Self-Interest And Collaborative Systems

Something else I wrote ended up on the Undercurrent blog today; this is something I've been working on at varying levels of intensity for months and months. I'll save the whole story for a bit later, so here it is: Self-Interest And Collaborative Systems.

I'm pasting the body below, so a little preview before you dive into one of the longer things I've written: Driving a car is a hassle for a lot of reasons – more and more cars for limited road capacity is one of the big ones. Congestion can lead to a lot of frustration, feelings of isolation (which is interesting since driving is a communal activity), and selfish behavior (cutting people off, not letting other cars merge into your lane, running red lights, rubbernecking at accidents, etc). I explore how different forms of digital in transportation can be used and combined with other things to lower selfish behavior and encourage drivers to be more collaborative on the road. Traffic is a system, after all, and one selfish move can throw ripples of inefficiency throughout the entire thing. Interested? Read on!

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The increase in the number of cars on the road over the past few decades has created headaches for everyone, from drivers to transportation planners and law enforcement. Advances in digital technology over the past several years, however, have made driving in some places less of a pain. For instance, digital signage on busy roads can alert drivers of alternate routes if there is an accident up ahead. Automakers have been working on Adaptive Cruise Control technology to help regulate your car’s speed in relation to the ones around you. GPS systems now plan your routes based on real time traffic data pulled from sensors, news stations, and other drivers over time.

But a well connected network is only part of the solution to chronic traffic issues. For the past few years, drivers have been using tools that largely focus on making each individual user’s life easier, when we really need to be moving toward innovation designed to make the system as a whole more efficient. And for this to fully work, people must then learn to use new technologies in less self-interested (and more responsible) ways.

PEOPLE AREN’T PROGRAMMED TO COLLABORATE IN ANY UNORGANIZED SYSTEM

From driving to work to standing in line at the store, people don’t tend to think of themselves as part of a system when they make decisions. Everyone has an agenda when they’re on the road, and different individual factors – personal speed preferences, schedules, and desired destinations – contribute to the fact that drivers largely act in their own self-interest. Personal agendas are compounded by the fact that, despite being a communal activity, being stuck in traffic can feel very isolating – everyone is alone in their own vehicles. This lowers their perceived proximity to (and empathy for) each other even more. What results is a transit version of the tragedy of the commons, and yields the opposite of what drivers are working toward – each person reacts to the unpredictable and selfish behavior of others near them, which, like dominoes, sends ripples throughout the entire system that lead to more delays and frustration over time.

Why do systems that transport things other than people run more smoothly? With fiber optic networks, for example, light is sent down a tube at different frequencies, and (like traffic) all of these pulses of light travel at different speeds. The difference here is that each of these pulses never goes at any other speed. When you design a fiber optic network, you can account for all of these predetermined differences, and everything will keep running smoothly. Humans are not pulses of light sent down a fiber optic tube, and are not programmed to interact with each other in predetermined ways (or drive at a constant speed at all times). But small digital steps can be taken to help drivers understand their role in a larger system, and encourage them to collaborate a little more with each other to help everything flow better than it does now.

GROWING OUR SYSTEM AWARENESS

The first step in increasing collaboration between people in a system is to help them understand that they are, in fact, part of one. The Spectrum of System Awareness below broadly outlines the different levels of understanding that one is part of a bigger network of people. A person acting in completely self-interested ways is at the very center (A) – they are going to get to their destination no matter what, other drivers be damned.

The next ring (B) represents a broader awareness to include people in one’s immediate vicinity – in front of and behind them, and on either side. People at this level may exhibit some degree of collaboration with the drivers around them – they will switch lanes if they see the person behind them is driving faster, for instance.

Drivers at the third ring (C) have an awareness of everyone else on the road, and while they might not think expressly that they are “all in this together,” they do tend to think about their actions invariably affecting everyone else.

People at the fourth ring (D) are the holy grail for a truly collaborative human system – they have a full understanding of the fact that they are part of a system that necessitates collaboration between all participants to run well.

The farther out from the center someone is, the more they realize that the whole (traffic) is greater than the sum of its parts (each driver), and the higher their likelihood of understanding the benefits of collaboration. Rather than trying to get everyone on the road to level D at the same time (which is unrealistic), the goal for automakers, technology companies, software developers and transportation planners should be to keep all of the levels in mind when designing new technology and experiences – this will ensure that there are tools in place to broaden everyone’s degree of system awareness, organically. Real-time reporting and feedback loops are two of the most straightforward ways to give people more awareness of the system they are part of, their position in it, and the effects of their actions on it as it is changing.

