If you're like me and have a long commute, you've probably had plenty of opportunities to observe another driver do something so spectacularly rude, dangerous, or illegal that you may wonder to yourself: how can anyone possibly do that? Looking at it rationally, there are tons of legitimate reasons why absurdly "outside the rules" driving can happen - for instance, the driver in question could be driving to the hospital because their wife is about to give birth, or their child or parent could be critically ill. At least, this is what I tell myself while barely holding back my fuming rage that people are able to break the rules so egregiously, always without a police officer nearby.But, let's face it: sometimes when you see this happen, it's just some rich asshole who is in a rush to get somewhere, and doesn't feel like playing by the same rules the rest of us face. Upon realizing this, it made me wonder: how much value would a person have to place on their time in order to willingly take the approach of damn the torpedoes, my 150' yacht ain't sailin' itself and I need to get to the marina, I'm riding this goddamned curb all the way to Rumson?
Well, not really. Since I'm a selfish asshole, I was really first curious about myself: given the realities of getting pulled over, the length of my commute to work, and the value I place on my time, would it make sense - from an economic cost/benefit perspective - to drive like more of an asshole than I currently drive?
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Now "driving like an asshole" is a fairly abstract concept, so to keep things as simple as possible, I wanted to focus on one fairly common traffic law - a rule which most of us break from time to time: running red lights. Specifically I wanted to know: what is the theoretical "break-even" point in which a person's time is so valuable such that they "shouldn't really care" about running a red light on occasion?
(NOTE: What follows is a completely amoral analysis, and leaves aside for the moment the very real truth that traffic laws exist for a reason, which is to save lives. So please keep in mind this an intellectual exercise, and even if the results suggest that I "should" run more red lights from a purely economic perspective, I'm not really about to start driving like more of an asshole than before, because I really do care about laws and rules and such.)
I have a long (thirty mile) commute to my work place, and in each drive to or from work, I hit approximately thirty traffic lights. And I'll admit that sometimes, in my impatience, I run yellow lights just after they turn red. I do so because, in my gut, I felt like the risks of occasionally getting pulled over are outweighed by the likelihood that I do get pulled over AND get a ticket. But I didn't really know this for sure, so I decided to crunch a few numbers in Excel and find out, roughly, how valuable an hour of someone's time would need to be in order to "come out ahead" money-wise while always speeding through yellow-to-red lights.
To be honest: I had to make a ton of assumptions in order to come to a conclusion, some of which are fairly abstract and open to interpretation to someone who disagrees. In my analysis, I've tried to be completely forthcoming about where I've made these assumptions. I did this because if you're one of those readers who loves crunching the numbers on their own, and if you find places where we disagree, let me know (especially if it fundamentally alters the result).
But, if you think I'm awesome and quantitatively infallible and just want to know the answer, here it is:
- With my New Jersey commute, I would need to earn only $43,326 per year in order to offset the cost of obtaining a violation for running the occasional "late yellow" or red light.
- Because people with shorter commutes have fewer opportunities to fail and therefore would go longer between obtaining violations, commute time largely doesn't affect the result of the calculation. A New Jersey driver with a 15 light/day commute would need to earn only $41,828 to offset this cost.
- Drivers outside New Jersey, being kinder, more moral, and better drivers in general than those inside New Jersey, would never consider such an evil possibility, and therefore are excluded from this analysis.
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As I mentioned earlier, this analysis primarily stems from a personal curiosity about my commute. So I'll start with that example and then address how this applies more generally to other people's commutes.
First, how frequently would I get pulled over if I always sped up at yellow lights?
Here are the facts:
- I hit 30 lights on each drive to AND from work (60/day)
- I drive to work 4 days/week
- So each week, I hit 240 lights
- The average "cycle time" for any given light is 60 seconds, and in those 60 seconds, a light is yellow for 4 seconds (about 7 percent of the time)
- So, each week, I should hit about 16 yellow lights out of the 240 total lights I encounter. That's 832 yellow lights per year.
- I have zero points, presently, on my driver's license.
- Yellow light situations turn into "running through red light" situations fairly infrequently, let's say ten percent of the time.
- Cops are rarely around - in fact, I would guess that cops are only around one out of every hundred times a person makes a poor decision and runs through a red light.
- I am polite with police officers when pulled over and therefore I am somewhat less likely than the average driver to get a ticket when I am pulled over - let's say one time out of every three that I'm pulled over (for something nominally "minor", such as running a red light), I get a traffic ticket.
- I encounter 832 yellow lights per year while driving to/from work (I assume that in my spare time driving, I'm more laid back and will always defer toward not running red lights), and I make 83.2 poor decisions on a yellow light per year.
