Brilliant Strategy for Transition to Road User Fees

Everybody in transportation knows that we need to move from a gas tax to a road user fee in order to finance transportation infrastructure. Regular people – that is, everybody else – hate this idea and doesn’t get it. A colleague has come up with what I think is a genius political approach that I describe in the second half of this post. The first half describes the problem.

THE PROBLEM. This is what the public says:

I’m already paying for the roads through my taxes. [Actually, you are paying with 18 year old prices since the fuel tax hasn’t been changed in that long. In the meantime, the costs have increased enormously. And compared to the price and volatility of the gas itself, the taxes are not that significant a percentage. ]

It works great. Why touch it? If the amount of money raised is the problem, just raise the tax. [Well, 1) you can’t just raise the tax, which is why it hasn’t happened in 18 years even though we are experiencing a crisis in our transportation infrastructure which is crumbling and ancient. If you’re lucky enough to do any traveling to Europe, you’ll note that our airports, train stations, trains, roads, and sidewalks are so much worse than what you see there. We are looking like the poor, ragged cousin. And if the fuel tax is broken as a means of raising money, as we move to more fuel efficient vehicles and alternative fuels, it will get increasingly broken.]

Paying by the mile is an unfair and regressive as a tax. What about the miles I drive out of state or on private roads? What about poor people? [Today’s gas tax has all those same problems. Some of the road user fee implementations could correct some of those problems.]

What about my privacy? I don’t want the government to know my every move. [Good point, read this that I wrote earlier]

THE SOLUTION. Here is a strategy that can get political buy-in and offer us a transitional path toward adopting road user fees. I’m thinking it is pretty clever and viable.
Put together a working group of legislators and outside stakeholders to discuss how we pro-actively address the impending transition to electric vehicles. Here is how the logic can proceed:

1. Everyone is willing to agree that EVs should pay their fair share, and that the gas tax system let's them off the hook.

2. It is far better to pro-actively come up with an appropriate solution before there are lots of them. With the tax expectation in place, people can buy EVs with full knowledge, rather than government trying to change the rules after this has become a significant market with a significant constituency.

3. The bill itself should be lightly worded. Owners of electric vehicles need to pay for miles driven within the state according to some referred-to rate plan (which definitely needs to adjust with inflation). The simplest means would be an odometer reading at time of inspection. Other mechanisms that result in the appropriate payment, as approved by the state, would also be allowed.

4. To be fair, any driver/vehicle can choose to opt in to this new method of road user fees, instead of paying gas taxes.

Implications: We have a platform for experimentation on this new payment method, and working it through the entire system with low volumes. We start with the lowest common denominator for payment (odometer reading) that side steps privacy and technology concerns. However, other technology solutions could come online and be approved by the state (payment with GPS using smart phones, or with other in-vehicle devices – those built in to the car or those retrofitted on existing vehicles). Having multiple payment options will ultimately provide consumers with an array of choices that many people will find more appealing. Some solutions will address the privacy issues. Some will be able to track out-of-state versus in-state miles. Just about every other option could be a preferred choice over the crude odometer reading because it will reduce the distance taxed. As time goes on, there would likely be all sorts of methods for payment and collecting of the data that use a wide range of devices, evolve over time, and take the burden of devices and refreshing them away from the state.

That is the gist. I think it is a brilliant strategy that should have few detractors now, gives a slow easy opportunity for working the new payment mechanism through the collections systems, and opens up the path for any kind of vehicle, to opt into the system.

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Times Sq Bomb & Crowd Sourced Security #2

I made this same point after the underpants bomber event. While the government can think up new security measures, we need to recognize that the best and most effective defense will be the distributed and ubiquitous eyes on the street. To repeat, relying on people means that you have eyes everywhere and some intelligence and context assessment thrown in. Very hard and expensive to do with just technology.

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Web 2.0 is like Yeast: Rampant Growth Possible

I'm preparing a talk and this New York Times interview I found with Andrey Turnovskiy, age 17!!!, exquisitely and quickly explains the components that make Web 2.0 a force to be reckoned with.

