You mention that an alternative to queueing for the Queen would be to balance supply and demand by charging for tickets, before dismissing this as unpalatable, and suggesting that an online ticketing system would be better. However, an online ticketing system would still suffer from the fact that more people would want to go than there is sufficient capacity for, and such a system would bias in favour of those who are most technologically literate, who arguably have a weaker attachment to the Queen than those of earlier generations.
A physical queueing system is arguably the most fair solution. A physical queueing system demands a sacrifice of time from the queuer, and this sacrifice of time is what ultimately balances supply and demand. This system ensures those who are most committed get to see the Queen, and those that are casual interlopers* do not. Note that if you did charge for tickets, the purchaser still has to sacrifice money, and they gained that money by sacrificing their time, so either way they still pay with their time. The difference between the two solutions is that people have substantially differing amounts of money (and thus rationing on this basis may be perceived as unfair), but everyone has the same amount of time on a given day (assuming they survive until the end of it, as approximately 99.997% of people do).
* I say this as a casual interloper who has not been to see the Queen, but might have done so if tickets were made available online.
#2 NHS
We, the citizens of the UK, have intentionally under-resourced the NHS. This is not a policy failure, it's an intentional policy choice. The choice is between lower wait times and higher taxes, or higher wait times and lower taxes. There's no free lunch here. Sufficient capacity may cost the order of another 5% of GDP, which would be £110bn of additional taxation per year.
For a very recent example of this in practice, look at the popularity of the recently proposed and then discarded 1.25% increase in national insurance tax (which the IFS forecast to raise £17.2bn/yr). Fundamentally the majority of electorate do not want to pay for better state healthcare services.
This is a really important insight, but there's an equally important second step.
When you see a queue, you know there's a bottleneck here. That's bad… probably. The next step is to ask what it would cost to remove this particular bottleneck, and what the benefit would be. All computer nerds know that you can never eliminate bottlenecks, only move them around - there's always a limit somewhere. So would fixing this bottleneck actually improve the overall situation?
Also there's wasted resources some of the time. The price of not having a queue at peak times is having idle capacity where demand is lower. Are we prepared to pay for this? (Hence airlines deliberately over-booking flights: cheaper to pay a bit of compensation than to routinely fly with empty seats.)
For example, queueing on the M25… huge problem around rush-hour, though to be honest it flows pretty well outside peak hours. How many people are delayed at peak, for how long? Probably a big number. What would it take to fix? Let's say we add two more lanes to the entire thing. How much countryside consumed, how much housing demolished, how much traffic now arrives at their junction 30 minutes earlier and then finds that now the displaced traffic is creating a jam in the smaller roads? The benefits might be worth it, but it's not a no-brainer.
How many counters would you have to install in every Post Office to ensure that there's never a queue on the busiest Saturday morning? That's probably quite a bit of investment for infrastructure that will be used for literally two hours per week. Plus retaining and coordinating a rota of trained staff to cover that period - is it worth their while learning the skills and not being able to make weekend plans for the sake of two hours' pay? Most Post Offices don't have lots of spare floor space, so what are we going to remove to make room for the extra counters?
Imagine how much the NHS would cost if we had sufficient capacity to cope with the normal winter surge plus contingency for an unexpected pandemic. Personally I'd be happy to pay more tax and have the ability to provide incredible care for non-urgent stuff, then flex that capacity to meet peaks in demand when necessary, but I don't think that's a majority view.
Disney may have a wonderfully efficient system for minimizing time waiting in line, but I wouldn’t overlook the price of tickets as a means of suppressing excess demand—cost to go to Disney world, even for Florida residents, is downright eye-popping these days. And as for whether it should be considered a virtue to form an orderly queue, I think the “orderly” part is a positive British virtue that I would hate to see exchanged for the American version, needing to hire security personnel to ensure an orderly line.
