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Bid On eBay To Speed Up Your Commute
malfunct writes "The traffic in the greater Seattle area is atrocious, and the State Government has been working hard to find a way to solve the issue. In the interim, they may use eBay as an innovative solution for estimating demand and raising funds. According to a MSNBC article, the plan is to use eBay to sell stickers that allow access for single driver vehicles to the car pool lane. The idea is to use eBay to find just how much a speedy commute is worth to drivers."
Everyone isn't able to buy it. There are a limited number. If they determine that an extra 100 or 200 cars per day in the lane won't matter (and having driven in HOV lanes, that's a lowball estimate) and they can generate $X amount of revenue, which never hurts, and can help fund things to benefit everyone....
Also, carpool lanes are just as much about cramped parking in Metro areas as fossil fuel emmissions.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Ummm.
I think you're missing the point. The state is trying to work out how much drivers will pay to get into the carpool lane. That is, this is an excercise.
So, they auction (say) 1,000 car pool stickers for a month in the fast lane (so to speak). By seeing what price is paid on eBay, they can calculate what pricing will allow new road building, public transport investment etc.
I live in Central London (in England). They recently imposed a congestion charge. Had they used eBay first, they might have discovered that the "correct" price was £3, not £5 to get traffic down to required levels.
Further, eBay is not a bad mechanism to rationing. Spaces in the car pool lane are a scarse resource (they won't sell more than they have room for... actually this government, scratch that) - why not work out what the right charge is using eBay, not by a fiat (or guess work).
--- My dad's political betting
In Washington DC the community slugs their way into the HOV lanes.
In a nutshell, folks driving alone on common routes who want to drive in the HOV lane pick up (car-less) complete strangers who also travel the same route. The driver gets to work more quickly. The passenger gets a free ride. The community gets less pollution and less traffic. Everybody wins.
If only Seattle would pick up on the trend! T'would solve their problems without any additional govenrment intervention whatsoever... without destroying the benefit of the HOV lanes.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Where I used to live, the volunteer fire department did something like that. People had to pay the fire department either a low yearly fee to be a member, or $200 per truck that responded to their fire if they weren't a member. Plus, members received preference while dispatching, so if you were not a member, and were unlucky enough to have a fire the same time as a member did, you would have to wait until the member's fire was assessed to see how many trucks would be needed before a truck was dispatched to you (if there were any who weren't needed for the member's fire).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The point here is to use a free marketplace -- Ebay -- to determine the value of access to the carpool lane to single drivers. This is valuable information, cheaply derived, which can be used to direct transportation policy in the future. Seems like a good idea to me.
In Western Washington? HAH! You must not be from Seattle, my friend.
One would think that would be a viable solution..like the time the constituency voted against building a new Kingdome, but it was built anyway. Or the time there was a referendum to see if bridge parallel to the Tacoma Narrows bridge should be built, only won by 3%, and was built anyway, unchanged. Now, the ballpark was only an initial query, with no set location, but the new Tacoma Narrows will be plowing through neighborhoods and taking out houses. Surely, that should require a margin of voter hapiness greater than 3%. The area definitely has a history of shady tactics when it comes to gauging public interest.
--- What
Carpool lanes have been shown to carry more passenger-miles than non-HOV lanes. Even though the traffic density is lower, each car carries more people, and gets more people to the places they want to be. So measured by that statistic, carpool lanes do work.
Let's talk about oversimplified supply and demand like you learned in high school.
When a consumer is willing to pay more than a producer is selling for, the consumer has an obvious benefit. The sum of these benefits (consumer valuation - price) over all the consumers is the consumer surplus. There is a similar concept for producer surplus that takes longer to explain.
Auctions (in theory) eliminate the consumer surplus. That's why people complain about them: they like their share of the consumer surplus.
That's also why companies don't like haggling or competitive bidding: it removes produce surplus. (Car dealerships in America are something of an exception. They're a well-refined system of manipulation to make you think you're getting a better deal by haggling even though they're still making sizeable profits from you.)
IANA economist
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Unless eBay can sort out the massive amount of fraud that's going on right now then I'm never using it again anyway.
There seems to be an absolutely massive problem at the moment with people hijacking eBay accounts and their associated e-mail addresses and eBay don't seem to want to anything about it.
Anyone who uses eBay and has a weak password on their e-mail account (or an obvious answer to their secret question) is vulnerable to having their eBay account taken over (complete with e-mail account and credit card details) and used by a Western Union scammer.
What's a Western Union scammer? Someone who asks to be paid though Western Union (who offer zero buyer protection or tracking of funds) and then simply never ships the item. Western Union seem happy to dish out funds to anyone so the fact that the account is in the wrong name doesn't seem to cause any problems.
eBay should make it so it's impossible to take over an account by changing the password/and/or e-mail address unless you know lots of personal information (D.O.B., mothers maiden name, etc etc).
I'm finding it very difficult to get eBay to reply or for any news agencies to give this any publicity.
Over the weekend I saw about 30 Sony plasma screens advertised (usually "pre-approved bidders only") - almost none of which were legitiate. When you contact the seller - you get a similar message every time - "The item will be shipped from and I would like you to pay though Western Union". They remove them eventually if you complain, but the point is, the fact that more are appearing means that they're still finding it very easy to hijack your account.
Nick...
Because Widening Roads Worsens Traffic Congestion.
Seriously.
Read here and here and here
and see some primary sources here and here and these:
Phil Goodwin, "Empirical Evidence on Induced Traffic," Transportation, Vol. 23, No. 1, Feb. 1996, pp. 35-54. This is in a special issue of the journal Transportation devoted to induced travel. It has several very good articles.
