satisfied when they get served. (This is why Disney World inflates the posted waiting times for their attractions.) And while you might think that the most important factor of a queue is how many people are in front of the person waiting, research suggests that the number
behind
is significant as well. One study, at a Hong Kong post office, found that the more people there were behind a person waiting in a queue, the less likely they were to “renege,” or quit. The queue might have suddenly seemed more valuable. Another theory is that when people are anxious—as is common in queues—they’re more likely to make “downward” comparisons than “upward”: instead of “Look how far along they are,” at the front of the line, they think, “At least I’m better off than you at the back.”
What really seems to rankle us is seeing people get ahead. This is why, says Richard Larson, director of the Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the world’s leading authorities on queues, any number of companies—from banks to fast-food chains—have switched from systems in which multiple lines feed multiple servers to a single, serpentine line. “There’s a theorem in queuing theory that says the average wait in either configuration is the same,” Larson explains. Yet people prefer the single line, so much so that they have said they would be willing to wait in a longer line at Wendy’s, the hamburger chain where a single line is used, than at a shorter line at McDonald’s, which uses multiple lines. Why? Social justice, says Larson. “If you have the single serpentine line, you’re guaranteed first come, first served. If you have the multiple lines, you have what happens at McDonald’s at lunchtime. You have the stress of joining a line with high likelihood that somebody who’s joined a queue next to you will get served before you. People get really irritated with that.”
This happens all the time in traffic, in which reneging on the queue is often impossible. It’s why I changed lanes and became a “late merger,” and why people get frustrated with late mergers. (I will explain shortly why they shouldn’t.) Sometimes, changing lanes (i.e., moving to a different queue) is actually a useful strategy. Often, however, it gets us no real gain. A Canadian television news program had two drivers commute along the same route on a highway at the same time. One was told to make as many lane changes as possible, the other to avoid changing lanes. The chronic lane changer saved a mere four minutes
out of an eighty-minute drive,
which hardly seems worth it. The stress involved in making all those changes probably took more than four minutes off the driver’s life.
One reason why many people constantly change lanes was demonstrated in a fascinating experiment conducted by Donald Redelmeier and Robert Tibshirani, a clinical epidemiologist in Toronto and a statistician at Stanford University, respectively. Using a simple computer simulation of two lanes’ worth of congested traffic obeying typical traffic behavior, as well as a video of an actual congested highway, the researchers found an illusion when looking at a sample driver: Even though the subject car had as many “passing events” as it had “overtaking events”—meaning it was maintaining the same overall relative pace as the next lane—the car spent more
time
being passed by cars than it did passing them.
Traffic, for reasons I will later explain, tends to act like an accordion: As traffic slows in a jam, it compresses; as congestion eases, the accordion “opens” and cars begin to speed up. Because of the uneven nature of stop-and-go traffic, these shifts happen in different lanes at different times. A driver in a temporarily opening lane may very quickly pass a cluster of compressing cars in the next lane. But then he will find himself in the compressing lane. And what happens? He spends
behind
is significant as well. One study, at a Hong Kong post office, found that the more people there were behind a person waiting in a queue, the less likely they were to “renege,” or quit. The queue might have suddenly seemed more valuable. Another theory is that when people are anxious—as is common in queues—they’re more likely to make “downward” comparisons than “upward”: instead of “Look how far along they are,” at the front of the line, they think, “At least I’m better off than you at the back.”
What really seems to rankle us is seeing people get ahead. This is why, says Richard Larson, director of the Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the world’s leading authorities on queues, any number of companies—from banks to fast-food chains—have switched from systems in which multiple lines feed multiple servers to a single, serpentine line. “There’s a theorem in queuing theory that says the average wait in either configuration is the same,” Larson explains. Yet people prefer the single line, so much so that they have said they would be willing to wait in a longer line at Wendy’s, the hamburger chain where a single line is used, than at a shorter line at McDonald’s, which uses multiple lines. Why? Social justice, says Larson. “If you have the single serpentine line, you’re guaranteed first come, first served. If you have the multiple lines, you have what happens at McDonald’s at lunchtime. You have the stress of joining a line with high likelihood that somebody who’s joined a queue next to you will get served before you. People get really irritated with that.”
This happens all the time in traffic, in which reneging on the queue is often impossible. It’s why I changed lanes and became a “late merger,” and why people get frustrated with late mergers. (I will explain shortly why they shouldn’t.) Sometimes, changing lanes (i.e., moving to a different queue) is actually a useful strategy. Often, however, it gets us no real gain. A Canadian television news program had two drivers commute along the same route on a highway at the same time. One was told to make as many lane changes as possible, the other to avoid changing lanes. The chronic lane changer saved a mere four minutes
out of an eighty-minute drive,
which hardly seems worth it. The stress involved in making all those changes probably took more than four minutes off the driver’s life.
One reason why many people constantly change lanes was demonstrated in a fascinating experiment conducted by Donald Redelmeier and Robert Tibshirani, a clinical epidemiologist in Toronto and a statistician at Stanford University, respectively. Using a simple computer simulation of two lanes’ worth of congested traffic obeying typical traffic behavior, as well as a video of an actual congested highway, the researchers found an illusion when looking at a sample driver: Even though the subject car had as many “passing events” as it had “overtaking events”—meaning it was maintaining the same overall relative pace as the next lane—the car spent more
time
being passed by cars than it did passing them.
Traffic, for reasons I will later explain, tends to act like an accordion: As traffic slows in a jam, it compresses; as congestion eases, the accordion “opens” and cars begin to speed up. Because of the uneven nature of stop-and-go traffic, these shifts happen in different lanes at different times. A driver in a temporarily opening lane may very quickly pass a cluster of compressing cars in the next lane. But then he will find himself in the compressing lane. And what happens? He spends
Similar Books
