Clumping, and throughput in public transportation

Several weeks ago, New Scientist ran a story about some mathematical modeling work that a couple of researchers in Mexico did. They modeled public transportation systems, and investigated the clumping effect that causes buses and trains that are supposed to be evenly spaced to wind up traveling in irregularly spaced clusters:

Public transport vehicles — underground trains, for example — set off from the start of their routes equally spaced. The problem starts when one is briefly delayed, making more time for passengers to accumulate at stations further down the track. Since passenger boarding is the main factor delaying trains, these extra people slow the train even more.

Meanwhile, the gap between the delayed train and the one behind is shortened. That means fewer passengers for the train behind to pick up, making it pass through stations faster until it catches the train ahead. Eventually, all the trains on a route can end up crawling after the slowest, lead train.

Not surprisingly, this clumping, or “platooning”, is bad for throughput: a second vehicle, or even a third, arrives so soon after the first that there are few passengers waiting for it. By the time the next cluster arrives, there’s a batch of people waiting for it, who had expected a train or a bus five or ten minutes earlier, or more. And adding more vehicles just makes the clusters larger.

There are ways to patch things up, by having the lead train skip some stations, for example, but the patches are poor responses to the situation. And just as it’s not surprising that the clumping is bad, it’s also not surprising that there’s an optimal way to stop the problem in its tracks (sorry). It’s a combination of

1. requiring vehicles to stay at each stop for a minimum time, even if there’s no one waiting to board (this prevents their catching up to the one ahead), and
2. having vehicles leave the stop after a maximum time, even if there are still people waiting to board (this stops the lead vehicle from being delayed, which is the primary cause of the clumping in the first place).

Of course, this solution is a usability nightmare. Passengers sitting on a train that’s stopped at a station, waiting, when there’s no one to wait for, will be upset that they’re not moving ahead. Passengers left behind by a bus that closes its doors in their faces will be even more upset, for obvious reasons. Complaints will abound.

But these are cultural issues. In Japan, I noted that the trains kept to a very strict schedule. They were on time, precisely. They waited for no one, and no one expected them to wait: signs, in Japanese and English, warned people to be ready, and announcements said that we’d be “making a brief stop”, emphasizing brief. If expectations are properly set and the passengers learn to be accustomed to the procedure, the system works. And, too, if the next train will be there soon enough, missing this one is tolerable — it’s much more of a problem when the next one isn’t due for an hour, but when that’s the case the schedules can be adjusted to allow for longer stops and catch-up periods (when the train waits an extra minute or two if it’s gotten ahead of schedule).

The key is avoiding the outrage when the train or the bus doesn’t wait for someone who’s running to catch it, or even someone who’s just about to step through the door, having waited in the normal flow of passengers. It’s hard to get people to understand that while you may have your trip delayed by ten minutes, the result is that we’re keeping things moving for better throughput for everyone. Or, turning it around: waiting for you would mean, ultimately, making hundreds of other people late.

It requires an adjustment from the “me first” approach that’s too common in our society.

Japan, part 2: the culture

No discussion of a trip to Japan could be complete with some comments on Japanese culture, and how it appears to an American. When I made my first comments about the trip, on arrival in Hiroshima, I said this:

My first real exposure to Japanese culture was something I hadn’t been told about and wasn’t expecting: when train personnel left one Shinkansen car at the front, to go to the next one, they opened the door, turned to face the passengers, and bowed, before turning again and going through the door. The conductors did this, and so did the young women pushing the food carts. Every time.

When my colleague and I checked into our hotel rooms in Himeji, we had a similar experience. After getting our room keys, we made for the wrong elevator — the end where our rooms were uses a different elevator. A woman on the hotel staff, who was sitting near the elevator we went to, asked to check our room keys, and saw that we needed to use the one at the other end of the hall. In the U.S., she would probably have just pointed and said we needed to use the elevator down there, but this wasn’t the U.S. She led us down the hall, running ahead of us. When we got to the other elevator, she motioned with her arm as if holding the doors open for us. And when we got in and pressed the button for our floor, we saw that she was bowing to us, and she held the bow until the doors closed.