Let's deconstruct parts of the interview quickly. I've put it in BOLD so I don't get int trouble about attribution.

Have you always wanted to be a programmer?
No, actually I had no interest in being a programmer. I was always interested in language, I studied English and Chinese and I hoped to be a translator. Then I got a computer and saw that you could write code, so I decided to try it.

How long did it take to build?
It took me three days. I built it on an old computer I had in my bedroom.

First point: we now have the tools available that enable people with little money and discrete skills to build things quickly and try them out. I think of these as "platforms for engagement." They dramatically reduce barriers to entry. Governments should be doing what they can to make sure these platforms exist. This is why I'm advocating open source, open data, open standards, internet protocol, open devices, and open networks for things built with taxpayer money.

Then what happened?
Well, at first I showed it to my friends and they criticized it; they asked why anyone would want to use it. So I went onto a few Web forums and asked people to try the site, and I got 20 people to try it.

He persisted even though people who theoretically knew better thought it was a stupid idea.

How many users do you have now?
Well, after the initial 20 users the site doubled and it continued to double every day since then. Last month [5 months in] I saw 30 million unique visitors come to the Web site and one million new people visit each day. It continues to multiply and I just couldn’t stop it from growing.

I would love to see that growth chart! But if you double every day, starting day one with 20 people, it takes 3 weeks to get to 30 million unique visitors (okay, so ChatRoulette didn't actually double every single day).

Remember that this success was totally unpredictable. This is one of the key reasons we (as a society, company, individual) need to make sure we have made room for easy experimentation and iteration. For every ChatRoulette, there are no doubt hundreds (thousands) of failed experiments. But if you don't open yourself (your company, your country) up to innovation, others will and will pass you by.

Lastly, recognize that the growth was possible thanks to other platforms -- the internet, email, Facebook, Twitter, wired and wireless communications -- that already exist, that make telling your friends really easy and fast. See Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody."

This speed and scale of adoption of new ideas and behaviors -- newly made possible by the internet and associated technologies -- is what gives me hope about our ability to solve the most terrifying and intractable problems this world faces.

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More sunlight on cars: Open up the data!

The New York Times ran this OpEd I wrote (and pasted in below). I've appended additional thinking about implications for innovation.

Cambridge, Mass.
IN the wake of the Congressional hearings on the Toyota recalls, we have heard various proposals for countering unintended acceleration in automobiles.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently said the federal government may recommend that carmakers install “smart pedals” that give brakes priority when both brake and accelerator pedals are pressed simultaneously. Meanwhile, Toyota has said that, in contested acceleration accidents, it will give regulators access codes to data recorders — essentially, onboard black boxes being installed in some new cars.

But sometimes the solution to a safety problem is simply more transparency. Indeed, there is a relatively easy solution that would help identify problems before they affect thousands of cars, or kill and injure dozens of people: allow drivers and carmakers real-time access to the data that’s already being monitored.

Current federal law requires annual emissions and safety inspections for all cars. A mechanic plugs an electronic reader into what’s known as the onboard diagnostic unit, a computer that sits under your dashboard, monitoring data on acceleration, emissions, fuel levels and engine problems. The mechanic can then download the data to his own computer and analyze it.

Because carmakers believe such diagnostic data to be their property, much of it is accessible only by the manufacturer and authorized dealers and their mechanics. And even then, only a small amount of the data is available — most cars’ computers don’t store data, they only monitor it. Though newer Toyotas have data recorders that gather information in the moments before an air bag is deployed, the carmaker has been frustratingly vague about what kind of data is collected (other manufacturers have been more forthcoming).

But what if a car’s entire data stream was made available to drivers in real time? You could use, for instance, a hypothetical “analyze-my-drive” application for your smart phone to tell you when it was time to change the oil or why your “check engine” light was on. The application could tell you how many miles you were getting to the gallon, and how much yesterday’s commute cost you in time, fuel and emissions. It could even tell you, say, that your spouse’s trips to the grocery store were 20 percent more fuel-efficient than yours.

