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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."
eBaying? Unless they let it go on for a LONG time so they can find a statistical mean, it's just going to represent the upper-echelon of prices paid. Judging the value of things by their auction price, unless you're talking about one-of-a-kinds, is going to result in hideous inflation. No matter how useless something is, there will be someone, somewhere, who's willing to shell out big money for it.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
If your commute doesn't improve by much, can you leave negative feedback?
Chris
I'll ride in your car with you on the way to work, so you can go in the carpool lane.
This could lead to some really bad economic decision. eBay is not a fair marketplace, especially in areas like this. We're operating in the extreme portion of the demand curve here. These extremely rare (unless they sell thousands of them) items might be very sought after by the $300k/year executive who hates his morning drive. If they price further sales based on a few eBay auctions, they might end up only catering to the very rich.
Not to mention they will be operating well above the point where they will make the largest (potential) profit.
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If everyone is able to buy their way into the carpool lane doesn't that defeat the purpose? Isn't the carpool lane supposed to reward drivers for reducing their fossil fuel emmissions?
Does it seem to anyone else that this will just end up with another crowded lane, especially if there are too many stickers sold? And isn't the whole point to keep that lane uncontested so people actually use it? This is just another example of government trying to get every dollar they can, and pandering to corporate interest.
Doesn't that lessen the incentive to carpool? Why are going to carpool if you have to share the carpool with a bunch of rich wankers who can afford stickers? The carpool lane encourages the ecologically friendlier practice of carpooling and that should be its focus.
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Seller was awesome! Totally fast shipping! Great communication! I love my sticker and will buy again! A+++++++
This provides an interesting opportunity to assess the "worth" of HOV lanes from an entirely new perspective. It would be interesting to see how such a market-based approach would value these high-speed lane projects, as opposed to the traditional multi-year study process that planning boards typically use today. What would be required is growth and maturation of the market in these stickers so one could get an estimate of the overall demand.
My guess is that the valuation would come in lower than today's standards, due to many parties who use the roads not participating (infrequent drivers, interstate drivers, etc.).
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The articles states that you would get a 3 inch square sticker on the right side of the windshield. Ok, lets say I win one for the month of July.... and now its August, I still hae the sticker. Now you could argue to put a date on it, but I defy a cop to spot the date on a 3 inch square while the car is traveling 65 mph. I suppose you could color code, it, but even that has its limits. I see this as a potential problem.
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Come on, this is just a thinly veiled attempt at making an old-people-free lane. Since old people generally aren't heavy computer users, let alone heavy eBayers, this lane will be regulated to the young and fast! We've all dreamed of it, and now its here!
daed si luap
If someone is willing to pay a lot of money for something, why shouldn't they? eBay is a very fair marketplace. It allows sellers to obtain maximum value for their product. If someone wants to pay more for something, why not let them? With state budget crunches (although I beleive that cutting spending is the answer), this will only help, and not harm anyone.
Honestly, people get bent out of shape if someone is willing to pay for something that you aren't. Why is this?
Ok, so if you have enough money from having a good job, you can get to work early or on time and keep that good job. If you don't have enough money from having a bad job then you'll arrive late and lose that bad job and never move up.
good thinking there..............
That's a great idea, but they'll probably need special permission from the Transportation Department to implement it, or risk losing some of their federal highway funds. The issue is that many urban highway construction projects are funded with conditions requiring HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lanes (or other specific things to encourage carpooling or mass transit).
Of course, with the current administration, such a waiver shouldn't be difficult to obtain.
Unless I am missing something, the point of high occupancy lanes is to reduce the number of cars on the road in the first place, helping with congestion as well as environmental issues.
Wouldn't these functions be better served by encouraging more ride share pickup areas and public information about ride sharing?
Oh, wait, that wouldn't produce new income past the already outrageous taxes involved and that means no new campaign kickbacks. How silly of me.
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I think this idea is great. I give it an A++++++++++++. Oustanding thinking and clever idea!!!!! I would work with Government again, anytime!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here
Finally a government agency is publicly admitting that a free market economy has some value.
Now if they'd just do this with ALL of our taxes.
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.
Funny thing is..
Dangerous driving doesn't get a ticket. Police typicaly are not allowed to engage in high speed pursutes without either authorization, or unless it's in relation to a felony.
Only the +5 to +15 mph speeders typicaly get tickets. They are so easier to catch, and quotas get made much more quickly.
"They'll probally kill them selves" is that I hear regarding super speeders, atleast among police at starbucks. Or "I wish I could have pursued that guy I clocked at 100+, but I hadn't made my quota yet".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Possibly because the roads are public property, intended for use by everyone - not a consumer good.