Real-Time Reporting– Traffic reporting is not new, but it has traditionally happened on a mass, one-to-everyone scale within cities (usually via the radio). Since digital technology has afforded us the option to slice content to make it more relevant and personalized to us, we have some interesting opportunities to zoom in a little and put real-time information into a more personal context.

Feedback Loops– You’ve probably heard of the kind of sensor technology that gives cars awareness of their immediate surroundings: cameras to help you parallel park better, or alert you when you’re getting too close to another car. A Volvo concept car debuted a new form of sensor at the Shanghai Motor Show last year: touch screen dashboard controls are embedded with eye tracking technology, and are only activated when you glance at the screen.

What if sensors and behavioral tracking (think Prius’s consumption monitor) were combined? Layering both external and behavioral reporting together make understanding one’s place in the broader system much easier. Imagine a combination of sensors that tracks your driving behavior and its effects on the cars in your immediate vicinity. Or, combine real time traffic data with Volvo’s eye tracking technology, allowing you to know if you’re rubber necking too much at accident scenes, or constantly scanning your surroundings for a chance to pass everyone.

Either of these Frankensteined combinations of software and hardware can accumulate information about your own behavior, resulting in a report that tells you how much time you wasted by passing 4 cars and stalling at a traffic light over the course of your 20-mile trip. It could also tell you how much your actions delayed everyone else’s trip, and that 60% of people in your town drive better than you, on average. Reports on the effects of one’s driving behavior on the entire traffic system over time – framed in a personally-relevant context – would eventually give people a higher-level awareness of the ramifications of their actions.

FACILITATING COLLABORATION

How do we now encourage more collaborative behavior on the road? One way to do this is through a marriage of unconscious and conscious behavior change techniques.

Unconscious Collaboration
Unconscious collaboration results from a system using behavioral guides to influence how people act in relation to each other. The stoplights on highway on-ramps that seem to randomly alternate between red and green are called ramp meters, and they use real-time traffic information to regulate the vehicles entering a highway. Most drivers don’t realize that this guide changes based on current traffic conditions, or that they have been helping traffic as a whole flow better for nearly 50 years.

Conscious Collaboration
Getting people to consciously collaborate with each other is obviously trickier. Revisiting feedback loops: More than just receiving spoken turn-by-turn directions, drivers with certain GPS systems can now benefit from the integration of real-time traffic reports with detour features and rerouting suggestions. If the real-time tracking technology that makes ramp meters work connected with GPS systems, a driver’s Garmin could help them (and their fellow drivers) better navigate their surroundings smoothly by making contextual recommendations. Smarter, more-connected GPS systems could provide directions such as “Based on the traffic ahead of you, you will get to dinner 5 minutes faster if you stay in this lane and drive 5mph slower.”

Balanced Collaboration
Unconscious and conscious collaboration should not be looked at separately – a combination of smart behavioral guides and educational behavioral recommendations is the ideal.

Small digital steps can be taken to help drivers understand their role in a larger system, and encourage them to collaborate a little more with each other to help everything flow better than it does now.

Let’s combine our previous two examples together. Someone leaves their house to meet their friend for dinner, and punches the restaurant’s address into his dashboard (or mobile app) when he turns his car on. The car takes both traffic reports and information about other cars’ destinations into account when giving that evening’s driving directions. The car is also outfitted with proximity-based sensor technology – like Ford’s Adaptive Cruise Control – to regulate his speed when he’s actually on the road. The driver’s mind is operating on both the unconscious and conscious level – he realizes he is being directed along a route that makes his car “work with” all of the other drivers in traffic that day, but may not realize how much more efficient his regulated speed is actually making him and everyone else on the road. Over time, he might consciously make the decision to tone down his self-interested behavior and help the system run more efficiently.

Laura Strangelove on buses

Laura is in the process of getting a Masters in City Planning with a focus on Transit. She's been into it for years, and has a soft spot for buses in particular. We recently realized that Urban Planning and Digital Strategy have so much in common that we're able to send each other articles, stories and links all the time that sit at the intersection of our respective interests.

Speaking of, Laura recently forwarded me a paper she wrote, and I found it so fascinating that I got her permission to post huge chunks of it here. It's called

Positive Public Perception of Bus Rapid Transit
as Dependent on How Unlike Conventional Bus Riding it Is
Or: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bus
and talks about just that – a fairly new type of bus transit that could elevate people's general opinions of bus transit.