Carmakers could collect the data, too. Aberrant engine and driving behavior would leap out of the carmakers’ now-large data set, allowing them, if necessary, to conduct recalls much earlier. And, in exchange for your contribution of anonymous data, carmakers could send you driving benchmarks aggregated from your peers; then your app could tell you how your driving compares with the average of all drivers of the same car.

Having such readily accessible data streaming from your car might raise fears of a Big Brother scenario, in which carmakers would know where you are and how you are using (or misusing) your vehicle. But you would still decide whether you wanted to tap into the data, how you would use it and with whom you’d share it.

Allowing drivers and carmakers access to real-time performance data wouldn’t prevent every future mechanical failure. But it would allow carmakers and entrepreneurs to develop analytical tools to help catch developing problems in both individual cars and entire model lines. Cars would continue to break down and even cause accidents, but it wouldn’t take a Congressional hearing to figure out why.
*******

On the same day, the NYTimes reported that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA) is considering requiring that a black box be installed in all cars. This is an idea that could be either really good or really terrible.

Really good: An implementation that uses open standards, open data, and open devices. That same data and devices could be reused and innovated upon to produce fabulous apps for cars.

Really bad: It’ll be another closed proprietary system that ends up adding to the cost of the vehicle and eventually becomes ancient technology, much like after-market navigation devices and transponders.

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Underpants Bomber & Crowd-Sourced Safety

For all the billions of dollars (and hours of time) spent on airline safety, the actual take down of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was by people in the plane. It was adjacent people, using common sense and common reactions, that foiled the plan.

It occurs to me that we could think of this from the crowd sourcing perspective. It is crowd-sourced safety.

Fifty million people flew last year. That is fifty million potential watchdogs and actors. We could decide that only 10 percent of that population would be competent to act, still pretty good and likely enough.

If you see something, DO something.

Do I really think that civilians should be trained to disarm terrorists in flight? No. But it does seem to me that these passengers are likely one of the best lines of defense. Isn’t this what happened with the plane that was forced to crash into the ground, instead of into a building (the Whitehouse?)in a Pennsylvania field in 2001?

This the similar lesson for emergency communications. After Katrina, we understood that what was really needed was existing on-the-ground communications, owned, operated, and understood by regular people.

The experts aren’t everywhere. In fact, we can know with a pretty high probability that they won’t be where an emergency event is. Haven’t we spent time teaching everyday people how to do CPR and the Heimlich maneuver?

Homeland Security might think about a different approach.

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Creating the Conditions for Explosive Innovation

Here is the most succinct description of how I think we can drive innovation, economic development, and spur our world on to the new low-carbon economy.

One of the reasons to make anything more open is the admission that there is more value to be extracted. Whatever we are talking about is underused. So in my mind, “open” implies “excess capacity.”

There are also levels of openness. Some kinds of open mean that certain people, with specific attributes (enough money, enough expertise) can participate in the newly opened asset. Other kinds of openness dramatically change the equation of who can participate: this kind of openness reduces the cost of participation and the level of expertise required to participate and therefore is game-changing, especially in the number of people who choose to engage.

Examples:

Guest bedrooms -> hotels -> couchsurfing (in 10 years since its founding, beds are now available to visitors in 55,000 cities in 231 countries – try that private sector!)

Ma bell phones -> cellphones -> iphone (in 2.5 years since its market entry, over 100,000 applications have been made)

Cars with fixed ownership & fixed wireless offerings ->
Zipcar/TomTom/Sync ->
multi-purpose open devices inviting creation of an infinite number of apps (who knows? We have yet to produce an open in-vehicle after-market platform)

Single-purpose wireless devices ->
Extensible malleable wireless devices ->
Open wireless devices with a mesh communications protocol (ubiquitous low cost local data transmission worldwide!)

This idea has important implications. For companies, opening up some platforms is a way they can farm for innovation cheaply. Losing ideas lose on their own R&D dollars. Winning ideas can be purchased by the platform-providing company. Voila! low cost R&D with 100% success rates!

