of congestion relief goals.

Each task force must publish a semi-annual report on the Internet. It must include or contain links to its balance sheet, the task force mission statement, philosophy and policies to meet its task force objectives, accountings of proposals and contracts, measures of progress, a timeline of significant events, any mid-course corrections, and future projections. Open proceedings and close scrutiny are essential to providing an accurate and meaningful accounting.

Open Competition: A forum must be open to public debate, through the Internet and town meetings, to attract the best, worst and wildest ideas imaginable. Each Task Force then filters through this treasure of ideas to generate proposals relevant to their mission statement.

Congestion Relief: Slogan Campaign

Positive slogans reinforce positive behavior. Become part of the solution. Ride share and share life. Join the solution. Hop on the bandwagon. Pass the bucket. The bucket stops here. The oil stops here.

Congestion Relief: Real Estate Market Exchange

It allows people to place buy and sell orders for single or packaged properties, which are maintained within a database with free access via the Internet. People can seek opportunities to improve ride sharing possibilities without putting their houses on the real estate market.

Congestion Relief: Real Estate Congestion

Traffic congestion is caused by real estate congestion – the limited prospects of buying a home. Disorganized traffic patterns are caused by disorganized real estate patterns. The current real estate market is stifled by tradition. Affordability is not the primary reason that dictates where people live – availability is. For ride sharing to succeed, as the major contributor to congestion relief it has the potential to become, people who commute to the same vicinity need to become neighbors. Neighbor ride sharing appeals to a wider clientèle than mass transit alternatives because of its unrestricted coverage. The majority hates paying taxes to benefit a minority. Incentives empower those who help themselves. Reimbursement benefits, due to their distributed nature, are open to any resident within or any commuter into the jurisdiction.

To visualize the extent of this problem requires only wall space, investment in a street map and box of push pins, and the motivation to make a difference. Disorder becomes obvious when push pins are stuck into the map at the residence addresses of commuters who work within the same vicinity. As a visual reminder, street maps and push pins can counteract out-of-sight out-of-mind apathy. The goal of this lifestyle changing exercise is to rally the push pins into clusters to promote and advance ride sharing. To facilitate and reward residence moves, toward this end, relocation expenses that improve neighbor ride sharing need reimbursement. Some people are more altruistic than others, and might be willing and able to participate at lower reimbursement levels. To achieve target levels, reimbursement levels should be adjustable to induce customer demand as necessary. To achieve the greatest gain for the least cost, competition between commuters is needed.

To avoid a bureaucratic nightmare of processing claims, disbursements will be made available to commuters through escrow. Disbursements, paid via Electronic Fund Transfers, can only be sought and redeemed, one per commuter, during escrow on owner occupied property transactions. It is the responsibility of escrow companies to certify a ride sharing gain, with criminal penalties for fraud. The names and addresses of all partners within ride sharing distance, which varies with commute distance, must be recorded. The buyer must supply proof. Disbursements of different denominations can be offered to balance commuter demand and available funds. A database will manage these disbursements. Closeness and numbers determine ride sharing gains. The number of eligible disbursements, on qualified separate transactions, for an individual commuter is not limited.

Taxpayers cannot afford full reimbursement. The instantaneous gratification of total compensation is prohibitively expensive. A calculator program is needed to show people the time until break even on ride sharing cost savings from fuel, car maintenance, and car insurance, etc. based on distances, the number ride sharing, and travel time.

To promote a local market for housing clusters, disbursements can be use to defray costs to form real estate holding companies of shareholder occupied properties. With the proper legal foundation, moving should become cheaper and easier – with less red tape. As with Stock Markets, a dynamic, high volume, real estate market should create competition for an expanded range of services including discount brokers. This could also be leveraged to mitigate the current mortgage crisis.

Congestion Relief: Real Estate Rewards

Get real estate agents involvement with cash incentives to steer home buyers to locate in neighborhoods with ride sharing partners.

Congestion Relief: Public Service Campaign

Produce television public service announcements that are also available as Internet videos. Fables and parables teach appropriate behavior through analogy. New territory is hard for many to comprehend. Some people are hard to reach, but humor can help create a lasting impression. Imagine the following videos in the Seattle area, where mass transit has been a fiasco.

Moving Assistance video: The Commuter Presort message can be communicated with a volunteer cast of thousands forming a bucket brigade, moving hundreds of household items along the sidewalks of our communities – over hills, across bridges and past landmarks - to their new home. By ferry or ski lift we follow the move. Play is halted at sporting events for fans and players to join a bucket brigade outside on the sidewalk, baffling the opposing team. After the flow passes, the umpire shouts, “Play ball.” Musicians and audience – dressed in tux and gown – file onto the sidewalk outside a symphony hall to keep books, furniture, goldfish in a fishbowl, kitchen utensils, docile pet cat, and buckets moving along.

Casting Call video: Crafting this new self-image should be fun. Seattle Seafair pirates can begin the move by ransacking the starting home and passing belongings to a mixture of: ordinary citizens, people dressed in costume, members of supporting organizations - like trade unions and church choirs, until finally Seattle celebrities ask, “Where does this go?”

On Time video: With a volunteer cast of thousands, a stadium can be emptied in choreographed fashion. Each row of people remains seated waiting in turn to stand and take to the stairs in precision then proceed to the exits and to buses parked outside, where they load into labeled school buses - from districts throughout the region. Airport flight attendants give the safety rundown aboard each bus as ground crews, with flashlight wands, direct bus departures. Rated best “ON TIME” service in the industry.