Do you think you should be able to pay extra to have the police or fire department respond to your calls faster than they do to someone who cannot pay extra? Please also explain why or why not.
Now obviously, this isn't the same as preferred law enforcement priviledges, but it's still letting certain people pay to break the rules.
Impressive? WTF? The whole point of the carpool lane is to get people to CARPOOL. As in, make a fucking friend at work and drive in with him so you reduce the emissions and cut down on the smog and make the air a little nicer to breathe for everyone. If you can't make a little effort to carpool, you don't deserve a speedy commute. No matter how much you pay.
So what, now it's not the carpool lane, it's the carpool/rich-lazy-bastard lane? Sickening.
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It would if police departments had enough officers to aggressively enforce speed limits and other safety-motivated traffic laws. But when police departments hire officers specifically to do that, people complain that the police are just doing it for the money, because people like to break traffic laws. (Another issue is that--at least in Houston--the police are often the worst drivers on the road, so even judges are hesitant to take them too seriously in traffic cases.)
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4 other lanes? WTF are you talking about 4 other lanes? I think you may need to check again. Going through downtown Seattle there are 4 HOV lanes, and part of I-5 is constricted down to 2 lanes for a time. 3 of those HOV lanes are so-called "express lanes" (it may even be 4 lanes, I don't know. I'm rarely on 'em.)
I for one am sure not happy about paying extra taxes so that other people can use their "elite" lanes, when my car barely pollutes at all (in fact, it was getting zeros at the emissions places, and the last check was VERY close to zero).
The problem is our transit infrastructure is *atrocious*. If you're not within a mile from a transit center, you're going to be waiting 30-60 minutes for a bus (which may not even arrive; bad track record), so you can take a 45 minute ride in to town. Most peoplw will not put up with this.
Carpooling is a poor answer as well. The timing issues are very difficult to work out. You have two people heading in to work, and say one person has to work late. They're completely screwed and have to take a taxi home (because they probably don't have bus service near their place, as most of the citizens in the region do not), which will cost $20-$50, at least.
Of course, the REAL answer is - people should live near where they work. The city should be designed so that this can be possible for the majority of workers. Nobody should ever be commuting from Kent to Seattle - it's a rediculous notion.
imagine how much people would be willing to pay for a sticker that let them drive as fast as they want
and drink beers while doing so.
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As one who drives Seattle's roads every day, I can tell you this is par for the course for our state government. They can't decide how to solve the problem (because they're too busy siphoning off transportation money to fill someone's pockets), so they look for hair-brained "solutions" to make it look like they're doing their job. There is no interest in emissions -- first and foremost, the carpool lanes here are designed to reduce congestion by reducing the number of cars on the road. By selling exemptions, they are reducing the incentive to get a modest increase in tax dollars, at a time when everyone is screaming about the budget deficit. (Mostly it's the politicians screaming, saying "how can we keep spending up when income is going down? How? How?") By using eBay, they're looking for a way to set the price, but it doesn't really matter. They could sell enough stickers to clog the carpool lane at $1000 a pop, and still make no dent at all in what it costs to build a single offramp (about $300 million dollars in Seattle!)
And it's people like you that make traffic much worse than it needs to be. Cutting people off, tailgating, causing traffic accidents... all of these things cause more traffic than it solves.
Think about it like math. If the average speed of the cars on the road is finite number whose upper bound is controlled by several factors, traffic density being the primary factor, then if one person attempts to go significantly over the average speed that the road can handle under those conditions then necessarily every other car must slow down a little bit just to accomodate.
Since many people believe that their needs are more important than the needs of the whole (as you have so clearly stated in your post) then everyone who believes that tries to go faster than the average.
Ordinarily this would raise the average speed. But clearly that isn't the case. Because as speed increases, safety demands that the space between cars needs to increase... this artificially inflates the traffic density numbers (because cars are treated as being "bigger" than they actually are) and so the whole road slows down.
It is because of this "me first" philosophy that traffic is as bad as it is in the world.
Its like everyone on the whole road missed the lesson in kintergarden about sharing.
Stop being an ass on the road, leave yourself enough time to get where you need to go and you won't stress quite so bad when traffic does suck because of the other greedy people on the road that think the way you say you do.
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And that's cool, if it's only a temporary thing. But I have a feeling that once they get a revenue stream going from this, they're not gonna say "okay, now we have our information, let's change it back to an only-carpool lane."
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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.
In fact, you can sell anything on eBay. Really.
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