Crazy Coding Conundrums

Here in the Netherlands we routinely rack up 300 to 400 kms of traffic jams during the morning and evening rush. It’s not for lack of train services; the Netherlands are just that densely populated. I live right next to the busiest 15kms of highway, where traffic moves at a snail’s pace about 6 hours a day, every day.

So, my interest was piqued when the ANWB (the local Automobile Association) organized a traffic jam free day, today, October 9th. There’s a site (filevrijedag.nl, it’s in dutch) and a million or so spent on TV and newspaper ads. The ads were light on what you were actually supposed to do, though apparently the jest was that you should try to work from home, or take the train, today.

What the hell were they thinking?

I see three possible outcomes here:

A. Everyone assumes that there won’t be any traffic (after all, file vrije dag literally means ‘traffic jam free day’), and takes the car. That’s the whole point of the tragedy of the commons, isn’t it? Asking everyone to take the train should logically result in more cars on the road. Now we’d have even more traffic. Okay, fine, you get the issue of traffic jams in the news, perhaps, but also your crazy incompetence for spending a million bucks to actually worsen the problem.

B. Due to the lack of suggestions, no one does anything, and there’s about as much traffic as usual. Great. No one cares and you’ve proven that you don’t know how to market an idea.

C. Hell freezes over and people actually do take the train. The trains are crazy busy, suggesting to those that tried the train for the first time that its a horrible mode of travel, and none of the experimenters actually get to enjoy the traffic jam free day, other than reading about it later, and probably being called a sucker, the next day, by those who did take the car. Endresult: Those who were thinking of taking the train to work now no longer will due to their bad experience.

Talk about a crazy plan. The results are in, and there was slightly less congestion on the road (‘just’ 250kms worth of traffic jams today). No word yet on how busy the trains were, but it looks like a result somewhere between B and C.

Simpler suggestion: Offer specific home-city to work-city year passes for a symbolic amount to everyone who wants it, staggering the introduction based on a factor that has no relation to the trajectories offered, so that the influx of extra passengers is gradual. With increasing fuel prices, the solution sells itself, really. The railways should probably do this at any rate; by introducing more people to the train system, which is really one of the best of europe*, more people will consider travel by train, even for things other than work/home travel.

*) Tickets are relatively cheap, trains run more often with more coverage than any other european country, and while the trains don’t run as punctually as in germany, its not too bad. However, whining about the sorry state of the rail system is a favourite pastime of the dutch, for some reason.