I hate queueing: is it ever a good thing?
Queues mean different things to different people across the world – from being a nuisance to compromising personal safety and limiting access to essential services.
People queueing (Photo: Hal Gatewood, via Unsplash)
I hate queues – for stealing my time, and often drawing on my income. Electronic queues have taken this to another level, widening their scale and scope, while our ubiquitous traffic jams are just another form of queueing. But do queues serve a purpose, and can they ever have social and community benefits?
For the most part, I am able to avoid queues, or at least minimise my exposure to them. Hearing those dreaded words on the phone, “your call is very important to us”, you know you have a long wait ahead. Music loops drive one close to insanity. Then just as you expect the connection you need, the phone cuts off and you have to start again. These queues can be classified as nuisances.
But for many urban dwellers, queues have a more serious impact on their lives and livelihoods.
Queues can have a big impact
The queues to get water from tankers in Karachi’s informal settlements, queueing for access to toilets and washing facilities for people and their laundry in Mumbai, having to get up very early to join the queue for water in Dhaka – all these take time and resource, and can even compromise personal safety and security. Unreliable services, such as water only being available for an hour a day, add to the problem.
For street vendors restricting the number of times they use toilets or access fresh water because of excessive queueing times affects their health and income. For those selling food, usually female, fresh water is needed to wash their hands, dishes and vegetables.
Then there are queues at the office of the ‘right’ bureaucrats to gain entitlement to public services, such as to register land ownership or housing rights, or to acquire essential paperwork to work, run a business or secure a loan.
Other examples are the queues to get documentation and those that provide access to health care or schools, or subsidised food. All this makes clear the difference between queues for documentation to get some goods and service, and queues to actually get a good or service.
Key tool in reducing poverty?
Having shorter and/or quicker/more accessible queues can be important to free up precious time for people to work, eat, sleep and live. The hundreds of community toilets built by the Mumbai women’s group Mahila Milan not only provided cheaper and more accessible water and sanitation, they also reduced queue times – and by providing separate queue lines for women – stopped men barging in.
In Dhaka, an externally-funded project improved the quality and availability of water in informal settlements. The evaluation of this initiative expected to find higher incomes – but instead found that what the women really valued was not having to get up so early.
Complaining or socialising?
We’re used to queueing, and complaining if a range of goods and services that in theory we’re entitled to, can only be accessed after a long and tortuous, usually electronic, experience.
What might be termed non-essential or optional queueing may get us tickets for gigs and concerts in the UK (think Glastonbury, Taylor Swift, Oasis), or seats in popular restaurants. Back in the day these queues were more likely to be in person (camping out for tickets to see The Rolling Stones – this was me!).
But physical queues still feature hugely in people’s lives – think border controls and traffic congestion. Some promote social interactions in a shared experience, such as queueing to pay respects to the deceased (for example the late Queen Elizabeth II) or as part of a religious pilgrimage.
Some queues provide security and personal safety. In Dhaka, girls and young women meet up to enjoy queueing together to use toilet and washing facilities.
Then there are the queues and other costs of the financial services low-income groups have to use (see the box below).
So what does a queue do?
One characteristic of urban poverty is lack of access to basic services – provision for good quality piped water, sanitation and drainage, healthcare, emergency services and the rule of law.
A queue is designed to restrict access to some good or service to some specific group’s interest in this, and from when and where they get access. So some queues benefit low-income people by improving access to, for example, water, electricity or community toilets, or can form spontaneously in response to the promised or actual arrival of the good or service desired.
Then there is the high cost of being ‘unbanked’, where according to a 2021 World Bank report only 37% of adults in Mexico have a bank account.
The fact that there is a queue in the first place suggests that demand exceeds supply. Perhaps there are unrecognised ways of reducing queues that benefit low income groups – such as governments making sure there’s enough to go round, ultimately promoting fairness and equitable treatment, or access for all.
But who wants queues? The goal is no queues.
This blog drew on the work of Tova Solo, Arif Hasan, the Orangi Pilot Project (Karachi), Sheela Patel and SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres), and Anupama Nallari.
