Slugging and Sleeping

I don't know why I haven't heard of Miller-McCune before, but it seems like a fantastic magazine/site. The surprisingly long article on Slugging held my attention to the last. Over the past few years living in Europe I discovered the joys of ridesharing, aka carpooling, and have lamented its absence in the USA. Everyone here has a car; no one seems to want to share his car with strangers. We don't like nor trust strangers here. I'm a trustworthy, semi-likable stranger without a car, people! Stop shutting me out.

Quite different from the typically longer-distance sharing that happens in Europe, it turns out DC and San Francisco are a couple of places that have had a strange ridesharing system for over 30 years. Irked by traffic jams and HOV lanes, it is workers in and around these two major cities that have casually organized a better way. Talk about an awful name, though, "slugging." Here's the suggested origin story:

When LeBlanc moved to the area in the mid-1990s, slugging was already entrenched. It was born alongside the I-395 HOV in the 1970s. According to the slugs’ creation story, drivers quickly realized they could get people in their cars and qualify for the new lanes by poaching waiting passengers from bus stops. Bitter bus drivers are credited with coining the term “slug,” originally a derogatory reference that has been amiably reappropriated.

"Slug" doesn't sound like it refers to anything specific about the practice, and I have a hard time believing bus drivers would use such a tame insult...am I missing some historical connotation there? I'll have to ask my family and friends in DC if they've heard of this system, which sounds really cool but also so specific to the surrounding layout and circumstances that it would be impossible to try to export it. But these are the cases that give hope that even Americans can change their travel habits if under enough time or cost pressure.

After spending an inordinate amount of time reading this fascinating piece, I was drawn to A Day in the Life of a Sleepy Student, which will please Stasia, who is incensed at the early start of a high schooler's day (seriously: ask her). I haven't made it all the way through yet, since the screen is starting to make my eyes burn and I need to get the word out here before I burrow squintingly back into my mole-hole for the evening, but I like what I've read so far and I'll certainly be exploring the Miller-McCune site in more depth soon.

The articles are massive, which is sometimes a turn-off when I'm reading something on a computer (see: eyes burning), but they're interesting, well-written, and most importantly they aren't spread out across 5 or 10 pages but rather contained on a single, very tall page. Web sites aren't subject to the space restrictions of the printed page, but sites like The Washington Post and Slate insist on making me load multiple pages for each piece I try to read, which is possibly a way of suggesting more length/depth than actually exists and is certainly a way of maximizing page views (Slate even goes so far as to automatically refresh its pages every minute or so in its quest to inflate its numbers).

Slideshows and multiple-page articles are infuriating and unnecessary and should go the way of AOL's cd-mailing bombardment and other relics of an age when "the Internet" and its benefits were completely misunderstood. Make the piece as long as it takes, utilizing the magic of the web, and let me use my handy scroll wheel to read it without interruptions. I'm more likely to finish it, revisit it, and discuss it if I can easily search and access the entire piece this way. You can slap ads up and down both sides of the page, I don't care; just don't ruin my reading experience or I won't keep reading. Though it could do without the awkward, hyphenated name, Miller-McCune seems to understand what it takes to captivate a reader.