- I would get pulled over by a police officer one time out of each hundred poor decisions that I make, so I would get pulled over once every 439 days (about every 14 months).
- But because I only get a ticket one time for every three that I'm pulled over, I only get a ticket every 28 months.
It makes sense here to explain the assumptions first, since the facts are pretty straightforward:
- Assume, if given a ticket, I come across the most hard-ass judge in New Jersey, and I'm forced to pay the maximum fine for the violation AND I also get two points on my driver's license. Realistically, the penalty for this violation would be far more lenient, but remember the exercise assumes that I turn into a radical douchebag driver. So we should assume, being a douchebag, I'm going to insult the judge's mother's sexual proclivities while in court, and as a consequence they'll come down hard on me.
- Assume also that after the judge throws the book at me, I decide to offset the points on my driver's license by taking a defensive driving class (you can do these every two years, which is good news for me because I'm now acquiring tickets every 28 months).
- I'd be getting the maximum fine of $200 for the violation, which plus maximum court costs of $39 is $239.
- The defensive driving course would be $35 (let's say I take the one offered by Rutgers, since it's close).
- It would take up a full weekend day, and I love my weekends because I get to write obscenely complicated blog posts, so let's say the opportunity cost would be $400 (this is the cost I'd put on eight hours of my freedom on a weekend day).
- The total cost of getting a ticket would be $239 + $35 + $400 = $674, every 28 months.
Here are the facts:
- In my specific commuting situation, I would save 13.86 hours per year (just trust me on this) by running through each yellow light I encounter (compared to always stopping).
- Over a period of 28 months, the theoretical time between receiving tickets, I would save 32.35 hours by being an asshole and running through every yellow light.
But what about a driver with a more "typical" commute, let's say fifteen traffic lights a day (seven or eight in each direction)? This driver would save less time than I would, of course, by running through red lights (they would only save 8.07 hours every 28 months), but they would also get tickets less frequently than I would as a function of having fewer opportunities to get pulled over (every 116 months, on average).
Plugging these numbers into my formula suggests that these differences essentially cancel each other out; a driver with a shorter commute would only have to value their time at higher than $20.11 per hour (or $41,828 per year) in order to economically justify this approach.
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I'm sorry that I'm not very confident about the above data, but I'm really not very confident about it. Even in a best case scenario, where all of the (very smart) people who take the time to read my detailed analysis agree with each of my assumptions, I think the precise figures I stated ($43,326 per year for me, $41,828 for a driver with a shorter commute) should be considered as "shotgun blasts" with a huge margin of error. In the real world, if I did this, I wouldn't be pulled over - like clockwork - every 14 months; instead, I might get pulled over twice in a month, with a two- or three-year break in between traffic stops. And of course, over time, the police would start to realize that they are pulling over the same silver Acura TSX for running red lights all the time. They might start to understand my M.O., destroying my "oh I'm so nice and the police will love me LoLz" assumption entirely.
At the beginning of this post, I suggested that the point of the exercise was to understand the "break-even" point where it makes sense for a hypothetical driver to start running through yellow lights each time they are given the opportunity, considering that in the long run it would make sense financially for them to do so. Now that I think about it, though, there are other issues at play here as well.
The first is that, even if you disagree with the $43,326 number and think it should be something like $70-$80k/year, either because my assumptions are way off or because you think the "moral cost" of behaving in such a manner would be quite large, it should be fairly obvious that rich people are more likely to drive like douchebags in part because they can afford to drive like douchebags. Traffic violations are a regressive tax in that (even if you assume that they occur with equal frequency across the income spectrum, which they don't) they hit the pocketbooks of low-income individuals disproportionally harder. In an ideal world, and forgive me for being a bit of a bleeding-heart liberal in saying this, traffic fines would be a specific amount of a person's income. $43,326 is a decent individual living wage in the United States in 2013, but if I'm correct about this figure (or even if I am in the general ballpark), it implies that for a sizable minority of people, the "correct" econometric decision would be to run through red lights. This actually has fairly significant consequences toward public safety. Turning traffic fines into a progressive tax would render my Incredibly Evil and Morally Reprensible Analysis completely moot.
The second (less academically rigorous) point I'd like to make is that productivity analyses are in the domain of economists and are therefore completely invalid in the real world, because psychology trumps economics in every way possible. I mean, c'mon, "value placed on my time"? Realistically, with all that time I'd be saving by running through each yellow light, what would I be doing besides fucking around on Facebook? I really did take time and care to put together the analysis that precedes this statement, but I think this is just a quirky, intellectual exercise that exists in a vacuum.
To that end, I'm curious about the extent to which people agree or disagree with what I've done. (Please don't take this as an excuse to say, "well shit, I'm gonna run red lights now, git 'ir done!", because that would make me sad.)
