TOPDOG08.COM

« Tis the Season | Main | Here is the video »

November 22, 2005

To pre-merge or not to pre-merge?

One of life's greater mysteries, no doubt.

In general, I am not a Freakonomics fan, but Kos linked to this and I read it:

When I used to commute, there was one particular interchange where incivility ruled. (For those who know Chicago, it is where the Dan Ryan feeds into the Eisenhower.) There are two lanes when you exit the highway. One lane goes to other highway, the other goes to a surface street. Hardly anyone ever wants to go that surface street. There can be a half-mile backup of cars waiting patiently to get on the highway, and about 20% of the drivers rudely and illegally cut in at the last second after pretending they are heading toward the surface street. Every honest person that waits in line is delayed 15 minutes or more because of the cheaters.

Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of “identity.” It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision. That leads you to take actions that are seemingly not in your short-run best interest. In economics, George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton popularized the idea. I had read their papers, but in general have such a weak sense of identity that I never really understood what they were talking about. The first time I really got what they meant was when I realized that a key part of my identity was that I was not the kind of person who would cut in line to shorten my commute, even though it would be easy to do so, and seemed crazy to wait for 15 minutes in this long line. But, if I were to cut in line, I would have to fundamentally rethink the kind of person I was.

The fact that I don’t mind when my taxi driver cuts in these lines (actually, I kind of enjoy it) probably shows that I have a long ways to go in my moral development.

All this is actually just a rambling prelude to my main point. I was in New York City the other day and my taxi cab driver bypassed a long line of cars exiting the freeway to cut in at the last second. As usual, I enjoyed being an innocent bystander/beneficiary to this little crime. But what happened next was even more gratifying to the economist in me. A police officer was standing in the middle of the road, waving every car that cut in line over to the shoulder, where a second officer was handing out tickets like an assembly line. By my rough estimate, these two officers were giving out 30 tickets an hour at $115 a pop. At over $1,500 per officer per hour (assuming the tickets get paid), this was a fantastic money making proposition for the city. And it nails just the right people. Speeding doesn’t really hurt other people very much, except indirectly. So to my mind it makes much more sense to go directly after the mean-spirited behavior like cutting in line. This is very much in the spirit of Bratton’s “broken windows” policing philosophy. I’m not sure it cuts down the number of cheaters on the roads in any fundamental way since the probability of getting caught remains vanishly small. Still, the beauty of it is that (1) every driver that follows the rules feels a rush of glee over the rude drivers getting nailed, and (2) it is a very efficient way of taxing bad behavior.

So, my policy recommendation to police departments across the country is to find the spots on the roads that lend themselves to this sort of policing and let the fun begin.

A commenter immediately points out the corollary:

I gotta blame road designers for these “extended merge” situations also. The proliferation of stop lights on many road contributes to the problem as it creates more bottlenecks – more opportunities to pass people who have “pre-merged”.

The interesting thing to me, is that many of these situations would largely go away if a large number of drivers refuses to “pre merge.” I would like to see more drivers would do this as it’s “difficult” for one vehicle to occupy the empty lane as the “blocker” to prevent opportunists from racing by, but it is “easy” for a many vehicles to achieve the same end by filling up both lanes until the merge must occur. There’s something to strength in numbers.

It is true. If everyone waited until the merge point to merge, line jumping would not be a problem. I've even seen road signs in New York telling people not to merge yet, which is why I'm suprised about those traffic tickets being issued. However, I am a pre-merger myself, because the truth is that in many cases it is not possible or practical to wait for the merge point, and the only ones who do are usually the line-jumpers. As a result, a lot of pre-mergers will not let you merge. Single-lane exits are a clear case where you should pre-merge, but I think the easiest solution would be signs on the roads to clearly indicate when drivers should actually wait until the merge point and when they should not. If no sign, then pre-merge.

That way the cops would be on much clearer legal ground to give line-jumpers tickets, and drivers would no longer have to struggle with one of life's unanswered questions. To pre-merge or not to pre-merge?

Posted by Mike at November 22, 2005 03:05 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.topdog08.com/cgi-bin/mt-trackback.cgi/876

Comments

Post a comment