A few things occur to me about the custom of bowing. In these cases, it’s clearly stating that the people involved — the train crew, the hotel staff — are in positions of service, and are putting us above themselves in the social hierarchy, at least for the moment, at least while they’re serving us. No response is expected, and, indeed, it would be odd for the train passengers to try to bow back to the crew.

We do have some sense of not turning our backs on people: when we leave the house of a friend, we don’t usually just walk out and go — we turn back to face them again, and we wave. But our process of acknowledging someone in the way the Japanese do isn’t formalized as it is there, and it’s certainly very common for someone who’s serving us to simply turn away without a word or gesture, and walk away.

We also shake hands, of course, and that’s also very different. For one thing, it’s approximately symmetric: you offer your hand, I accept it, and we shake hands as peers, whether or not we are. There’s little difference in form between shaking hands with me and doing so with the President of the United States.

The bow, though, is very much asymmetric. First, and most obviously, it is simply given, and does not require any acceptance from the recipient. The depth and length of the bow can be adjusted, varying the statement that it makes. It’s a much more interesting and flexible social custom than the handshake.

There’s some perception that Japanese society is more relaxed, but that’s clearly not true in general. There’s a great deal of pressure to produce, succeed, move ahead; office workers often work long hours, still seen coming out of their office buildings at 8 or 9 at night. And you can always see people running on the streets of Tokyo, crisp-suited men and smart-skirted women running to catch a bus or a train, running to cross the street, or just running to get to where they need to be.

But what does seem to be true is that the Japanese place a great deal of importance on down-time, craving quiet and simplicity. Places to relax are austere, to western senses, with very simple furnishings and calming decor. A park or a garden will have a simple bench in a clearing, but it will be in a place where you can sit and hear water quietly running, or leaves rustling very gently.

The complete opposite of that is the tolerance for crowds. When I visited the Tokyo National Museum, the Heiseikan building, which houses special exhibits, had two exhibits of Japanese cultural treasures. Some of these were things used in the emperors’ houses, and much of the rest were scrolls and panels of writing — the writing of the adopted Chinese script is an art in itself, and the ability to make words look beautiful on the page is a renowned one.

The special exhibitions were very popular, and I arrived soon after the museum opened, at a very busy time. The special-exhibit halls were extremely crowded, and what really surprised me was that as I entered the first hall, I encountered a thick crowd, five to six people deep, packed against the glass. There was no hope to see anything without pressing into the crowd and being moved along with it. It seemed more like a Black Friday “door buster” sale than a scene at a cultural museum. I don’t know what was going on in people’s minds, but no one seemed to think this was at all unusual. As for me, I was very happy to finish the special exhibits and move on to the much more serene Honkan building.

Their smoking policy is interestingly reversed from ours: there are areas of the cities where they do not allow smoking on the sidewalks (though note on the sign that the fine is only about $10 for smoking, littering, or failing to pick up after your dog^[1]; the fine for doing graffiti is up to $500). But most restaurants do allow smoking, and it’s hard to find non-smoking restaurants, or even ones with effective non-smoking sections. So, in many places, one can smoke in the restaurant, but one has to put out one’s cigarette before going outside.

Speaking of the sidewalks: they are blind-friendly. The photo to the right (click to enlarge) shows a sidewalk in Himeji — Hiroshima and Tokyo both had these as well. The yellow strip has texture that can be felt under foot, and the ovals tell the direction the sidewalk goes. When the texture changes to small circles, it designates an intersection or turning point. I suspect there’s a national law that mandates this. It seems useful.

The syllable for "four" sounds like the syllable for "death", and so the number four is associated with death and is considered unlucky. Things don’t come in boxes of four, for example, and buildings do have 13th floors... but skip the fourth floor, as you can see in the photo to the left, of the elevator panel in my Tokyo hotel.

This is one case, at least, where we have it better than the Japanese: “triskaidekaphobia” is just such a cool word.
 