Couple of thoughts:
#1 Queueing for the Queen
You mention that an alternative to queueing for the Queen would be to balance supply and demand by charging for tickets, before dismissing this as unpalatable, and suggesting that an online ticketing system would be better. However, an online ticketing system would still suffer from the fact that more people would want to go than there is sufficient capacity for, and such a system would bias in favour of those who are most technologically literate, who arguably have a weaker attachment to the Queen than those of earlier generations.
A physical queueing system is arguably the most fair solution. A physical queueing system demands a sacrifice of time from the queuer, and this sacrifice of time is what ultimately balances supply and demand. This system ensures those who are most committed get to see the Queen, and those that are casual interlopers* do not. Note that if you did charge for tickets, the purchaser still has to sacrifice money, and they gained that money by sacrificing their time, so either way they still pay with their time. The difference between the two solutions is that people have substantially differing amounts of money (and thus rationing on this basis may be perceived as unfair), but everyone has the same amount of time on a given day (assuming they survive until the end of it, as approximately 99.997% of people do).
* I say this as a casual interloper who has not been to see the Queen, but might have done so if tickets were made available online.
#2 NHS
We, the citizens of the UK, have intentionally under-resourced the NHS. This is not a policy failure, it's an intentional policy choice. The choice is between lower wait times and higher taxes, or higher wait times and lower taxes. There's no free lunch here. Sufficient capacity may cost the order of another 5% of GDP, which would be £110bn of additional taxation per year.
For a very recent example of this in practice, look at the popularity of the recently proposed and then discarded 1.25% increase in national insurance tax (which the IFS forecast to raise £17.2bn/yr). Fundamentally the majority of electorate do not want to pay for better state healthcare services.
This is a really important insight, but there's an equally important second step.
When you see a queue, you know there's a bottleneck here. That's bad… probably. The next step is to ask what it would cost to remove this particular bottleneck, and what the benefit would be. All computer nerds know that you can never eliminate bottlenecks, only move them around - there's always a limit somewhere. So would fixing this bottleneck actually improve the overall situation?
Also there's wasted resources some of the time. The price of not having a queue at peak times is having idle capacity where demand is lower. Are we prepared to pay for this? (Hence airlines deliberately over-booking flights: cheaper to pay a bit of compensation than to routinely fly with empty seats.)
For example, queueing on the M25… huge problem around rush-hour, though to be honest it flows pretty well outside peak hours. How many people are delayed at peak, for how long? Probably a big number. What would it take to fix? Let's say we add two more lanes to the entire thing. How much countryside consumed, how much housing demolished, how much traffic now arrives at their junction 30 minutes earlier and then finds that now the displaced traffic is creating a jam in the smaller roads? The benefits might be worth it, but it's not a no-brainer.
How many counters would you have to install in every Post Office to ensure that there's never a queue on the busiest Saturday morning? That's probably quite a bit of investment for infrastructure that will be used for literally two hours per week. Plus retaining and coordinating a rota of trained staff to cover that period - is it worth their while learning the skills and not being able to make weekend plans for the sake of two hours' pay? Most Post Offices don't have lots of spare floor space, so what are we going to remove to make room for the extra counters?
Imagine how much the NHS would cost if we had sufficient capacity to cope with the normal winter surge plus contingency for an unexpected pandemic. Personally I'd be happy to pay more tax and have the ability to provide incredible care for non-urgent stuff, then flex that capacity to meet peaks in demand when necessary, but I don't think that's a majority view.
They didn't appreciate the queues in the Soviet Union.
Disney may have a wonderfully efficient system for minimizing time waiting in line, but I wouldn’t overlook the price of tickets as a means of suppressing excess demand—cost to go to Disney world, even for Florida residents, is downright eye-popping these days. And as for whether it should be considered a virtue to form an orderly queue, I think the “orderly” part is a positive British virtue that I would hate to see exchanged for the American version, needing to hire security personnel to ensure an orderly line.