For governments, the implications are much more far reaching. If a government seeks to maximize the private sector or individual gain from its expenditures, it should open up as many of its technology investments as possible. It should seek to lower the cost and expertise barriers for participation, with the resulting explosion of uses and innovations on the underlying platform.

This is why I have been advocating that government technology purchases require that excess network capacity be make open, that devices chosen be non-proprietary and able to be multi-purpose, that open standards and internet protocol be used.

Related posts:
Lowering Barriers to Innovation in Cars
Creating an Open In-Vehicle Platform
Open Platforms, Smart Grid & Smart Transportation
Whats "open" got to do with it?
Time for Cooperative Capitalism
Technology Recommendations for Congestion Pricing

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Lowering Barriers to Innovation in Cars

In 1890, there were 2000 car companies in and around Paris. I haven't been able to find the data for Detroit, but its a good guess to imagine that it was the same. Today, what do you think? Maybe 50 new cars being seriously tested for market consideration worldwide?

In a time when everyone is talking about the need for innovation and new vehicle types, it is basically impossible for a couple of clever guys (used in a gender-neutral way) to think up, test, sell, and improve upon their ideas. We have set the regulatory bar so high, that we've basically excluded innovation from any who doesn't have several hundred million dollars handy. The US Department of Energy recently gave Tesla Motors a $465 million loan that will be repayable only if they succeed. This is an expensive approach, for the government and for car manufacturers.

There is a lower-cost way forward, with precedents in the food industry. Here's what I think should be done.

To promote innovation In the existing vehicle stock:

1. Create an open in-vehicle technology platform/device that can be installed in existing vehicles, which brings car-specific data to the internet (with open APIs) for developers/innovators. This will facilitate changes in ownership, access, driving behavior, connectivity to other relevant data in the environment. [This idea is in hand and doesn't need government regulatory intervention.]

To promote innovation of new vehicles and new mobility choices:

2. Create a government insurance plan for small transportation businesses, to be paid into by these start-ups, that provides insurance, likely with reasonable per incident caps, that enables them to try innovative things that don't match the insurance industry status quo. Carsharing, carpooling, pick-up shuttles, PAYD insurance, innovative vehicle designs have all be held back by the insurance problem. By capping at some specific "small business" volume, innovation can be enabled and the real liability risks can be learned from these small groups. Ideas that succeed (and increase in volume beyond small business) will have the track record to move into the private sector insurance industry.

3. Remove government oversight of safety standards for low sale-volume vehicles. There is insignificant public health risk from small volume vehicle accidents. As an analogy, the health standards we apply to the corner deli are different from what we apply to Nabisco. In the vehicle space, there is only one rule that applies. And like the corner deli, locals won't frequent one that serves old or unhygenically prepared food.

4. Consider creation of low speed, low weight class of roads on which any vehicle and mode of transportation is at low risk for mortal accidents, and on which these small volume new vehicles could travel very safely. "The probability of death from an impact speed of 50 mi/h (80 km/h) is 15 times the probability of death from an impact speed of 25 mi/h (40 km/h)....only 5 percent of pedestrians died when struck by a vehicle traveling at 20 mi/h (32 km/h); however, the proportion of fatalities increased to 45 percent at 30 mi/h (48 km/h) and to 85 percent at 40 mi/h (64 km/h)." Source data.

On this last point, I'm imaging that many urban areas (and perhaps some roads or some lanes in suburban/rural areas) could have this classification. If this new classification were just by speed, allowing a diversity of vehicles could travel on those roads, we would get one kind of innovation. If we pushed the restriction further to include weight restrictions, these low speed/low weight roads would have a totally new and different characteristic that would favor pedestrians, bicycles, and small vehicles. Right now, many people tell me they don't ride their bikes (or let their kids ride) because of the weight/speed problem of other traffic.

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Creating an Open In-Vehicle Technology Platform

A nice interview conducted by Vincente Everts in Amsterdam at PICNIC last week on the whys and wherefores of creating an open in-vehicle technology platform.