---

^[1] And, by the way, I saw very few dogs, in particular contrast to New York City.

Children and airplanes, another view

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about children on red-eye flights — and got quite a few hate-mail-like comments about it. At the risk of more of the same, I’ll point my readers at an opinion piece from last week by Amy Alkon, “Screaming kids and airplanes: Mayday! Mayday!” Ms Alkon, a non-parent, as I am, doesn’t like having children’s behaviour inflicted on her in inappropriate places... and she thinks of airplanes as about as inappropriate as they get:

Root was appalled when a flight attendant told her something to the effect of “We just can’t tolerate that [screaming] for two hours,” reported the San Jose Mercury News. Root insisted Adam would be “fine once we take off” — which, in my book, means either “He’ll be fine” or “It would be a serious pain in the butt to be stuck in Amarillo another day.”

[...]

Southwest sent the right message in yanking Root and her screaming boy off the plane. Unfortunately, it lacked the corporate courage to stand its ground, probably fearing a public relations nightmare from the Mommy Mafia. Yet, almost every day, I encounter parents who need to get the same message Root initially did. Trust me — should I long to hear screaming children, I’ll zip right past my favorite coffeehouse and go read my morning paper at Chuck E. Cheese.

I know, I know — because I am not a parent I cannot possibly understand how hard it is to keep a child from acting out. Actually, that probably has more to do with the way I was raised — by parents I describe as loving fascists. As a child, I was convinced that I could flap my arms and fly, but the idea that I could ever be loud in a public place that wasn’t a playground simply did not exist for me.

I hear claims that some children are prone to tantrums no matter how exquisitely they are parented. If this describes your child, there’s a solution, and it isn’t plopping him in a crowded metal tube with hundreds of people who can’t escape his screams except by throwing themselves to their deaths at 30,000 feet.

Ms Alkon, soi-disant “Advice Goddess”, is known for her humorous and blunt, over-the-top manner, and the L.A. Times piece has well over 200 comments, as I write this, both for and against.

I’ll only say that I’m glad to have had two peaceful, quiet flights to and from Japan, on my recent trip.

Ahhhhhh....

[Thanks to Lisa Simeone for pointing me to the item.]

The Tap Dance Kid, and other thoughts

In the mid-1980s I saw a musical on Broadway called The Tap Dance Kid. I enjoyed it a lot — I liked the story, the characters, the songs, and the dancing. It’s not a very well known musical, it got a poor review in the New York Times (Frank Rich liked it much less than I), and it ran for less than two years.

It’s the story of an African-American family, centered around a pre-teen called Willie. Much of it is the standard sort of story: Willie wants to do one thing with his life, but his father thinks that frivolous, and demands that he aim higher, follow the family business, or some such. The Jazz Singer is one version of the story that’s been done a few times.

In this case, Willie wants to be a dancer — a tap dancer, in particular. His father, William, is a lawyer, and would like Willie to be one too. He looks down on the dance idea, and on Uncle Dipsey, Willie’s mentor.

In some versions of this story, the father is just being obstinate, insisting on his vision of his son’s success over the son’s own. The Jazz Singer has that, but adds cultural tradition to it. Whether it was Al Jolson, Danny Thomas, or Neil Diamond, the son was more than just “wasting his life”, but also abandoning the family and its heritage.

So it is in The Tap Dance Kid: William wants Willie to meet the former’s standards in life, of course, but he also wants his son to show the world, as he did, what a black man can do. And so it’s doubly disappointing to him that Willie is going in a direction that’s not only frivolous, but also stereotypical.

William’s disappointment comes through in the story’s climax, the powerful and moving “William’s Song”. He starts by berating Dipsey before he addresses his son:

Who ever heard of a grown man named “Dipsey” before?
Every day of your life, every moment you live, you lose!
You’re going nowhere, but you go too far,
Telling my son he’s gonna be a big star,
Shining, shining, sure:
Shining shoes!

