g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est




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Monday, March 31, 2008
12:46 - Punch in the presence of the passenjare

(top)
One of the philosophies that I tend to live by is that everything happens for a reason—not in some kind of "preordained fate" way, but as an illustration of simple mechanics and sociology. Things happen because they make sense to. Personally, I find it fascinating to observe the myriad things in daily life that we encounter often without thinking twice about them, everyday items that illustrate a long history of design through consensus, where something—be it a traffic light pattern, a teapot, a burrito, a sewing machine bobbin, a representative democracy—exhibits characteristics that show that over decades and centuries, we've all converged on an understanding of how a particular thing is supposed to work.

It's difficult to explain precisely what I mean by this, but part of it was expressed (somewhat indirectly, in service of a slightly different point) by David Mamet in that recent Village Voice essay that got so much attention:

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

. . .

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

That's it exactly. I love seeing this principle in action in the world from day to day, and I love it in particular because it's so easy to find examples of it. It's so easy, in fact, that if called upon to do so, often I lock myself up just trying to pick which one is the best example to offer up. Traffic lights go at a certain interval because people trying to solve a common problem (how to direct traffic through a crossroads) had to figure out what the most efficient way to move people through the system is. They had to analyze what the best timings and light phases might be, test it out in practice, and adjust according to how well people liked it. Obviously some would dislike getting red lights at any time, but anyone would grudgingly accept that in order to get people through the intersection there had to be some red-light time—and over time a consensus arose as to what the most appropriate phase sequence and light timing should be. Eventually it becomes infrastructure, invisible and unchanging except when new technology comes along to change the game entirely (electric traffic lights replacing those signpost flags you see in Popeye cartoons; freeway interchanges replacing intersections that grow too large in volume).

Mamet talks about this principle applying primarily to people and governmental systems; but I see it everywhere. A microwave that's built into the cabinets above the stove. A deli menu where you order by number. A parking lot payment machine where you remember your slot number and stick folded-up bills into a numbered slot, instead of—at one extreme—a computerized payment-processing machine that takes credit cards and prints out a ticket and is subject to breakdowns and vandalism and software failures, and—at the other—a permanent employee who sits in a booth and enforces parking restrictions and collects a full-time salary. We converge on solutions that make sense. And an awful lot of things make sense to me.

That's why I bristle reflexively whenever I hear someone grouse about some household item being designed stupidly, or that someone on the road is driving poorly, or that any significant number of happenstances in the world can be ascribed to good old-fashioned stupidity and incompetence and malice. I know there are idiots and mischief-makers out there; but I also know that they don't make up that big a percentage of the population. Otherwise we'd live in perpetual chaos. We'd be fighting our way through dozens of car accidents every single morning. We'd be under siege from knife-wielding muggers even on suburban sidewalks. We wouldn't be able to trust in anything we couldn't control directly, be it an online ordering system at an e-commerce website not to steal our credit card numbers or a gas pump not to fill our tanks with Gatorade. Never mind iPhones—this world would never have produced a telephone if it weren't for the fact that even when acting at their most self-indulgent and swinish, people are just out trying to get by, trying to get along in a world that works a certain way, that we all have come to presume will act in the way we expect so that we can get on with our own business, whatever that might be.

Some of these bits of infrastructure have been they way they are for so long now that even our grandparents wouldn't find them surprising—they're problems that have been solved so long ago that there's literally no need to try to improve on our existing solutions. Even modern technology can't improve on what we've come to know and love. The case in point that I wish I could have brought up at any of a dozen times in the past when I've tried to describe this philosophy is now something I encounter on a daily basis: the ticketing system on trains.



A hundred years ago Mark Twain popularized a set of rhymes about the way conductors punched tickets on a train line:

Conductor, when you receive a fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
Chorus.
Punch brothers! Punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare.

And today, in 2008, you can get on a train without having bought a ticket, and a conductor in a round, high-sided cap, a uniform with epaulettes, and a genial smile, will sell you a ticket and punch out your destination and fare paid with a hole punch. A hundred years and more, and not a damn thing has changed.

Oh, sure, they'll try to encourage you to buy your tickets beforehand from a vending machine, by hiking the fare by $5 for an on-board purchase. They'll put magnetic stripes on the tickets so you can put them through reader machines. But ultimately even these tickets mean the same thing to the guys shuffling their way down the train cars that they did in 1915 and before: something to check, to ask each passenger to present, and a slip to punch indicating where you're going and that you've paid the appropriate amount to get there.

The most fascinating thing about all this, to me, is how for a long commuter train ride, there is literally no more efficient way to handle this—or else it would have been put in place years ago. They're not just doing this because people like epaulettes, or out of some kooky sense of nostalgia; people on a train are some of the most practical people you'll ever have the privilege of sitting wordlessly next to and not acknowledging each other's existence. Nostalgia and style are the absolute furthest things from these people's minds. And yet surely you're thinking to yourself, y'know, there has GOT to be a better way to do this than punching tickets, what with computers and all. And maybe there is. Maybe people can carry RFID tags that can be read by train car doors, ensuring that they get on and get off at the stops they're entitled to. Maybe you could put LCD readouts above every seat and turn the conductors into enforcers who just read the displays and herd people up and down the cars. But any such solution would be expensive, and complex, and subject to all kinds of gamesmanship and subterfuge such that it would not be anywhere remotely near worthwhile. Turns out—I assert, given that we're still using a system that Mark Twain would have zero trouble using if he were beamed to the present day's commuter train system by the Enterprise crew—that the perfect storm, the perfect system for dealing with large crowds of people getting on a train at any of dozens of different stops and mostly but not all) getting off at a particular stop to transfer to another station, is the one where the conductor walks up and down the aisles, checks your ticket, punches in your route and fare, and memorizes your presence and paid fare along with everyone else's for the duration of the trip.

I'm absolutely won over by nothing so much as the little metal clip on the seat back in front of you, allowing you to stick your ticket there so the conductor can pick it up and punch it for you without your having to look up from the work you're doing or the nap you're taking. It even serves as a place for him to put the little slip that helps him remember your destination. Low-tech. Simple. And absolutely ingenious.


It's a system that can easily be simplified if your service is simplified, too. For example, on the leg of the journey between Secaucus and Penn Station, there are no stops, and so fares can be enforced by magnetic strip and electronic turnstile—you put in your ticket, and the act of getting into the platform area gives you leave to get from there to the only other station on the trip, so there's no point in even having a conductor for that segment. Similarly, in the subway system, there's so much getting-on and getting-off in the sprawling network of train lines that not only is it impossible to enforce specific station-to-station fares based on distance traveled, it's pretty much pointless; it would all come out as a wash in the long run, so they put a flat $2 fare on entry gates and let you ride all day long if you want, as long as someone else has to spend $2 to get three blocks. It all evens out—especially as the ones who get screwed by that system will find other and more efficient means to their ends, whereas the people who would ride the train all day long don't have any good reason to do so and there's really no problem of people being so patently impractical. It's an amazingly self-optimizing system, and a flat fare works perfectly for it. But for long commuter train lines, where you're just radiating out from a central depot and occupying a seat for as long as it takes you to get where you're going, fares vary with distance, as well it should—and a conductor is the only sensible and practical way to make it work, punching in the presence of the passenjare.

I don't know about you, but I look at things like this and think, "You know, we're doing okay. And everything is not always wrong."

Perhaps that's naïve. But like Mamet, I find myself more amenable to looking for evidence in favor of such a sentiment than otherwise these days. It certainly is reassuring to think that so much clear and obvious evidence of it surrounds us so thoroughly that we hardly need look further for it than the seat back in front of us.


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© Brian Tiemann