Art of queuing: A combination of math & psycho

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Man is born free, but everywhere he is in queues. Queuing is an acquired social trait; homo sapiens as a species do not queue naturally. Can anything be done to mitigate the frustrations of standing in a line? Lately the subject has been attracting a good deal of expert
attention.

One study estimated that the average American spends a fortnight in a year in queues.

With the pressure of numbers and shortage of resources, we in India will be called upon to queue on more and more occasions. How orderly and acceptable will be such queuing?

The way every nation cries differently, nations display cultural differences in queuing.

There are two psychological things that upset people most when waiting in queues. One is any impression of unfairness in the arrangements. The other is the feeling of wasting time. Accordingly, queuing experts—combining mathematics with psychology—are concentrating on these two aspects. Take immigration clearance of passengers at international airports. It’s common to employ several servers to quicken clearance. The crucial question: should passengers be made to form a single combined queue or have the option to join any of the queues formed separately before each server? At Heathrow, London, you encounter the combined queue snaking between long lines of rope. At IGIA, Delhi, arrivals hasten to choose from half a dozen queues the one they deem will move the fastest. In the days of Sikh militancy, I took care to avoid a queue that had a few turbaned fellows in front; their clearance was sure to be slower.

In multiple queues people often stay restive; they perceive other queues as moving faster. This may sound like paranoia but there’s some truth in it. If there are six queues, the mathematical probability of your queue moving the fastest is only one in six. That way a combined queue imparts a better feeling of fairness.

At multiple airline check-in queues, some couples are seen employing the strategy of standing in two different queues. The one who reaches the desk first can check in for both.

No wonder the concept of combined queues has been gaining in popularity, especially in UK and USA. You see this in banks, enquiry counters, and cafeterias. Again, switching to a combined queue in place of multiple queues is reckoned to cut average waiting time significantly. All that is required is a length of rope held on posts within a waiting area.

In India, there is a good case for service organizations to make greater use of ropes or railings for the integrity of queues, whether combined or multiple. The returns in user goodwill will be well worth the extra expenditure involved.

Of late, a few researchers have expressed their reservations about quicker clearance through a combined queue. According to them, multiple queues allow people to shift to adjacent queues when held up by someone too slow in front. If people with relatively quick requests are allowed to jockey, it makes multiple queues faster.

Multiple queues can also exercise a psychological effect on servers. Servers feel guilty if their queue grows in length, and so tend to speed up disposal. Regular customers, such as in banks, have again the option to choose a server with greater expertise, rather than just the first server who becomes available.

Richard Larson of MIT, Harvard, highlights the second problem of queuing: the "empty time" effect. Time is actually a man-made thing, an artificial concept. You know this while queuing because it stops completely.

People waiting in a queue harbour the familiar feeling that time spent in queuing is wasted, and so it seems longer than "real" time. For example, passengers usually perceive a minute of delay in bus arrival to as much as twice of a minute spent sitting in the bus.

An Israeli researcher timed how long each of the 640 people stood in a grocery store check-out lines. Then he asked them how long they thought they had waited. On average, perceptions of the waiting period were 30 per cent longer than the real waiting time.

Larson cites the case of Houston Airport where passengers were complaining about the delay in getting their luggage—actually a time of 8 minutes. Even with the airport employing additional handlers the complaints continued. Passengers who only had hand luggage were heading straight for the taxis, in full view of those waiting for their baggage. But, interestingly, without any reduction in handling time, complaints ceased when the baggage was sent to a more distant carousal. Passengers spent longer walking to it, and less time getting jittery waiting for the luggage to turn up.

Organisations, especially those running fun-fairs, circuses, or other entertainment, are always on the look-out for tricks that help "fly" waiting time for their patrons. Queues are twisted in a way that their true length is impossible to judge. And things like music or some other visual entertainment for people stuck in queues. The aim is not to cut waiting time (smaller waiting crowds make a venue look less attractive) but to make waiting less irksome.

The longest queue I have stood in was at the Leicester Square, London, for half-price theatre tickets. A serpentine queue almost a furlong. But it was a relaxed, well-spaced, good-humoured, ice cream eating queue; confident of its integrity was safe from intruders or queue-jumpers. And the long line melted in no time when all those ticket windows were thrown open. The other day I encountered an extraordinary queue -- indeed a sickly queue — at the OPD of AIIMS, Delhi, where I stood to obtain the obligatory registration card. Nearly two hundred sick men or seemingly in need of medical attention, were already standing in a line that twisted out of the huge reception hall into the verandah, and into the open, as I joined it at 8.15 am.

The fellow immediately in front of me had injured his ankle in an accident. He wasn’t comfortable standing. But whenever he sat at a wall-side bench—asking me to watch his place—a policeman with a baton would shout at him to get back into the line. Here was an outside agency helping to keep the queue orderly.

But even without its aid, the sickly queue showed remarkable resilience in guarding its integrity. It defended itself against a few persistent intruders whose modus operandi was to pick up some acquaintance already in the queue and squeeze in there. Perforce the important and the influential were left with no choice but to manage registration surreptitiously by approaching officials from behind the counters.