Private vehicles as public transit

1/08/07

In the Washington D.C. area every morning, thousands of commuters gather at spots much like bus stops. These spots are known as slug lines. The people waiting in those lines are known as slugs.

Every morning, at some 25 slug lines in Washington DC, Springfield, Woodbridge, Stafford and Fredericksberg, a car with no passengers pulls up aside a slug line and the driver lowers the passenger window and calls out a destination: “L’Enfant Plaza!” perhaps, or “The Mall!”

The slugs who are first in line for that destination hop into the car, which can now whiz past all the slow traffic by joining the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane. This method of combining solo drivers with strangers to beat the three-to-a-car lanes is called slugging. By the accounts of veteran sluggers, the system has been around for over twenty years.

Slug Etiquette

Slugging has evolved a distinctive etiquette. Sluggers do not talk, unless a conversation is initiated by the driver. Sluggers do not eat or smoke in the car, and do not ask to change the radio station or turn up the air conditioning. Money never moves from hand to hand, even if the driver has to stop for gas; slugging does not involve exchanges of anything more than a mutual “Thank you” at the final stop. One universal rule: never leave a lady standing alone at a stop.

The name was conferred, it is said, by bus drivers decades ago. Their stops frequently overlapped slug lines, with bus drivers annoyed that half the people in a lineup weren’t real passengers but – as they came to be known — “slugs,” after the phony coins that occasionally clack down the coin collector.

The excellent site slug-lines.com calls slugging “the most efficient, cost-effective form of commuting in the nation.” Slugging represents a subculture that has discovered the advantages of spontaneous human pooling. We stand to learn several lessons from slugging. The most important of those lessons may be the transformed meaning of the automobile in a Fourth Voice culture.

Lesson #1 From Racy Alter Ego to Pooled Experience

The automobile is the grandest expression of the Third Voice, the voice of corporate culture, which has set the defining rules of communication for the last hundred years. The Third Voice shapes mass communications to stroke the private ego. Indeed, its genius is to condition us to regard pre-formed artifacts such as cars, as our most important mode of self-expression. Whether it is the car’s humongous engine, or its sleek suggestive lines or its battle-tank-like chassis, these mechanical features, assembled by teams of workers, have become deeply fused over the last century with private notions of freedom, sexuality, power.

The first Model Ts came rolling off the busy floor of the Ford Motor Company in 1908. Early advertising and marketing soon made those cars totems of identity. “FREEDOM for the woman who owns a Ford,” promised a full-page 1924 ad, showing a solo woman in driving togs enjoying a maple tree at the peak of its fall colors. Images of the open road became the obligatory background to any automobile ad. Car marketing became the promise of expanded personal freedom, in an age where corporate media had come to govern all expressions of personal freedom. The car is the ultimate soloist shell, and the perfect embodiment of Goebbels’ maxim that captures the ethos of the corporate voice perfectly: “We speak not to express ourselves but to elicit a desired response.”

With slugging, the car ceases to serve as a stand-in for the soloist self; it becomes instead a free-forming method of delivering specific people from this location to that. Busses could not achieve what slugs and their drivers achieve: a fluid, adaptable, unscheduled means of routing transport to needed destinations. Slugging is an early glimpse of the new values we will find in the automobile as we enter the age of the Fourth Voice.

Lesson #2 With social rules, we trust in the anonymous

Imagine you are a commuting driver in the Washington DC area. You will happily pick up three riders standing at a slugline. You would not, however, pick up a lone hitchhiker even when that hitchhiker holds a placard announcing your destination. Why?

It’s simple. Drivers trust the anonymous folks who stand in sluglines, in ways they cannot trust the anonymous folks who hitchhike.

The difference between slugging and hitchhiking is that slugging has fixed social rules that everyone recognizes and follows. Whether by keeping us driving on the right hand side of the road or forming lines where the most recent addition starts at the back, social rules are important. Riders and drivers alike are protected by the widespread agreement in those rules.

Lesson #3 As new constraints are imposed, the surest social response to them will be free-forming

To anyone who truly believed the mythic palaver about autonomy on the open road, the appearance of HOV lanes must have been a slap in the face. At grueling rush hours, the HOV lanes rewarded cars in which the drivers had traded their autonomy for passengers. Yet slugging is highly successful precisely because so many drivers are happy to make that conversion and find some “open road” while everyone else sits in tenative parking lots.

No one knows who first invented slugging but we can be certain it was not the transportation section of the city planning department of Washington DC. Slugging is an entirely free-forming response to growing social regimentation, and a reminder how pooled cognition works best: in creating spontaneous new responses to changing social conditions.

– William Kuhns