Tim Harford on British queues (and how queues get long)

 Here's a column in the FT on congestion and growing queue length, which (also) shows why Tim Harford is one of my favorite economics journalists.

How British Queues Got Out of Hand 

[Why are ambulances increasingly delayed?] "The obvious explanation is that there are not enough ambulances, but the deeper problem is that ambulances themselves are being delayed in discharging patients into A&E units, which are themselves often overwhelmed: in the first quarter of 2014, 134 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E before being admitted; 10 years later the figure was 141,693. The long delays in A&E are in part the result of the hospital beds all being full and that, in turn, is in part because hospitals sometimes struggle to discharge vulnerable patients into an overstretched social care system. All of these problems are a kind of queue and they all interact in a surprising way: you can die waiting for an ambulance because there aren’t enough nursing homes in your area.

...

"when bottlenecks feed into bottlenecks, some strategic thinking is required to fix the system. There is often more than one bottleneck in a congested system and opening that bottleneck will sometimes mean the same queue builds up somewhere else."