Posts about Gordon Linton

Gordon Linton, Montgomery County's alternate member, is also leaving. More changes are likely to come when Vincent Gray makes his picks for the DC mayoral appointees and Rushern Baker for the Prince George's alternate; speculation is that Kwame Brown will also change one or both of the DC Council appointees.

Meanwhile, General Manager Sarles announced that WMATA will ramp up useless security theater in the form of random bag checks. As usual, anyone can just turn around and decline to enter the station instead of having a bag searched.

This will let riders be confident that anyone trying to smuggle contraband into that particular station at that particular moment is instead walking to a different station instead, while having enormous amounts of time and police energy wasted on not catching actual potential terrorists.

TBD summarizes the more meaningful news from the safety committee's meeting: Metro has made good progress on safety incident investigations, and suicides have declined. However, train doors are still occasionally getting opened on the wrong side, and there are more fires but fewer smoke incidents. Also, people keep assaulting bus drivers.

Update: Zimmerman sent a letter which is included below. He announced that Mary Hynes, his colleague on the Arlington County Board, will be taking over the seat.

Today I announced that I will be stepping down from my role as Arlington's representative on the WMATA Board of Directors. On January 1st I will assume the Chairmanship of the Arlington County Board. In view of those responsibilities, and my desire to give greater focus to some of the needs within my county, I have decided that this is a good time for me to pass on the day-to-day duties of Metro representation.

I want to assure you that my commitment to transit and to Metro is as strong as ever, and I will continue to work for improvements to rail, bus, and paratransit services in our region. I will continue to serve on the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission (which is the governing body for WMATA in Virginia), as well as on the Transportation Planning Board for the National Capital Region, and the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.

One benefit of this move is that another member will have the opportunity to become immersed in the daily issues involved in the system, increasing the level of direct knowledge about Metro significantly on the Arlington Board. And I am confident that my County will be well-represented, and the region well-served, by the member who will succeed me on the WMATA Board.

My colleague Mary Hynes will take over in January. Mary is an exceptional public official, and she is well-prepared for this role. For the last three years she has served on the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, for which she is currently Secretary-Treasurer. Mary has a very personal connection to Metro. For many years, she and her family have lived about a block-and-a-half from the Clarendon Metro station. They have relied upon the system, and seen the changes Metro has brought to the community over the years. Mary is also a very experienced local elected official, having served Arlington since 1995 as a School Board and now a County Board Member. She is known for her responsiveness to constituent's concerns, and for paying close attention to details. Mary is also highly respected for her command of capital budgeting issues. She will be a strong advocate for riders, and a conscientious steward of the agency.

It has been a great privilege serving on the WMATA Board, and I appreciate all the help and support you have given me over the years in this role. I will be, as I have been, an ardent advocate for Metro, its riders, and the jurisdictions it serves. I look forward to continuing to work with all of you. There is much we need to do for the betterment of public transportation in our region, and for a bright future for Metro.

Thank you.

—Chris Zimmerman

Arlington County Vice-Chairman
WMATA member

Gordon Linton noted in his rebuttal to my testimony that these others haven't asked for revenue. That may be true, and IP considerations aside, it's okay for Metro to ask. They could also ask Alstom to give them rail cars for free. But in both cases, that's not going to happen. So far, there's been no deal after years of delay. Whatever Metro is asking for, they apparently aren't going to get it. And if Google paid Metro, then everyone else would start asking for money, too. Quite simply, it's clearly better for Google not to work with WMATA than to change the existing, settled market price for transit data.

It's also important to keep in mind that Google is probably not making any money off this service. Linton, Metro staff, and others seem to assume that this must have a value because a big, rich company is asking for it. That fundamentally misunderstands the way Google is structured.

Google acts much more like a startup than a big company in many ways. The typical company will only release a product if it's worth a considerable amount of money. After all, any product requires development resources, marketing time, and more. There's a roadmap, and everyone works on the top priorities on that roadmap. If you launch a product, you better be willing to invest millions to market it to make it successful, otherwise it's not worth it. Google, however, tries very hard to maintain a startup culture where people can just whip out projects because they feel like it.

In an industry like shampoo, where there are manufacturing costs and huge marketing costs, that's how businesses work. In technology, it doesn't need to be that way because it's pretty easy to make a halfway decent Web site. And Google has worked hard to maintain some of that nimbleness. If an engineer, or a group of engineers, wants to build something, like adding transit directions to Google Maps, they can go ahead and do it.

There's still a coordination cost, as a product manager has to get executive buy-in, the user interface has to be immaculate, and lawyers have to sign off if copyright could be even remotely involved, but you can launch a side product at Google with only about 10 people involved. This is why Google often gets mocked for having so many "beta" products, many of which don't go much of anywhere.

It's easier to think of Google as one extremely profitable business plus a very large number of very small, completely unprofitable technology startups that are all funded by one VC firm or philanthropic foundation. The profitable business is search and content advertising. Google makes just about all its money from the ads on search and the content ads on millions of other Web pages. Then it's got a lot of other stuff, most of which just loses money. At least when I was there, Gmail, for example, cost way more in capital costs (all the computers that store all of your email) than it made in ad revenue. It's valuable strategically, but a big money-loser. The same applied to Maps. YouTube was a ginormous money sink. And so on.