Now, Willie, I don’t want you thinking I haven’t any feelings.
I don’t want you thinking I haven’t got my dreams.
I only want what’s best for you,
’cause we’ve got better things to do
Than dancin’... like a monkey with a ring through its nose!
Dancin’: every time a curtain opens
Another door is gonna close behind you.
And I won’t have that; I just won’t have that!

[Listen to an excerpt from “William’s Song” on Amazon. And as I write this, I see that the out-of-print CD is going for $180! Yow! If I ever need some extra cash, I suppose I could sell mine.]

I thought about The Tap Dance Kid and William’s line about shining when I was recently in Boston: there was a shoe-shine station in the hotel, off by a side entrance. Most of the time I passed, it was unattended. A few times, it was attended, but without a customer — the gentleman attending it, a black man who seemed to be in his 50s, his sparse hair graying, was reading a newspaper. But once, there was a customer.

I had an uncomfortable reaction to the scene. There was a black man kneeling at the feet of a younger white man, the former buffing the latter’s boots as they made small talk. There were sepulchral echoes of a slave past going through my mind.

But what of that? I felt uncomfortable? The man seemed at ease with his job, and perhaps he liked it very much. Perhaps he enjoyed working in a nice hotel and having a chance to talk with many different people throughout his day. I didn’t ask him, and I wouldn’t have known how to do so without having it come across disrespectfully. Am I being like William, expecting this man to represent all African-Americans... and denigrating[1] his job in the process?

Worse, am I showing up as the white man looking to “save” the black man from... from what? From being part of an image that sticks in my mind and makes me uncomfortable? From something I imagine him to have risen above, when I don’t know the first thing about him or about his work? How arrogant of me!

I don’t know how to conclude this entry, so maybe some commenters can provide a coda.
 

---

[1] It’s the word that came first to mind, and I then realized that it has a particular connection here, in its obsolete sense of “to make black.”

Japanese erasers?

As if it were needed, here’s more evidence that I’m fairly clueless about current pop culture. I can watch a TV series like Life on Mars and know every song on it, including all the words. I can remember clearly when Shoop Shoop Hula Hoops, Super Balls, and Pet Rocks were new.

But Pokémon completely passed me by. And the first time I heard Paris Hilton’s name, I thought they were talking about a hotel in the French capital.[1] Really.

And so it was when I saw the sign over there on the right (click for full size). Why, I wondered, are Japanese erasers different from those from any other country? And why should I be excited that the store now had them? And how many people need erasers any more? Don’t we do everything on computers?

Happily, Google now erases (um, sorry) all ignorance. A quick search produced this page, among many others. Indeed; one doesn’t use these erasers, at least not to erase anything. One collects them; one treasures them. Consider this gem, from the aforelinked page:

There was a time when one dollar cannot buy much of value, but now that one dollar can be a best quality Japanese Iwako eraser, a little pocket pet to be with you 24 hours a day. You don’t need to be rich or powerful, all it takes is one dollar to have a true friend to be with you wherever you go. You can save up another dollar to get a new companion for your little eraser pet.

A new companion. You wouldn’t want just one, lonely eraser, would you? That’d be... heartless.

I can, though, connect all this stuff about erasers back to my own cultural awareness, through the lyrics of Bill Horowitz, and make those much younger than I go running to Google for a history lesson:

If I had a friend like Miss Rosemary Woods,
How simple my life would be.
I’d just give all my problems to Rosemary Woods
And she would erase them for me.

---

[1] Yes, yes, I know better now, though I rather wish I didn’t.

Black and white

About a week ago, NPR had an item about the then-candidates’ campaigns in Florida. Don Gonyea talked with some Obama supporters in Sunrise, not far from where I grew up:

Don Gonyea: Seated two sections over was 57-year-old Joan Benn[?], who was born in Guyana, but who has been a U.S. citizen for 30 years. As an African American, she says she always hoped she’d see what she’s seeing now; she just didn’t think it was possible so soon. She thinks an Obama presidency would restore America’s global reputation.

