This vintage clip, part of the "Magic Highway, U.S.A." episode of the1950s TV series Disneyland, predicts how transportation — particular anything related to the highway — will evolve in America.
This is amazing!
Will a World of Driverless Cars Be Heaven or Hell? – Robin Chase – The Atlantic Cities
Autonomous cars will be part of our reality faster than most people realize. While manufacturers have a four-phase plan to bring about the fully autonomous car within the next two decades, Google promises to have them ready as early as 2017, just three years distant.
My guess is that Google’s could be the "heaven" vision. In July they spent $966 million to purchase Waze, a company with a brilliant smart phone navigation app. The app delivers the best routes based on the historical choices of the 50 million Wazers combined with the traffic speeds they are experiencing in real-time. Back in the day, when I was CEO of Zipcar, I was struck that we knew the precise times, days, durations, and distances of car travel more intimately even than car manufacturers did. Today, Waze offers a greater insight into the exact travel paths of what must be on the order of a billion trips over many years. If you wanted to get into the on-demand public transport world, you couldn’t ask for better data against which to understand and predict exactly where and when people will want to travel. Couple that with Google Ventures single largest investment to date — $258 million — into Uber, which has perfected the request, pickup, and delivery side of the equation, and you’ve got a clear blueprint for tomorrow’s transportation (if you take as a given the autonomous vehicle itself, of course).
via Will a World of Driverless Cars Be Heaven or Hell? – Robin Chase – The Atlantic Cities.
Am I too late?
The Neuroscience of Car Dependence – Eric Jaffe – The Atlantic Cities
The researchers cite recent research on the nature of drug habits: they’re suggesting you’re addicted to your car. Perhaps more intriguing is recent work on the role that stress plays in shifting cognitive function from flexible parts of the brain (in the hippocampus) to procedural ones (in the striatum). In brain imaging studies, test participants placed under stress rely more on the striatum to determine their behavior — overwhelmed by life, we revert to habit.
That helps explain why choosing to travel by a certain mode in the morning often doesn’t feel like a choice at all. Getting ready to leave the house has always been a stressful time, confronted with an annoying commute and a new day at the office, and the stress only increases with the urge to get a head start on work on our phones. (Morning commutes are the clearest example, but the process applies to any trips secondary to their purpose.) In light of this overload, conserving brain power with regard to travel choice is actually the wise move.
Knowing that people don’t think twice about mode choice makes it all the more important to get other options right the first time.
via The Neuroscience of Car Dependence – Eric Jaffe – The Atlantic Cities.
Who Is at Fault When a Driverless Car Gets in an Accident? – John Villasenor – The Atlantic Cities
Design defects are another commonly asserted theory of liability. Suppose that the software for controlling braking in an autonomous vehicle doesn’t sufficiently increase braking power when the vehicle needs to stop on a downhill slope. If, as a result, a vehicle causes a frontal collision i.e., impacts a car in front of it, a person who suffers injuries or economic losses due to the collision could file a design-defects claim against the manufacturer.Even when a design is sound, manufacturers can be liable for manufacturing defects. If an autonomous vehicle technology provider accidentally ships some vehicles with an early, non-market-ready version of software containing a flaw not present in the newer version that was supposed to have been shipped, a person injured in an accident attributable to this flaw could seek to recover damages from the technology provider.
via Who Is at Fault When a Driverless Car Gets in an Accident? – John Villasenor – The Atlantic Cities.
Waze under attack: Israeli students fake traffic jam on popular map app – National Israel News | Haaretz
A software program the two wrote created a fake traffic jam that lasted for hours, causing many fake drivers to take detours. To avoid causing real traffic jams and affecting real drivers, the two manufactured a backup on the quiet main road through the Technion campus in Haifa. But according to their faculty advisor, Prof. Eran Yahav, the program could just as easily have created a fake traffic jam on any other road in Israel and thereby caused Waze to report erroneous information to its customers.
HT Aviv
The Practical Path to Driverless Cars – Richard Morgan – The Atlantic Cities
Nobody dies when Siri doesn’t understand what you’re saying. But what if Siri were your chauffeur? … Would you trust Google Translate at 100 miles per hour?
via The Practical Path to Driverless Cars – Richard Morgan – The Atlantic Cities.
Tampa, FL seeks to lead the driverless car movement. They have traffic infrastructure from the 70s or so. There have been brainstorming workshops for devising a practical path.
The War Between Uber and Lyft Will Be Won With an Algorithm – Rachel Feltman – The Atlantic Cities
He also hopes to make an algorithm that predicts the likelihood that someone nearby will need a car in the next three minutes.
via The War Between Uber and Lyft Will Be Won With an Algorithm – Rachel Feltman – The Atlantic Cities.
And there we have it, what am I doing here?
If Savanna Animals Took the Subway – Jenny Xie – The Atlantic Cities
Quite a few creatures have wound up on our trains over the years. In a new digital photo project called Animetro, photographers Clarisse Rebotier and Thomas Subtil imagine an even wilder Paris Metro, roaming with animals from the savanna.
via If Savanna Animals Took the Subway – Jenny Xie – The Atlantic Cities.
Millesime Gallery in Paris.
The War Between Uber and Lyft Will Be Won With an Algorithm – CityLab
Lyft’s new VP of data science, Chris Pouliot, previously led the data analysis team at Netflix, which is known for utilizing the heck out of its user data. He’s got big plans for Lyft, too. "We can use data to provide more accurate [estimated times of arrival] when a passenger requests a ride, to set high expectations and provide a better user experience," Pouliot told VentureBeat in December. "The success or failure of the business is highly correlated to how the company uses data." He also hopes to make an algorithm that predicts the likelihood that someone nearby will need a car in the next three minutes. That way, each individual is sent a ride that’s convenient for them as well as the entire user base. The drivers-as-friends shtick might get a software boost, too: Pouliot imagines that a Facebook connection could tell passengers about interests they have in common with their driver.
Uber has a current job listing for a "leading data scientist," so it could be that they’re still trying to get their own Pouliot-level analytics whiz.
via The War Between Uber and Lyft Will Be Won With an Algorithm – CityLab.
This timelapse from a San Francisco street may change how you see the Google bus
Commuter Shuttle and 21-Hayes EB Bus Stop Observations from Paul Supawanich on Vimeo.
San Francisco does have a real problem: Hundreds of private commuter shuttles move through the city every day, collecting people who work in Silicon Valley but can’t bear the thought of living there (with some ingenious sleuthing, Wired’s Kevin Poulsen just counted 36 Apple buses passing by his house on an average day). These shuttles clog city streets. Sometimes they block public bus stops. In a city wary of the rising might of tech giants, these things have come to constitute a massive (and exclusive) parallel transit network that competes for space with publicly funded transportation.
via This timelapse from a San Francisco street may change how you see the Google bus.
Reminds me of a time lapse of commuting hours at a NYC subway/train station from several decades ago. The biggest difference is perhaps the way people dressed back then. Even so, it was fascinating to see, and I’m glad that piece of history was captured.