Airborne

Charities have a lot of ways of raising money. Governments have basically three.

First, taxes. Second, lotteries (defined as a tax on those who don't understand math). And third, of course, the inevitable speed cameras.

I read somewhere a few months ago that the District of Columbia had placed speed cameras in all sorts of obscure spots. Naturally, the cameras caught a lot of speeders and brought in some huge bucks as a result. Foolishly, however, the D.C. government budgeted for a similar amount the next year. What happened instead, you will hardly be surprised to learn, is that drivers figured out where the cameras were and slowed down. So the speed cameras brought in a lot less money the following year.

But, you say, they still accomplished their primary mission of getting people to drive within the speed limits.

Are you out of your freakin' mind? No local government cares whether people drive within the speed limits; its concern is with raising money through fines.

All of which makes it particularly amusing that in Silver Spring, a 68-year-old man, driving a Toyota Echo with his 76-year-old wife, was charged with driving 100 MPH (that's miles, not kilometers, per hours) on a hilly, winding, narrow street -- in order words, with doing the impossible.




The photo above is not, by the way, a Toyota Echo, but it's a car that might have done 100 MPH on that road.

This is an Echo.



You really should read the linked article, because the man and woman are apparently your typical good-government Montgomery County liberals:

"While the Brennans strongly endorse the county's photo enforcement efforts, they are baffled as to how Terence Brennan could be accused of driving their Toyota Echo economy car at 100 MPH."

And Mrs. Brennan was saddened, not outraged:

"'We and our neighbors, who know well that even 40 MPH would be dangerous at this stretch, wonder how the camera could come up with such a reading,' Helga Brennan wrote to The Washington Post. 'This speed would be impossible on the Beltway at the best of times, and we have never in our life driven at this speed.'"

If you think it's unfair of me to make fun of their political views without knowing anything about it, you're absolutely right. But I'm going to do it, anyway. Because there's even more evidence of it. According to the Washington Post:

Terence, 68, and Helga, 76, paid the $40 fine promptly after receiving the citation in the mail. Like many people, they felt it wasn't worth the hassle of contesting the ticket in district court. Like very few, they also thought the county needed the money.

But the story did end happily at last. Helga Brennan wrote to the Post; the Post got in touch with the county police; and the county police admitted error, refunded the fine, and apologized for having failed to respond to the Brennans' letter.

And as for the rest of us, so long as there are people who think the government needs more money and are willing to pay fines that are obviously undeserved, I say, "Good for them!" The more people there are like that, the longer we can go between tax increases.

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More on highway game theory

A couple of years ago, I wrote about what I called "highway game theory." The question I posed was this:

Assume you have to comply with all traffic laws. You're on a highway with four lanes in each direction, and traffic is fairly heavy. You see a sign telling you that the two left lanes will be closed in 2000 feet. What's your best strategy to minimize the time you will be delayed? (Using the shoulder isn't a legal answer, because the traffic laws don't permit it.)

Let's call the four lanes 1, 2, 3, and 4, from left to right, where 1 and 2 are the left lanes that are going to be closed, and 3 and 4 are the two right lanes. Which lane or lanes do you drive in?

You can read my analysis at the link, along with an economic analysis from Three Sources in the update.

But now, the problem has made an appearance in an article in the New York Times Magazine, in which a native of northern California makes the astonishing discovery that some people try to use their best strategy on the highways. She calls these people "sidezoomers," as distinct from "lineuppers" like her. She despises sidezoomers.

I'm not really sympathetic, and I don't like the term "sidezoomer." I'm a strategizer, and I recognize there are also some total jerks on the roads. But there no moral principle that forces you to get in line way ahead of time.

And even her experts agree with me to an extent:

The experts drew schematics in my notebook for me. They asked me to envision rice pouring smoothly through a kitchen funnel. They pointed out, as a Virginia Tech computer-science professor named Chris Barrett put it, that “if you move over too soon, you have this big empty piece of real estate, which could absorb that many more cars.” And I would say, yes, but they still all have to squish into the same two-lane tunnel, right? And the experts would say yes, but what really botches the flow is the stop-and-go part — which is accentuated both by the guy hanging around up there trying to last-minute jam his way in and by the hostile party in the Subaru who won’t let him, thus prompting him to try again in front of the next car, whose driver brakes while deciding whether to go into high-, medium- or low-level snit, and so on.

I'll leave you with the names that another of her experts uses: cheaters and vigilantes. Cheating may not be desirable, but I'd say it's the vigilantes who create the bigger problem. As the highway cop she interviews puts it:

“It’s not a matter of fairness or unfairness,” Morgan said. “It’s a matter of there’s no violation, no one is being injured. Ergo, chill out. Enjoy life. You’re spending too much energy pounding the dashboard.”

Yes, indeed.

UPDATE (8/17): Here are the letters responding to Gorney's article. Don't miss the second one, making the political link.

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