Joan Benn: The world would look at us in a different way, and a different level. I think it’s good for our children, and my grandchildren, to see a black president.

Now, in case you’re not sure, Guyana is here, in South America. It used to be called British Guiana, and it’s next to Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), Venezuela, and Brazil. It’s not in Africa.

I don’t know whether Ms Benn (and I’m sorry if I’m getting her name wrong, but NPR didn’t spell it) does or doesn’t prefer the term “African American” for herself, but I suspect her own reference to “a black president” is a strong clue. In any case, I’ve known a number of dark-skinned people who hail from South America and the Caribbean who are quite bothered by it. In the words of a Jamaican friend of mine, “I am Jamaican; I am not African.”

Of course, her ancestry might be traceable to Africa within the last few centuries, but the question comes down to how one identifies oneself, compared with a hyper-political-correctness that drives our media to pick a term that has to “fit all”. When the movie Pocahontas came out in the mid‘90s, I read a newspaper article that said that Disney had engaged as a consultant “an American Indian (the term [he] prefers)”. They went on to refer to him as a Native American for the rest of the article.

I’ve also seen references in the U.S. news to, say, Algerians living in France, or Nigerians in England, as “African Americans”, even though they might be talking about people who’ve never set foot on our shores.

Ideally, we wouldn’t characterize people unnecessarily, and when it is significant and needs characterization, we ought to use the subject’s own preference when we can — and use some common sense, rather than bleat like sheep.

Dark-skinned ≠ “African American”. That ought to be as plain as black and white.

Inhaled, contrary to ban

When we first learned of Sarah Palin, I noted, in passing, that she’d tried marijuana and said she didn’t like it. Bill Clinton, of course, famously told us that he hadn’t inhaled when he smoked up. Barack Obama’s also admitted to a doobie or two in his salad days, and even George Bush has some puffing in his past.

We’ve arrived at a time, over the last 15 years, where the people we’re calling on to run things grew up in generations that simply did that. I think of my high school and college classmates — doctors, professional photographers, small-business owners, bank managers, police officers, scientists, lawyers, actors, ministers, military personnel... yes, there are some of all of those in the mix — and I know that most of them smoked weed at one time or another, some once or twice, some occasionally, some regularly and often.

Now, they and others a bit older and a bit younger, folks in their 40s and 50s, are the ones who are out there as community leaders. And, you know, I almost feel that I’d trust them less if they hadn’t been part of it, back in the day.

True to that, we seem to be worrying less about minor drug use, though there’s still some criticism to be heard. There might be something to worry about if one is still getting stoned in the office, right before a big meeting with customers, or union leaders, or whatever. Otherwise, what we did 20 years ago shouldn’t matter, and doesn’t seem to. Who knows?: maybe we’ll eventually be able to see that keeping weed illegal is just silly.

We’ve also seen our first wave of presidents and candidates who haven’t served in the military, and who, in fact, went out of their way to dodge it — again, just as many in my generation did during the Vietnam years. Bill Clinton left the country, and participated in anti-war protests; George Bush got an appointment in the National Guard and then ducked out of that; John Kerry did serve, and then protested the war when he came back; Barack Obama hasn’t served nor been called to. We need to accept that that, too, is a common situation with the new generations of our country’s leaders.

And now I think, as I read more about the level of connectedness and information sharing that’s common today, what political campaigns will be like 20 years from now. How will politicians of that day deal with the resurfacing of old Facebook profiles and Twitter logs? Will proudly calling oneself a “[obscene gerund] redneck” at 18 be a political liability at 48? When there’s a dense and detailed Twitter record of one’s daily comings and goings, moods and thoughts, what will happen to one’s public face?

Perhaps it will just be so much information that it will equalize everyone. Maybe if no one can be completely clean, we’ll stop worrying about the smudges.

Roll another one
Just like the other one
You’ve been holding on to it
And I sure would like a hit
 
Don’t bogart that joint, my friend
Pass it over to me

 

---

[The title phrase is an anagram of “tetrahydrocannabinol”.]

