Posts about Technology

Currently, Capital Bikeshare's stations and kiosks serve the following functions:

1. Unlock in response to member keys and credit cards
   
2. Provide a secure locking point to deter theft
   
3. Transmit usage and billing information
   
4. Identify a known place to find bikes (by users or the bike sharing agency)
   
5. Advertise for the system (and other commercial sponsors)
   
6. Less commonly used functions, such as reporting malfunctions and extending reservations when dockblocked
   

Instead of putting these features in the station kiosks, they could all become part of the bikes themselves. The SoBi (Social Bicycles) system pictured above shows how this could work. A box attached to the bicycle contains a lock, a GPS, and wireless communication with a central computer. It unlocks in response to a rider's mobile phone or PIN code. When a rider reaches a destination, he or she locks the bike, and the station notifies the central computer.

It's easy to envision other potential features, such as a credit card reader for tourist use, or a button for reporting malfunctions. The box is solar-powered, like Capital Bikeshare stations, but could also be pedal powered.

The first system to use smart shared bikes like this is Call a Bike, still widely used in German cities, including Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich. As its name implies, a user must phone before each trip for a bike's unlocking code, then after each trip, phone again with the bike's cross street to confirm return.

However, without designated stations or accurate location information, it can be inconvenient to find a bike, and the system does not encourage use by tourists. The weBike system at the University of Maryland uses text messaging instead of phoning, but also requires bikes to be returned to fixed docks.

Currently, two "next generation" bike sharing systems in the US are going further by putting all the intelligence in the bike. These systems are viaCycle, currently operating at a small scale at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and Social Bicycles, a startup in New York.

In each of these systems, vehicles themselves communicate their locations to a central server, and users can find them using a website or mobile apps. A user unlocks a bike using his or her mobile phone and can then lock it anywhere.

These systems are analogous to the car2go car sharing system, in which cars don't have designated spaces and can be parked in any legal street location.

Smart bike systems promise a significant cost savings versus current generation systems with docks and kiosks. Adding 12 docks to an existing station costs about $13,000, while a new 12-dock station with a kiosk costs about $36,000. This cost difference is leading DDOT to expand many stations instead of adding new ones in between, where they'd be more useful but also more costly.

Social Bicycles founder Ryan Rzepecki claims that 2-4 times more smart bikes could be deployed for the same cost as current generation kiosk systems. Bike racks could also go almost anywhere, without the linear space and solar requirements of current docks.

Flexibility has advantages and disadvantages

Smart bike systems largely solve the dockblocking problem at full stations because users can lock their bike at any safe location, not just at docks.

But is it really a good idea to be able to dock bikes anywhere? It would be difficult to prevent some people from abusing the privilege, such as locking bikes in inaccessible locations (e.g., garages, courtyards, and behind security barriers). Additionally, bikes might accumulate in remote or infrequently used locations, as some have reported happening with car2go. Theft and vandalism could also become a problem; Capital Bikeshare has relatively low loss rates, thanks in part to its sturdy docks in well-traveled locations.

In addition, smart bikes do not solve the problem of empty stations, and can even add difficulty to the process of finding a bike. Bike sharing members often plan around expecting to find a certain number of bikes at a station because it makes for a convenient routine, or because they need several bikes at once for a group trip. A more flexible system would create more uncertainty and make users more reliant on smartphones, which are not available to everyone.

In fact, DDOT officials have cited predictability as a major reason they are enlarging stations: users find it particularly frustrating to find an empty or full station, so they would rather have fewer stations that are more often usable than more conveniently located, closely-spaced stations.

To make bike locations more predictable, Social Bicycles has proposed a "virtual station" concept, in which a station is just a geographic area on a map. Bikes could incur higher fees depending on how far riders park them from a virtual station. This solution gives users the flexibility to park anywhere, but ensures that most bikes will return to designated stations.

Would we use this here?

Several jurisdictions in our region are considering their own bike sharing systems. Some, fairly distant from DC and Arlington, primarily expect users to take short trips inside their systems instead of trips to and from the core.

