Archive for November 17th, 2009

My latest Slate column is up — a survey of the various psychology experiments that have been conducted on subway systems (particularly NYC’s) throughout the years.

Here’s a fragment:

Although subway studies had their heyday in the ’70s, they’re as old as public transit itself. The seminal urban sociologist Georg Simmel, in a famous passage from his 1912 volume Melanges de Philosophie Relativiste, was struck by the new spatial and sensorial regimen that transit provided. “Before the appearance of omnibuses, railroads, and street cars in the nineteenth century, men were not in a situation where for periods of minutes or hours they could or must look at each other without talking to one another.”

What much subway psychology seeks to understand, however, is what holds these rules in place, and what happens when they are violated. In one of the most well-known studies, social psychologist Stanley Milgram had students spontaneously ask subway riders to give up their seats. As Thomas Blass recounts in The Man Who Shocked the World, this experiment arose from the seeming erosion of a subway norm. As Milgram’s mother-in-law had posed it to him: “Why don’t young people get up anymore in a bus or a subway train to give their seat to a gray-haired elderly woman?”

In the new fairy-land of New York City parking, where drivers, who tend to act like children to begin with, will be treated thusly and indulgently, in an act of colossal political cowardice (the car is, if nothing else, the great vehicle for political pandering — remember the “gas tax” holiday?).

Why a five-minute “grace period”? Why not ten minutes? Why enforce any law at all? Perhaps we should start demanding grace periods elsewhere in life (Mr. Taxi Driver, can you please drive me a few more blocks for free?) This is a classic case of Thomas Schelling’s “micromotives and macrobehavior,” where the no big deal of every driver taking the extra five minutes adds up to a great chain of inconvenience for the larger collective. That little grace period just added more cars to your block, circling for that (already undercharged) spot as the driver and traffic agent mull over the metaphysics of time.