Youth viewpoint: The end of the line Why in Egypt is the simply logic of queuing so misunderstood, ponders Mary Mourad* What do you do if you wish to register a birth, a death, get into school, buy bread, license a car, get on a crowded bus, or buy subway or cinema tickets? The answer is simple if you live in England, Germany, China, Canada or Rwanda: stand in line! But this is Egypt! You ask, "But excuse me, where's the queue?" The answer: "The queue disappeared a long time ago. It's time to look for the tunnel leading to the office of the manager ... the tunnel of personal connections ... and if there's no tunnel, you have to dig one ... or you can try queuing, but we're not sure when or how or whether you'll be served. If today we're serving at all, we have to manage the tunnel crowd first ... they get priority, you know... So your turn might come tomorrow, or in a month or a year, or a century." It also may never come. And here you are faced with the reality of the matter: the age of queuing is long gone. We're in the age of tunnels! The background of the story is this: there are more people than resources, and everyone knows that. Queues are one way to manage the distribution of resources on a first-come first-served basis, to ensure some kind of equitable distribution. The needier come first and spend more time queuing than the less needy. Queues existed when everyone believed they were still going to get their errand completed. It was simply a matter of when. Yet as resources grow tighter, queues grow geometrically (ie. much faster than resource scarcity). If that continues for too long, however, and people don't get to their final goal, despite the queue, alternative routes are created and eventually queues disappear. The crowd battling every day to maintain its sliver of the limited pie is only capable of using its various skills to ensure that share doesn't escape its grabbing hands. Once they stop believing they're getting their turn, they turn into a jumble of chaos, fighting each with their best tools to get to their ends. Solutions are invented: big guys go first; loud women follow, while those connected go straight to the manager's office. And what happens to queues? They die out. what's the use of queuing? One's time is better spent digging tunnels leading to all those back doors. The problem with a lack of queues is that efficiency drops exponentially. To give a local example: if there's one man selling bread through a window with five men in front of him properly queuing, he hands out the bread one by one, with only one request flowing at a time and one hand of money to manage. If he faces all five at the same time, he hears five requests and has to manage five separate money-giving hands. You can bet he's at least going half as slow in the second case. So, the last person served will be delayed twice as much if he had been last person in the queue, while the third person served will be served as slow as if he were the last of the lot. In other words: there is only one person who benefits from the cram at the window, one who stayed in same position, and three who were worse of. Can you imagine? Now, picture how worse it gets if he is also receiving requests from the manager's daughter inside and from the friend screaming from the second floor outside, etc. Imagine the lack of efficiency we're creating from all the new tunnels! You wonder: wouldn't all be better off if they were standing in line? By contrast, here's a solution for the above challenge from the traffic situation in Holland. They discovered that during times of high traffic, the smoothest way to manage the flow of cars is to slow down their speed. Simply, cars coming from a distance are asked to move towards the traffic ahead slower. As they slow down, they give time to allow the traffic ahead to flow smoother and avoid further cramming. Once the flow into traffic slows, eventually the traffic build-up stops, and in the end the car coming at a slower speed actually doesn't face any traffic and goes a lot faster than if it had rushed earlier into traffic! Brilliant, isn't it? Do you think we can apply that in Egypt? Blocking all the tunnels, rat holes, back roads and dark alleys leading to that manager's desk that lead to efficiency loss? Allow queues to evolve hilariously for a while until resources are reallocated to the larger queues (bread versus car licensing for example), knowing there will eventually be more bread and many more car licences than ever there was before? * The writer holds a Masters Degree in Economics from Sussex University, UK.