Robert Noland, Relationships Between Highway Capacity and Induced Vehicle Travel, Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting Paper 991069 (www.epa.gov/tp/trb-rn.pdf), January 1999.
Harry Cohen, "Review of Empirical Studies of Induced Traffic," Expanding Metropolitan Highways: Implications for Air Quality and Energy Use, Transportation Research Board, Special Report #345, National Academy Press (Washington DC), 1995, Appendix B, pp. 295-309.
Cairns, Hass-Klau and Goodwin, Traffic Impacts of Highway Capacity Reductions: Assessment of the Evidence, London Transport Planning (London; www.ucl.ac.uk/transport-studies/sc1.htm), 1998.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I have a hard time understanding how the Washington Legislature think they can allow single riders when AZ was just threatened by the Feds to have their highway funding pulled for allowing Alternative Fuel vehicles to use their HOV lanes.
The following article was posted in the Arizona Republic back in Jan '03:
Bifuel vehicles seen as illegally hogging HOV lanes in Phoenix.
Source: Arizona Republic [Jan 28, 2003]
As you crawl along at 5 mph in rush-hour traffic, a few drivers zip by in the car-pool lane -
despite having no passengers
You know why: They have the "clean air" license plate, blue with puffy white clouds, identifying vehicles that don't spew out polluting fumes. Under federal law, states may allow alternative-fuel vehicles to use the HOV lane. The idea is that you can cut air pollution, one of the goals of HOV lanes, with clean-running cars, as well as by reducing the number of vehicles on the road. What you don't know is that most of those vehicles shouldn't be there.
Yup.
The state wrongly gives HOV access to cars and trucks that can run on either propane gas or gasoline. (Can we guess which fuel they're really using?) A quick trip to the Federal Highway Administration Web site shows that only vehicles that run exclusively on electricity or natural gas can use the HOV lanes.
Talk about adding insult to injury.
The injury: Arizona shelled out millions of dollars in rebates for buying vehicles equipped or retrofitted to run on natural gas. The deal, which gave buyers as much as 50 percent of the sticker price, including extras, was on the way to bankrupting the state before the plug was pulled.
The insult: Even the most conscientious alt-fuel owners have trouble refilling their natural gas because there's such a tiny network of suppliers.
And thanks to the rebate, people could afford huge trucks and oversized SUVs. So drivers are tooling along in the HOV lane while spewing out even more gunk than the average car. Arizona goofed. To follow federal rules, the state should yank those license plates. To play fair, we should at least require the owners to prove that they're using alternative fuel virtually all the time.
Meanwhile, the feds are denying HOV access to the new breed of hybrid electric cars, like the Prius, that produce so little pollution that they're called "super-ultra low-emissions vehicles." The hybrids don't meet federal requirements because they use electricity only part of the time.
Nine-tenths of a loaf is better than none, especially when fuel access and battery life are discouraging the sales of vehicles that don't run on gasoline.
Federal regulations must be expanded to include the lowest-polluting hybrid vehicles.
It would also make sense to include alt-fuel vehicles - if the owners can prove they're actually using alt fuel.
Otherwise, pull those plates.
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One reason Seattle traffic is worse than L.A. is geography. The L.A. Basin has many interconnecting roads and you can make a profession of traffic-listening and choosing the best route.
In Seattle, there's a few routes to a compressed downtown, and being squeezed by hills and water means: if the traffic report says slow, your SOL.
OTOH, that means Seattle is the perfect candidate for mass transit as you have fewer routes to cover.
Why don't they just put a frikkin' toll on I-5, I-90, 405, 520. Make it $1.50.
1. I-5's road surface is terrible. Particularly between Tacoma and Seatac. Maybe with that they can afford to maintain the damn road.
2. Pricing it at $1.50 makes it competitive in price with the bus system. Ergo it minimizes the advantage of Single Occupancy vehicles.
3. Might even solve WA State's Budget deficit. Not like anyone here pays state income tax or anything.
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
This has been tried in a number of cities without success. You can move the employment into the suburbs, but then you just wind up with suburb-to-suburb commutes which are even worse than suburb-to-city commutes. Google for "suburb commute" and "suburb-to-suburb commute" for some good articles on the subject.
Consider the simple case of going to work for Bob's Hardware in ThisSuburb. Nice place, great job, I buy a house. But then I get a very nice job offer from Mary's Hardware in ThatSuburb on the other side of TheCity. Do you expect me to sell my house and move to ThatSuburb? Or should I turn down the new job offer? Roll those dice about a million times for everyone in the region and you quickly having everyone commuting all over the place and all your planning is shot.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that almost nothing will fix this problem except for higher population densities. People have to be willing to live very close to each other and not have any land. Then mass transit works pretty well. The American dream is an acre and your own house, so what do you do?
Personally I vote for more money for mass transit every time it comes up on the ballot and I always vote against any road measure that doesn't include more funding for mass transit. But it's just because of a vague feeling that "mass transit is good." I can't myself come up with any way they could possibly deploy it that it would work for me or anyone who lives near me. We're just too spread out on our nice big wooded lots that we love so much. I just would rather throw money away trying to solve the problem than to give up on it. I have this weird fantasy that it bleeds over to a greener attitude from our elected officals, but I'm probably just kidding myself.
You haven't seen seattle traffic.
Or at least on I520 westbound, just prior to the bridge, the cops are on FOOT pulling people over for using the carpool lane when they only have one person in the car.
Check out the puget sound traffic map.
From 4pm to 7pm, at least a few spots on the map will be black. Back means that traffic is moving between 20 MPH and completely parked. And the majority of what is measured is freeway.
A 20 minute commute in good traffic can be a 3 hour commute in bad traffic! Traffic is bad when you can safely read 20 pages of a book while driving home.