By Will Carlin
In the mid 1990’s, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority began to do two things simultaneously: lay off station attendants and install a new kind of turnstile. The new turnstile was designed both to allow customers to continue to use the station despite a lack of attendant and to prevent fare-beaters.
The turnstile is seven feet tall and consists of a curved metal meshing comb that makes it look like a cross between a typical revolving door and a small jail cell. It is properly known as a HEET (High Entry/Exit Turnstile), but some refer to it by its predecessor’s not-so-affectionate nickname “The Iron Maiden.”
The turnstile’s metal rods start at the floor and go all the way to the top, so a passenger can not jump over or crawl underneath, and on one side, it allows access to the station via a MetroCard. Because it has to work with electronic entry in one direction and allow a push exit in the other, it doesn’t turn very fast (about twenty exits a minute). When a train arrives in a station and one or two HEETs are the only turnstiles, a line to exit typically forms.
After the London subway bombings in July of 2005, the transit authority realized that 20 people per minute was not enough for an “evacuation event,” and they spent $3.8 million to install emergency doors all over the system.
These doors emit a piercing high-pitched alarm when they are pushed open. To New Yorkers who regularly take the subway, this ear-splitting alarm has become almost as ubiquitous as the familiar squeal of steel wheels against steel tracks.
It almost never signals an actual emergency. And yet alarms go off every morning during rush hour and again during the evening rush every time a train arrives at hundreds of subway stations across the city. Exiting passengers are supposed to depart through the turnstiles, of course, but the HEETs’ just aren’t fast enough for New Yorkers on their commute. Inevitably, someone bangs open that emergency door, causing the alarm to sound.
Every emergency door says right on it “Emergency Exit. Push bar for emergency exit. Alarm will sound.” The bar to press open the door is bright red, and when it is pushed, the alarm sounds. You sort of have to wonder: what part of “emergency” don’t these people understand?
Interestingly, though, the words on the door don’t say whether or not it is illegal to use the emergency exit for a non-emergency. It is, though it is rarely enforced.
“The only real disincentive to banging open that door,” said Stephen Dubner on a recent Freakonomics podcast about pain, “is the painful shriek of the alarm, and the first guy through…actually suffers less than anybody…[He] gets out of the station faster than anyone, and then 30 or 40 people follow him through the open door and another 30 or 40 patient schmucks—that’s me—we wait our turn at the turnstile wallowing in the noise…It is kind of a backward incentive, right? The guy who you want to pay the most is actually paying the least.”
At a junior squash tournament, two teenagers are engaged in a tight battle, and they play a very long point. At the end of it, one player goes for the kill with a short crosscourt forehand. He drills the ball into the top of the tin, and it makes a loud sound. At the same moment, though, there is crowd noise from an adjoining court, and the loud sound is muffled to many outside the court, including, unhappily, the referee.
The shooter’s opponent realizes that the tin’s sound might have been muffled by the crowd noise, so he signals that the ball was down and turns to the referee to confirm that she heard it. The striker also turns, and seeing the referee’s hesitation, he makes an instant decision: he says the ball was good.
The tin was heard by many outside the court, but one boy is maintaining that he thought it was good. The referee is unsure. What do they do? The referee says to play let and the striker immediately agrees: “Yes, we should play let. That’s fair.” Some in the crowd applaud his apparent sportsmanship. His opponent, meanwhile, turns sullen and momentarily loses his competitive zeal. That’s all it takes, and the striker wins the match.
Afterward, the match loser couldn’t look his opponent in the eye. Later, he said, “I know he knew it was down—we both heard the tin—and I couldn’t understand how he could take the point. But I let it affect me, and I shouldn’t have.”
The winner’s father said simply, “They couldn’t agree and the referee wasn’t sure. They played let. It was the right call.”
Backward incentives, indeed.