There are many reasons for jurisdictions to join the current Capital Bikeshare network, like savings from economies of scale, and the convenience for users being able to get a bike anywhere within the network. However, systems less reliant on docks could be more cost-effective in lower-density suburban areas, where stations will be smaller and the cost of station kiosks will be a large fraction of the total budget.

Meanwhile, Capital Bikeshare is a huge success with its current, proven technology. Already, its stations are far cheaper to install and move than its predecessor system, SmartBike. Capital Bikeshare shouldn't change just as it's hitting its stride. In time, we might even see it transition toward technologies that further reduce the burden of stations.

The revolutionary app allows texting drivers to "see" bicyclists and pedestrians in their path, and promises to significantly cut down on incidents of drivers hitting these other road users.

Greenbelt Mayor Pro Tem Emmett Jordan, Dr. Allen Lim of Skratch Labs and author of the The Feed Zone cookbook, and cyclocross superstar Tim Johnson all shared their thoughts for the video. The product demos were done in conjunction with Tim Johnson's Ride on Washington and sponsored by Proteus Bicycles in College Park.

If you want to cross a road, you'll just cross. The cars will slow down and avoid you. You could cross blindfolded and be perfectly safe. You'll be able to cross freeways. You'll be able to walk diagonally across intersections. You'll be able to do anything you want, and the cars will be responsible for avoiding you. Your biggest danger will come from cyclists and other pedestrians, not cars.

It would be fantastic if this scenario came to pass, but is it realistic? It's certainly possible computers can get smart enough to handle it, but the sticking point here is the words "will slow down."

How much will they slow down? For how many pedestrians? Drum lives in Irvine, California, which has few pedestrians, so perhaps the cars can just avoid the occasional pedestrian. But in urban areas, there are a lot of pedestrians. If everyone crossed whenever they liked, the cars would slow down an awful lot.

In some places, cars would hardly ever get through. In almost any major city's downtown during a busy period, pedestrians are waiting in large numbers on street corners to cross. The only reason cars can get through is because signals govern pedestrian crossings. And when a light is green, often a car has to wait for a gap in the pedestrians or gently nose through to get past.

In Kevin Drum's future urban cores, constantly crossing pedestrians mean that car traffic will not flow at all except perhaps in the wee hours. Anyone who's been involved in a proposal to take away a lane of a road for bikes, or for a road diet, knows that drivers (or, in the future, car riders) will not stand for it.

Drivers are a powerful political force

Just look at, for example, the backlash against a bicycle lane on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. In a very liberal jurisdiction, a modest and overwhelmingly successful bike lane nevertheless stirred up a few wealthy and well-connected individuals, including the wife of Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), to create an organization and file lawsuits to block the project using any means necessary.

Tea Partiers certain that there is a vast UN conspiracy to force them to live in high rises are opposing even extremely modest state laws creating some incentives for development in dense areas. Do we really think people will let government mandate that nobody is allowed to drive a car by hand, and that pedestrians get absolute priority?

In the DC area, some bicyclists ride on MacArthur Boulevard in Potomac, a narrow and windy road in a low-density area. That's perfectly legal, but there's a constant stream of letters to local press outlets by drivers who are sure it must be illegal to bike there since it slows them down.

Forcing drivers to travel slower would be like telling seniors that we're cutting their Medicare. The political counter-pressure is intense, so much that most transportation planners always take great pains to reassure drivers of how any change won't really slow them down. Even for the pedestrian plaza in Times Square, one of the early promises from the mayor's office was that it would actually reduce car delays.

I can go on. But anyone who writes regularly about transportation has encountered the massive sense of entitlement from drivers. When I'm driving, I hate to be delayed, too, but I squelch this natural impulse because I write about the issues and have context.

It may well come to pass that driverless cars have to travel slower and pedestrians are able to act more freely. But this will create tremendous political pressure to change the social compact over roads to get traffic moving faster once again. And in this, we will see another, more intense variant of the same fight we have today.