Some wonderful antismoking news!

It seems that Bill Gates is adding $125 million to $350 million from Michael Bloomberg, the $500 million to go to worldwide antismoking campaigns over the next four or five years:

The $500 million would be spent on a multipronged campaign — nicknamed Mpower — that Mr. Bloomberg and Dr. Margaret Chan, director of the health organization, outlined in February. It coordinates efforts by the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, the health organization, the World Lung Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Foundation and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

The campaign will urge governments to sharply raise tobacco taxes, outlaw smoking in public places, outlaw advertising to children and free giveaways of cigarettes, start antismoking advertising campaigns and offer their citizens nicotine patches or other help quitting. Third world health officials, consumer groups, journalists, tax officers and others will be brought to the United States for workshops on topics like lobbying, public service advertising, catching cigarette smugglers and running telephone hot lines for smokers wanting to quit. A list of grants is at tobaccocontrolgrants.org.

The campaign will concentrate on five countries where most of the world’s smokers live: China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Bangladesh.

I barely need to say it: this is fantastic news. The tobacco companies, faced with strong antismoking campaigns stateside, along with a number of lawsuits, settlements, and regulations, have long been targeting folks in other countries with their... um... product. Not that there hasn’t been a propensity for smoking in some of those places anyway, of course, but targeted marketing has made it worse, especially among women.

This will go a good way toward counteracting that. And it will include funding for helping people quit. That, coupled with plenty of pressure for cultural change — making it less normal, natural, and desirable to smoke — should really make a difference.

Thank you, Messrs Bloomberg and Gates, for putting your money into such an important effort.

Good cop, bad cop

I often watch some of the British TV cop shows, the ones with Inspector Lynley, or Inspector Morse, or Inspector Tennison. The ones where the detectives root around and solve a murder, which word they pronounce so British-ly. And there’s something I think I’ve noted before, but maybe I’m just thinking about it now because of the recent Supreme Court Decision declaring the District of Columbia’s handgun restrictions unconstitutional, and thereby making our cities more deadly with a stroke of “Justice” Scalia’s pen.

You see, I’ve watched American detective shows too, such as NYPD Blue and the Law and Order series, and there’s something very different between the US and UK versions. In the US shows, as the detectives sift their way through the facts and the evidence and the leads and the suspicions, they do it in a very physically aggressive, in-your-face kind of way. They’re rough with the suspects and the interrogations. They smack people around, they threaten them, they shout a lot. They go places with guns drawn, and you never know when some skel will take a shot at them. There’s the threat of a bullet around every corner.

The British detectives, in contrast, work more subtly. They’re generally rather polite, if insistent (the American version might be Columbo, or the guys in Dragnet, decades ago), and they crack the case through dogged determination and by getting into the minds of the suspects and puzzling out the inconsistencies. They don’t even carry guns — in the British police force, only special units are armed — and there’s rarely concern that they’ll walk through a door and take a bullet, or even a club to the head. They’ll speak sternly during interviews, but they don’t often shout, and I can’t recall them applying fists to the situation.

It doesn’t matter, for this discussion, whether either of these depict police work accurately. What’s interesting is what it shows about how our two cultures look at police work, what image we have of how they operate. The American culture is steeped in aggression, violence, and guns. We have the Old West image of the lawman with his six-shooter, and a cop without a sidearm is a completely foreign image to us. And, obviously, the creeps they’re dealing with are no good, so if we can slap some sense into them or get them to “cooperate” by banging their heads into the wall, where’s the problem in that?

The Brits, on the other hand, would find it odd to see their Detective Inspectors running around with guns or using their suspects as punching bags. In fact, there was a plot thread in one season of Inspector Lynley, where a threat to push a suspect off a balcony nearly cost DI Lynley his job. That’d be a normal day for Andy Sipowicz.

It’s fiction, yes. But our fiction says a lot about our reality. In the 1950s, Joe Friday never drew his gun. 40 years later, we didn’t even notice the guns because we were so used to them.

We’ve come a long way.