The bus is generally considered to be the most loathed form of public transportation. People, as a whole, do not like to ride the bus. A google search for “I love buses” turns up 217,000 results. A google search for “I hate buses” turns up 2,890,000 results. (...) Our culture’s hatred of buses even sneaks its way into our idioms—of late, to “throw [someone] under the bus” is a phrase that means to sacrifice another person for personal gain, even though throwing someone under a train or into the whirling propellers of a helicopter would almost surely result in more gruesome consequences.

To be fair, the bus has rightly earned some of its criticism. There is a plethora of reasons people do not like buses, and while all of them are not present all of the time, some of them are present most of the time. Buses can be unreliable and late, and when they do show up, they sometimes show up in pairs, or more insultingly, in groups of five. Waiting for a bus at a conventional pole-and-sign stop can be a cold, wet, and even dangerous adventure. A bus ride on a heavily-trafficked corridor with many stops is slow and lurching. Hardly any transit mode in the world can be considered more unpleasant than a standing-up ride on an overcrowded bus while carrying six shopping bags or an infant.

Enter Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). It's still a bus, but it's operationally different in a lot of ways. For one, dedicated rights-of-way: buses get their own lanes. One result of this is that they are seen as a unique form of transportation, rather than another vehicle sharing the road with everyone else. Dedicated bus lanes are also a lot more efficient (more on this soon).






images of current & proposed BRT systems in St. Petersburg, Florida; Changzhou, China; and Hamilton, Ontario

Another popular feature of BRT is pre-boarding fare collection: everybody pays (or swipes their card) ahead of time, like in the subway. When the bus arrives, everyone is "ready" and can board at once. Also results in more efficiency. Dedicated rights-of-way and pre-boarding fare collection reduce the likelihood of bus bunching, which is one of the most frustrating things in the universe.

Bus bunching occurs when one bus, due to traffic, a late start, or any other reason, is a little behind schedule, and as a result, arrives at each stop to see more people than usual waiting to board. Because it takes longer to board more people, the bus arrives at each subsequent stop more and more behind schedule. Meanwhile, the bus behind it—the next bus running the route—does not have a large number of passengers to pick up because any of those passengers who were early enough to be there when the earlier bus came by in all its lateness boarded it instead. By the end of the route, the second (or, when it’s really bad, third, fourth, or fifth[!]) bus will have caught up with the first bus, and the bus arrives very late and in multiple.

There are other factors that can set BRT apart from regular bus transit as well, to get commuters over the psychological barrier against them. The buses themselves look different, the stations are more sleekly designed (sometimes with modern logos and bright color schemes) and are built to accommodate pre-boarding fare collection. Here's an example from the RIT in Curitiba, Brazil, one of the most successful BRT systems in the world:


image from Wikimedia

A tubular station! That beats standing by a pole in the rain any day.

Does New York need this? Well, the MTA has dabbled in it with their Select Bus Service (SBS), which has a very limited run (bet you don't know where it is). Since the NYC subway system is so advanced & gets you almost anywhere you need to go, Laura sees the SBS as "an example of BRT used in the context of merely making bus service vastly superior" rather than its own, unique form of transportation.

In short, BRT is good for pulling buses out of their perceptual dead zones: the more they resemble – and are seen on par with – rail systems, the more psychologically accepted they will be, and the more passengers the system will attract. Of course it's not all shiny wonderfulness; Laura plays devil's advocate and raises some great questions (including cases of induced demand, which isn't always necessarily a "good" thing). She also writes about how BRT is so characteristically (and operationally) different from buses that people have even talked about removing the "B" from the system:

It is as though people are known to hate buses so deeply and thoroughly that the only way to trick them into riding one—even if it’s a bus with none of the problems of a conventional bus—is to disguise it with an Orwellian name change, a la 1984: But the Ministry of Love is still where people get tortured, and “Commuter Rapid Transit” is still, technically, a bus.

I recently spotted a PSFK article about the MTA investing further in more efficient bus transit, but the link seems to be dead (see? a sad, dead link). I did find This MTA page on their SBS Project that explains BRT really well, and explains how they envision BRT fitting into New York's transit system in the future. Exciting! Maybe it'll turn bus riding reluctance in NY around?


tweet by James

There is a chance that I may have butchered some of Laura's reasoning, as I just tried condensing 18 pages into a single post in just an evening. Stay tuned for edits, as (and if) she corrects me. Thanks, Laura!