Once, pedestrians did walk freely, and children played in the streets. As automobile use proliferated, rising deaths led to campaigns to segregate street space. Our society could have taken one of two approaches: it could have limited drivers, and added legal liability to force drivers to be more careful, or it could get people out of the street. Many places in Europe chose some elements of the former, but America decisively chose the latter: to redefine the street's role in society to move cars faster. I'm certain that in Drum's scenario, there would be intense pressure to do the same.

Who is liable?

One element determining whether driverless cars turn into the Kevin Drum reality or another one is how we treat liability. When a driverless car kills a person, whether due to a human overriding the technology or a failure in the computer system, there will be a lawsuit.

If courts hold that the manufacturer of the car is liable, this will stifle development of the cars. The technology might ultimately be perfect, but it won't be perfect from the start. Manufacturers will ask state legislatures to limit their liability. Already, a number of commentators have called for liability caps or other legal changes which shift the burden away from the manufacturer.

If the legislatures don't agree, then manufacturers will have to move very carefully until they can make the cars virtually incapable of killing anyone. That will likely hinder development in general, and make any self-driving cars travel slower than human-operated cars. Many drivers therefore will turn off computer mode a fair amount of the time, and political pressure will build to change the liability standard. This will be an early skirmish in the battle over the cars' speed.

If states do limit liability, then we'll end up with a different situation. Buyers will want driverless cars that use algorithms like the one the University of Texas team devised that let them move faster. Sometimes those cars will travel close to pedestrians or bicyclists. Most of the time they'll still avoid killing anyone, but mishaps will happen. And like in today's legal world, prosecutors, judges and juries will be very reluctant to impose heavy punishments on someone operating a car who unintentionally kills another.

Then we'll be back to a situation like the early 1900s roads. For people's own safety, officials will start imposing restrictions on pedestrians. It'll start in places like Irvine. If laws won't stop people from walking on highways or crossing diagonally, then they'll build fences, or skybridges, or both.

Today, one argument against restricting pedestrians too much is that not everyone can drive. Seniors and people with disabilities can't operate a car, and many can't afford them. When driverless cars become commonplace, there will also be cheap taxi service, and so it'll be easier just to tell people to call up a car.

Already, many suburban areas are essentially an archipelago of human-accessible islands in a sea of almost-cars-only space. Little will stand in the way of making this other space absolutely cars-only. And why not? After all, without people, cars can use fancy algorithms to interweave with each other and zoom around far faster than they could in 2012.

Driverless cars aren't bad

A number of the responses seem to be reacting to an imaginary variant of my thesis, in which I said that self-driving cars were going to be a unmitigated bad thing. There's a natural tendency to simplify all arguments into "x is great!" or "x is terrible!"

The fact is that autonomous cars are coming whether we like it or not, and like any technological advance, will bring both terrific improvements to people's lives as well as drawbacks.

Driverless cars are sure to lead to big fights. Will they shift the balance farther toward pedestrians, as Kevin Drum believes, or away? I hope the former, but the technology won't magically solve this problem. Instead, we'll have to fight it out through the democratic process, as we do most other issues affecting the public sphere.

Mouse over a station to see the trips from that station. The blue circle shows the magnitude of trips starting at that station, and the red circles show the relative number of trips ending at each station.

Rahul Nair, a faculty research assistant at the University of Maryland, has created some great visualizations as well. One shows Capital Bikeshare trips from one selected station. It's displaying the same type of data as the MV Jantzen app, origin-destination pairs for a single origin, though it uses arrows instead of bubbles.

Nair also built a tool showing travel times on the Beltway, using data from INRIX for 2011:

Badger writes,

[H]uman-driven cars would have to wait for a signal that would be optimized based on what everyone else is doing. And the same would be true of pedestrians and bike riders.

That certainly sounds like all other users of the road will have to act at the convenience of the driverless cars, under constraints designed to maximize vehicle movement instead of balance the needs of various users.

My background is in computer science, too, and computer scientists love figuring out how to make complex systems perform efficiently. Driverless cars provide an opportunity to optimize the real-world traffic system, if you can get most people driving computer-controlled cars and can get all of those computers to cooperate.

But you can't optimize people so easily. Already, cities host ongoing and raucous debates over the role of cars versus people on their streets. For over 50 years, traffic engineers with the same dreams about optimizing whizzing cars have designed and redesigned intersections to move more and more vehicles.

