Steve the Owl's Blog

I have lived in the Philadelphia area for nearly three years. I lived in a dorm for the first two years while I was finishing my master’s. Because of this, I didn’t really have to deal with parking issues. However, after I got my master’s and got married, we moved into an apartment with on-street parking. This gave us a lesson in the study of human nature, and it helped demonstrate the free-rider problem in its purest form.

The Snow Comes

Philadelphia is a city that does not get snow very often for a city of this latitude in North America, but we got three blizzards that hit this city really strongly this past winter, and those three were enough to set the city record for snowfall for one winter. When the blizzard came in February, snowfall started to come on a Tuesday evening. Eventually, it would measure nearly two feet in certain parts of the city.

The Problem

When the snowfall came, we had a new problem. People still had to go to work the next day, and people had to dig out of the snow. Many people did dig out of the snow, but they were also fearful that they would lose their parking spaces when they came home. In a lot of neighborhoods, the method of protecting one’s parking space was to mark the space with anything they could, whether a chair, garbage can, etc.

The Law vs. Social Custom

According to city law, a public parking space is just that: available to the public. However, our mayor, Michael Nutter, acknowledging the social custom of many neighborhoods, defended the practice of saving parking spaces. After all, the city has been short on funds, and they weren’t about to try to plow parking spaces, especially in places that were residential. (In order to make up for this, some of the high-traffic areas had free parking.) So, despite the law, residents of many city streets decided to continue with this practice.

The Results

Not every neighborhood in Philadelphia condoned space saving. As a matter of fact, this wasn’t even true of every block in the same neighborhood. My block was one that encouraged space saving; the block perpendicular to mine did not. Many people would assume that the neighborhood with no space saving in place would be more crowded because of space saving. After all, the “free rider problem” argues that any time everyone benefits from the actions of a few, no one will act because the cost is too high.

However, it turns out that this was not how the free rider problem played itself out. Rather than focus on the fact that someone would “steal” a parking space, the non-saving block dug out literally weeks faster than my own. On my block, people would insist that they shoveled out a space when they did not. (For example, someone accused my wife of stealing a space that they dug out, even though she dug it out that very morning.)

On the blocks where people saved spaces, people actually stayed parked longer because of paranoia over a stolen space, and those who saved spaces only dug one space (if they dug at all) while my wife and I dug a total of five spaces either together or individually.

The Lesson

While many would assume that every one from themselves would be the best method, it turns out that cooperation, and acknowledging a parking space as something that was shared is what fixed the problem. Rather than a focus on “me,” the ones who thrived were the ones who focused on “we.” This is similar to the way network marketing works. There are some who insist on going it alone, and hoarding up whatever profits possible, but what they don’t realize is that they are surrounded on all sides by a mountain of greed, while those who learned to cooperate are the ones who were able to free themselves and be able to go wherever they wanted to go.

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Tags: blizzard, business lesson, cooperation, free rider, teamwork

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 16th, 2010 at 12:03 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.