I don't know if Google is making any money off ads on Google Transit, but either way it's a rounding error. Maybe the ads make enough to cover the engineering and legal time, plus the computing resources. Probably not. They can't be making much. This product started because some engineers were disappointed that Google Maps let you find out how to drive and not how to take the train. The company is supporting this product because people like it inside and outside the company, not because it is a major strategic focus or even a minor one.

It is, however, valuable to riders. Even if the trip planner were perfect, which it's not, many people are already looking up businesses on Google Maps and would find it much easier to get directions with one click. Many people are using iPhones or Android phones and want transit directions on their existing map application. Others don't know about the Metro trip planner.

Metro staff, and Linton, are so obsessed with the imagined revenue that they won't get. Meanwhile, they're missing the bigger issues that affect riders. Next, we'll put this whole issue in perspective.

Disclosure statement: I worked for Google from 2001 to 2007. I did not work on Google Maps or Transit. I am not coordinating with them on this series. I do still own some Google stock, but am selling it in fixed increments each month without regard to its performance. I don't believe that Google Transit influences the price of the stock by even a penny.

Chris Zimmerman first explored the issue of indemnification. In a nutshell, New York and Chicago have negotiated contracts where they don't indemnify Google for anything. Staff have claimed that's a sticking point, but since these other agencies have gotten past that, Zimmerman suggested that Metro try to get the same.

Sarah Wilson, the Metro staff member working on this issue, replied to Zimmerman's question about indemnification by bringing up an unrelated argument:

We did an anlysis of the ten major transit properties, and we are the only ones who solicit advertising on our own website. What that means is that to the extent that we are driving traffic to our website that is helpful towards revenues that we derive.

Zimmerman continued:

A far as the revenue side goes I certainly agree that we should explore, and I think we have a duty to explore, any possibility for revenue. And I agree with Mr. Linton that transit agencies dont always do that and we should. And I support your efforts to find out the value of any intellectual property that we have including those provided by the internet.

On the other hand, I don't see any reaason for us not take advantage of opportunities right now, today, to provide more information to customers that doesn't cost us anything, as long as we protect the long term value. In other words, we don't have to say that, now and forever, we're going to do something for free. Mr. Linton, in an earlier meeting, cited our example of car sharing, and I think it is instructive. He correctly pointed out that we are now getting some rev back from that contract, as we should because someone is making money off it. And that was right. But we just started out by saying, let's just get car sharing started, and the people coming in weren't making a lot of money on it, and we didn't expect to make any money on it. And after a few years we were able to do that.

Right now it seems to me there's an opportunity to provide benfit to customers, both those who live here and those who come from around the country, to be able to sue our system more effectively in a way that it looks like doesn't cost anything. If there's a way to do that and, again, hold out the possibility in the future... This is a very dynamic environment. The Internet changes all the time. You dont want to bind yourself well into the future. But
why not do something now.

I've got a trip coming up to another city. I'm going to Boston for a conference, and I ... was able to have it tell me how to use transit in the city of Boston to get from the airport to the location of the conference. The kind of thing everybody here's probably done on the Web when you're driving somewhere. It seems to me that it's a very tangible benefit we could have and I don't see anything that I've heard told that says we can't do that without causing some kind of long-term damage. I don't see what the loss to us is, assuming we can clear up this indemnification issue, what significant cost there would be to us of allowing that to happen in Washington, DC and its surroundings just like right now it is in New York, Chicago, Boston, and most of the major cities in the country.

While it's always good to be looking for how we can make any revenue we can to offset the cost of subsidies and fares, it would be a shame to get ourselves so tied up in what might not be a significant revenue stream that we miss the larger thing. Getting a customer on that pays a fare to fill a bus that's not full could be worth a lot more to us, potentially.

Many of of these kinds of applications aren't making a lot of money for anybody. One example that I heard of is some graduate student; basically it's a hobby. They do i for fun. Somebody sometimes money and a lot of them don't. Our fundamental biz is transportation, and to the extent that we can do that better and get more customers, that's where our emphasis ought to be.

That is our fundamental business, but we don't have that business unless we have revenue to support it. My experience has always been that we tend to underestimate and overlook the revenue implications of this. When we were looking at the idea to have car rental services, I suggested that we explore it and what I heard was that this was a service that we provide to our users. Just by exploring it we found that there was revenue.

We always need to look and not assume that just because you provide a service that someobdy's not generating income. And since I am on the other side of this equation I know how people are out there generating income. Transit agencies I have supported for my entire career are always begging for money, but do not value their resources, and others do who are lining their pockets.

I would point out, though that your example is instructive. You're talking about car sharing. When we started that we just provided the space, and we didnt get any money back. More recently, we have been able to make arrangements that do provide us some money back, but when they first walked in here to do car sharing, there was no money to be made. Nobody was making anything. It was important to get it seeded and started to a point where someondey is making money and we can share in it.

If nobody is doing it then nobody is making any money on it. It's very important to protect our long-term interests. But again, if it doesn't get started, if it doesn't happen, then there's no value created. And I think we need to find a way to get these things started. In the long term if there is a flow of revenue that's significant, we should be tapping some of it. But this won't happen if we don't help stimulate it in the first place.

It's not a matter of not starting it, it's a matter of how you structure your deal. [It's fine if] the deal allows you to get the revenue that's generated, recognizing that for startups there's no revenue. I created public-private partnerships when I was at the FTA. They create a structure for innovation but at the same time recognize that at a point of innovation when we have a spinoff and rev starts to be generated, you should therefore start sharing in the revenues at that time.