These changes frequently pushed other users aside with longer waits for crosswalks, the need to push buttons to get a walk signal, awkward bridges over wider and wider arterials, or simply omitting bike or pedestrian facilities entirely and then blaming those users when careless drivers hit and kill them.

Some pro-automotive advocacy groups like to push the theme of a "war on cars," but bicyclists and pedestrians feel like there's been a war against them since the early 20th century. This Texas team's video just perpetuates that impression.

The video even depicts an intersection with a whopping 12 lanes for each roadway, at a time when most transportation professionals have come to believe that grids of smaller roads, not mega-arterials, are the best approach to mobility in metropolitan areas.

Driverless cars, therefore, are poised to trigger a whole new round of pressure to further redesign intersections for the throughput of vehicles above all else. It won't only happen in the cities, either. Suburban areas are often ground zero for these debates, where the majority of people drive, but a significant and often growing number are either unable to drive due to age or disabilities, or are unable to afford cars. (Driverless cars probably won't be cheaper.)

Suburbs, therefore, often develop a greater tyranny of the majority, where county and state departments of transportation optimize their roadways for car throughput and leave bus stops in awkward and narrow roadside spots, leave crosswalks out or even remove existing ones, and set the stage for rising deaths.

If autonomous cars travel much faster than today's cars and operate closer to other vehicles and obstacles, as we see in the Texas team's simulation, then they may well kill more pedestrians. Or, perhaps the computers controlling them will respond so quickly that they can avoid hitting any pedestrian, even one who steps out in front of a car.

In that case, we might see a small number of people taking advantage of that to cross through traffic, knowing the cars can't kill him. That will slow the cars down, and their drivers will start lobbying for even greater restrictions on pedestrians, like fences preventing midblock crossings.

Our metropolitan areas could then look, more and more, like zoos for humans interlaced with pathways for the dominant species, the robot car. Maybe the machines really are on the way to taking over, but instead of Skynet declaring war on humans, we'll be the ones passing laws and reshaping our communities for their convenience.

I'm not suggesting we avoid research into driverless cars. Like any technology, they can bring good or evil, depending how society handles them. Driverless cars can allow buses to become on-demand jitneys and virtually eliminate the need to own a personal car in a city, or to build huge amounts of parking under office buildings. Instead of storing cars during the day, they can just drive around and transport people like taxis.

But we do need researchers excited about driverless cars not to forget the human element. The goal of our built environment is not to move cars as fast as possible everywhere, but to create a better quality of life. The computer science researchers need to also talk to their colleagues in other disciplines, set appropriate goals that consider all users of the roads, and think about what algorithms can actually make life better.

Cross-posted at The Atlantic Cities.

The technology, similar to night vision, has not hit the streets yet. Tests at a police shooting range have demonstrated the technology's effectiveness is limited to around 5 meters, but NYPD would like to achieve 25 meters.

DC is not involved in similar research.

"Our best bet is that the Secret Service develops it and then lets us use it," said Kristopher Baumann, Chairman of the Fraternal Order of Police's Metropolitan Police Department Labor Committee.

Baumann praised Ray Kelly, NYPD's Commissioner, for advancing his department's use of new technology to improve public safety. "Ray Kelly and NYPD are 100 years ahead of us," Baumann said.

But the Metropolitan Police Department has made investments in other technologies under Police Chief Cathy Lanier.

Public listservs now include more than 10,000 members and allow citizens to read arrest and crime reports in almost real time. MPD has installed speed cameras around the city, added closed-circuit television cameras, and ShotSpotter devices, which immediately alert police to the sound of gunfire, in high-crime areas.

Not all technology investments are working, however. A 2011 study by the Urban Institute concluded the city's more than 70 neighborhood crime cameras do not have a measurable effect on crime.

Surveillance of the city's foreboding corners and hardscrabble courtyards began in summer 2006 by Chief Charles Ramsey, now police chief in Philadelphia, with funds from the DC Council to install nearly 50 cameras. Cameras are reportedly monitored from a single control center with a police officer at the rank of lieutenant or higher present at all times. They retain footage for 10 days.

