I’ve lived at The Flats for over a year now, and it’s a great place to live. But one of the big issues for residents including myself is the noise imposed from the train, and specifically for me, the beeping, crunching, screeching sounds of the garbage truck outside my window early in the mornings. Although I’m usually awake during the weekdays when the garbage truck comes, I do like to catch up on rest just a bit on the weekends. Low and behold, I am prevented from doing so because of the beep beep screech beep outside.
This annoying way to wake up definitely imposes a negative production externally on me, and I’m sure it’s imposed on others in the area. Students including myself work ourselves hard during the week, and need that extra sleep on the weekends. My potential marginal benefit of each extra minute of sleep is curtailed without my choice when I’m woken up by the garbage truck. The social marginal cost includes the private marginal cost imposed on the garbage truck, plus the negative externality, thus the social marginal cost exceeds the private marginal cost. The equilibrium point of allocative efficiency is not being met. A Coasian solution to this problem would be to negotiate with the garbage company to convince them to alter their routes so they would come down Main Street at a later time of day, but I would probably have to pool funds from many people who have this problem in order for the company to agree to changing their operations. If the marginal benefit to the garbage company is less than the dollar amount of damages imposed on those who are sleep disturbed, the garbage company would agree to this negotiation.
One of the problems with this Coasian negotiation would be arranging the negotiation in the first place and assigning damage. Measuring how much damage to our sleep this garbage truck is doing, determining how many people in the area have experienced disturbance of sleep due to this garbage truck, and equating lack of sleep to a dollar amount, resulting in total damages, would be an extremely difficult feat. I would also run into free rider problem. What about the people who aren't paying or contributing, yet still benefit from no sleep disturbance that they were not able to achieve before? This would lead those who agree to contribute to potentially see the deal as unfair and withdraw from the negotiation. Another solution would be to assign the damage in monetary terms and have both The Flats and The Standard add an extra fee to everyone's rent. Yet, some individuals may refuse to comply with this new provision, or argue that they do not experience sleep disturbance from the garbage trucks, so the apartment complexes are unlikely to include this fee. As one can see, a Coasian solution to this problem would be extremely difficult to pull off, therefore I must accept that I will be woken up by the beep screech crunch beep sounds every week and wait until I move out of the apartment to achieve some peaceful sleep.
2 comments:
Ashley, although the solutions you provided follow Coase's bargaining style that we've been going over in class, I'm curious if you also considered solutions to this problem that stretch further than the block of your apartment building. After all, I imagine that in many cities across the United States there are disgruntled civilians waking up to a garbage truck.
As I was once in the market for food trucks, I know that there's only a handful of manufacturers of specialty trucks. I assume that garbage truck manufacturers share a similar production chain from this background knowledge. So, if there are few manufacturers, if you were somehow able to influence these companies to improve their technology, could you solve the problem entirely? If this were possible, garbage removal companies would continue to run their trucks at optimal hours for them, and civilians would recover hours of sleep they had previously lost.
I'm not implying that these companies need to throw their trash trucks in the dumpster in exchange for brand new trucks, but perhaps a reengineered muffler would reduce the externality they currently create.
Is it practical to replace a muffler on a garbage truck? Lets perform a conservative estimate, and say that at the specific intersection of your apartment complex there are 30 residents bothered in your 9 story building, 25 across the street in a 6 story building, and 40 in the hotel adjacent to your building. There are 95 people bothered on a single intersection by this process. Lets assume that on average a half hour of sleep is lost per person. If we assume that there are 15 intersections in a city with a uniform number of people bothered by the truck (I'm aware this is incredibly low) we have 1475 people bothered by the truck, and 712.5 hours of lost sleep. This is for one day of trash pickup. If we can place a dollar amount on the damage ( lost utility and the lost productivity during each individual's workday due to the lack of sleep) caused by a single trash pickup run, I imagine we would be horrified at the cost to improve the truck relative to the cost incurred by civilians.
Brandon, I like your idea for how the community can come together and fix this solution privately. This would definitely be a Coasian Solution in the real world. However, the almost 1,500 residents leaves room for the problem of free-riders. Let's say that you value your sleep, in the morning hours, more than I do because you have an 8 am everyday of the week, have early morning events on Saturday's, and go to a early Church service Sunday mornings. I on the other hand, have no morning classes throughout the week, no plans on Saturdays, and do not go to my Church till 11 am or do not attend church. When I hear the truck noises I think to myself, "It's okay, I can go back to sleep for the next X amount of hours", but when you hear it, you realized you only have 30 more minutes till you must get up and that you cannot fall back asleep in that time period. Thus, you lose 30 minutes of sleep every time you hear the Garbage Trucks. You would be willing to pay more for these modifications on the trucks, as opposed to me who would pay less because it does not effect me as much. This situation creates possibilities of me and others who may be in the same boat as me, becoming free-riders on others who value these modifications to trucks more.
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