Rat Race video: Inside a bus, cheerful passengers sway and sing a song in multi-part harmony. “Thank you mister bus driver, bus driver, bus driver. Thank you mister bus driver. Thanks for the ride. We went this way, and that way, and this way, and that way. Thank you mister bus driver. Thanks for the ride.” Viewed from outside, the bus turns into a bank parking lot where the sports fans depart to parked cars, exchange good-byes, and leave for home. Voice over: “Forget the rat race. Rejoin the human race. Ride share.”

A Better Deal video: The educational show-and-tell approach of proof is needed to create believers and missionaries, not just followers. On a split screen, top and bottom, two decks of cards sit face-up on a green felt background. The top deck is then shuffled. Dealing starts from both decks simultaneously. Each half screen shows its own timer. In the top half screen, cards are placed down in piles of the same suit. When the deck is depleted each pile is sorted from King to Ace and spread on the table. At the same time in the bottom half screen, thirteen cards are counted from the top of the deck then spread on the table. The cards are presorted. This is repeated for the next thirteen cards and so forth until done. Each timer stops when its process is finished. The timer on bottom stops much sooner than the timer on top. The top is labeled, “Late 20th Century Suburbs.” The bottom is labeled, “A Better Deal.”

Congestion Relief: Public Education

The purpose, rules and etiquette of congestion relief goals must be debated and clarified to have a lasting contribution. Establish a web site for environment friendly tips and ratings as an avenue to direct positive changes in behavior.

Congestion Relief: Parking Space Market Exchange

Park & Ride Lots take space and concentrate traffic patterns. Create a database with free access via the Internet to manage available parking spaces or parking spaces freed by ride sharing to be used as ride sharing collection points. Entries need to include number of spaces, times of day, and days of week – like during church and bank off-hours.

Congestion Relief: Moving Expense Tax Deduction

Our national congressional delegation is hereby authorized to sponsor legislation to amend the Internal Revenue Service code for the Moving Expenses form 3903 to allow deductions of non-reimbursed expenses from moves made to improve neighbor ride sharing. Requested deductible items include costs of escrow, title insurance, building inspection, broker commissions, mortgage origination and movers.

Congestion Relief: Mobilize Activists

Coordinate volunteer and grassroots efforts in support of congestion relief goals. Create a single source to draw media attention to congestion relief events.

Congestion Relief: Information Sharing

During World War II the US airplane manufacturers formed an alliance of cooperation rather than competition. Airplane plans were shared, so previously competing companies could manufacturer the same airplanes. In the process proprietary information was exchanged. This experiment during the war was a success, but not business as usual. Scientific knowledge has advanced because of the information sharing technique.

The US airline industry could be much more energy efficient, if only the anti-trust restrictions on collaboration between competing carriers was suspended. This would take a war on oil attitude and government regulation, so conspiring airlines don’t exploit cartel induced monopoly markets. If a market can support more than one flight a day, then one airline should not receive a monopoly to ensure some level of competition.

Congestion Relief: Growth Management

Redirect urban planning toward congestion relief goals. Curtail suburban sprawl. Infill the urban landscape. Restrict building and development practices. Co-locate residences near businesses.

Congestion Relief: Fuel Taxes

Tax on fuel consumption to provoke changes in behavior and overcome our addiction to cheap fuel. Raise tax level on fuel to penalize consumption and reflect the true cost of low priced fuel consumption as it pertains to traffic congestion. Directed at encouraging conservation measures and decreasing the competitive disadvantages of promising alternate technologies. Vehicle expenses include operations, maintenance, and the capital cost of the vehicle. By increasing the price of fuel, an operating expense, the competitive balance of the three expense categories changes. Vehicles that are more fuel efficient become more attractive to buyers relative to less fuel efficient versions. At high enough tax levels spontaneous driving patterns diminish, trips become better planned, and shorter commuting distances are favored. Raising fuel taxes in a controlled fashion can better accommodate the economic impact than the pending catastrophe awaiting us when oil reserves, a non-renewable resource, become depleted. Sooner or later, controlled or uncontrolled, changes on this order are inevitable. An artificial crisis is easier to plan and survive.

A blanket effort is required. Otherwise people will drive outside the impacted area to buy fuel at depressed levels, and thus obstruct progress along these fronts. Multi-level target groups might be necessary. Exemption and partial exemption from fuel taxes would be analogous to subsidies. Freight trucks and farm equipment could be exempted to forestall inflation of food and consumer prices, whereas no personal vehicles should ever be exempted. To localize taxes, for instance higher in urban areas where more options for behavior modification exist, require all gas stations to use government sponsored and special issue credit/debit cards or non-exempt standard alternatives like cash or normal credit cards. The credit card system must be able to distinguish commercial from personal use, i.e. diesel from gasoline, and apply the appropriate tax rate based upon user residence address.

Short Term: Public notice of hardships along with requirements for sacrifice and change.
Long Term: Diminished mobility and optimized travel.

Congestion Relief: Famous Ride Sharers Game

Post a compilation of images on the Internet where people can nominate and submit their own choices – including “us.”

Examples are: Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, Bonnie and Clyde, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, the Beverly Hillbillies, Trojan Horse Greeks, armed forces crews from local bases, Oregon Trail pioneers, the Jamaican bobsled team, Vikings, pirates, parade queen and court float, TV Batman and Robin, Starship Enterprise crews, school and professional sports teams at away games, and the D-Day invasion flotilla.