According to the study's analysis of DC's network, "[B]ecause the video cannot be zoomed in after-the-fact without distorting the image, the footage is often too granular to make positive identifications. Cameras are also sensitive to changes in weather and lighting and do not always maintain a continuous flow of coverage." The study cited the "limited use of camera footage in court cases" as evidence that cameras don't help solve or prosecute cases.

Another weapon police have used in recent years to combat crime with mixed results is the Global Positioning System. While ankle monitoring bracelets have been in use for nearly three decades, in recent years these devices have been equipped with GPS. To a determined executioner in the Barry Farm neighborhood this gadget was of no consequence; while equipped with a court-mandated GPS ankle bracelet prosecutors believe Alonzo Marlow committed two murders.

Last month the Supreme Court issued a ruling against the MPD and law enforcement agencies across the country, deciding that the warrantless use of a tracking device on a suspect's vehicle to monitor movements on public streets violated the Fourth Amendment. In response to the Supreme Court decision, the FBI announced last week they were turning off nearly 3,000 GPS devices, many of them stuck underneath cars.

In 2009, Chief Lanier declared, "We're targeting for under 100 [homicides], and I think we can do it if we give everything we've got." With 132 murders recorded in 2010 and 108 last year, Lanier is knocking at the door of her stated goal.

At this time last year, there were 15 homicides in the city. This year there have been 12.

According to the most recent statistics, MPD has recovered 311 illegal firearms this year. Last year, 1,919 total guns were recovered, the fewest recovered since 2003.

A DC law enforcement officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity envisions where and how new gun-spotting equipment could be used throughout our region. "It could prevent a lot of the violence at the Go-Go shows. You could single them out one by one," the officer said. "It could make everyone safer."

Maxwell von Stein is a graduate of the Cooper Union, where he designed a flywheel to use regenerative braking for a bike. The flywheel, which was originally in a Porsche, sits on the frame between the rider's legs.

When the cyclist wants to slow down, say at a red light, he or she can shift gears so that the motion of the cycle is transferred into the flywheel. When the light turns green, shifting will give a "kick" of speed to the bike.

Von Stein says it's cool to get your own energy back, that you've already put in, instead of just wasting it. He actually hopes to use these principles and apply it to cars.

I hope he (or somebody) though will market this. I wouldn't mind an extra 15 pounds on my bike if it meant a power boost when getting started.

What's more, Uber can actually improve the efficiency of "black cars," the for-hire sedans which spend a large portion of the day idling. While the Uber founder says they discourage drivers from accepting Uber trips while they are on a job, it is distinctly feasible to do with their system.

I used to live in Foggy Bottom, and when major summits came to town, the neighborhood would be covered with Town Cars and Tahoes with Virginia "For Hire" license plates. With the IMF, World Bank, and numerous upscale hotels in the area, the vehicles would sit idling all over Foggy Bottom and the West End. The cars often took up parking spaces for hours, double parking at times.

Uber gives them the ability to provide some trips instead of blocking lanes of traffic and every conceivable parking space. This would be good for everyone.

Ironically, the limousine industry should be the one that is more concerned about Uber. Their business is likely to change as long is Uber is around. If someone can book a black car on-demand, pay a mileage-based rate, and then book another one for a return trip, without having to pay for time in between, why, except for the most demanding situations, would anyone bother to hire a car service?

What's more, the taxi industry actually stands to benefit from the presence of Uber. At peak times, such as New Years' Eve, there are not enough cabs to go around, period. Uber maintains their reliability by using "surge pricing" to price out many people and find those customers who are desperate, or well heeled, enough to pay for that reliability.

At high traffic times, Uber takes some people who would have otherwise tried to hail a cab, leaving fewer people to fight over the limited cab supply, and ultimately making traveling by taxi cab easier and more reliable.

Lawyers, Uber, cabbies, the Taxi Commission, and possibly DC councilmembers will debate the legality of Uber's operation in coming weeks. Residents should hope they come to a conclusion that lets the service, and others like it, keep running.