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The new GM could get it right

I just read a fascinating blogpost by Bernard Avishai describing a GM electric power-train called Voltec. I read that first sentence and laugh. Fascinating power-train? Puh-lease.

But Bernard writes:

"GM has a chance to become the software powerhouse of the newest new economy...a design hub and anchor for hundreds of new software solutions companies that will focus on the tiers of communication the electric car portends: battery-pack to vehicle, vehicle to electric utility, and utility to sources of renewable energy."

This is definitely going in the right direction. The question will be, will GM take this vision all the way? -- making its communications protocols and vehicle APIs open to everyone? As some of you know, GM's OnStar is my poster child for a great idea that failed because they kept it closed. [My oft-repeated line: OnStar is like having a smartphone that can only call your mom. Sure, I like calling my mom, but there are thousands of other people and other uses I'd put the phone to if they'd open it up.]

Ultimately, we need to connect and open up for innovation all car data (remember, no one could actually do anything to your car without your explicit permission). We also need the communication protocols to include a peer-to-peer mesh, and imagine, as GM begins to, that data is data, and therefore this protocol is good not just for smart cars, and the smart grid, but for smart infrastructure, smart governments, and smart people as well.

Related articles and blog posts I've written on this subject:
On connecting everything up in this Wired article
On what the car companies should do to dig themselves out, in this Fast Company piece.
On why open is the right choice in this blogpost.

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Open Platforms, Smart transportation & smart grid

Nice Treehugger podcast interview with me that explains my vision on the how and why of open platforms for cars, the connection to the smart grid, and how creating a mobile internet can become an engine for economic development. Phew, all that in 15 (?) minutes.

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What I love about the Internet: past & future

Most people who use the internet don’t appreciate how it came to be and what makes it so special. This post is a very very short history lesson that will give you a flavor of the past, and a taste of the future some of us want to create – it should take you about 20 minutes to get through it, but it is worth it and will likely change how you feel about the word "internet."

First, read this endearing account of an important piece of internet history by Steve Crocker for the New York Times and then come back to this blog.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html

The critical points are that the internet was designed to be open, was able to evolve, and welcomed participation. Steve Crocker told me “We had no idea when we started that this is where we’d end up.”

Here is an excerpt from a longer talk David Isenberg wrote, that describes what makes the internet we have today so special.

"The Internet derives its disruptive quality from a very special property: IT IS PUBLIC. The core of the Internet is a body of simple, public agreements, called RFCs, that specify the structure of the Internet Protocol packet. These public agreements don't need to be ratified or officially approved -- they just need to be widely adopted and used.

The Internet's component technologies -- routing, storage, transmission, etc.-- can be improved in private. But the Internet Protocol itself is hurt by private changes, because its very strength is its public-ness.

Because it is public, device makers, application makers, content providers and network providers can make stuff that works together. The result is completely unprecedented; instead of a special-purpose network -- with telephone wires on telephone poles that connect telephones to telephone
switches, or a cable network that connects TVs to content -- we have the Internet, a network that connects any application -- love letters, music lessons, credit card payments, doctor's appointments, fantasy games -- to any network: wired, wireless, twisted pair, coax, fiber, wi-fi, 3G, smoke signals, carrier pigeon, you name it. Automatically, no extra services needed. It just works.

This allows several emergent miracles.

First, the Internet grows naturally at its edges, without a master plan. Anybody can connect their own network, as long as the connection follows the public spec. Anybody with their own network can improve it -- in private if they wish, as long as they follow the public agreement that is the
Internet, the result grows the Internet.

Another miracle: The Internet let's us innovate without asking anybody's permission. Got an idea? Put it on the Internet, send it to your friends. Maybe they'll send it to their friends.

Another miracle: It's a market-discovery machine. Text messaging wasn't new in 1972. What surprised the Internet researchers was email's popularity. Today a band that plays Parisian cafe music can discover its audience in Japan and Louisiana and Rio.

It's worth summarizing. The miracles of the Internet :
any-app over any infrastructure,
growth without central planning,
innovation without permission,
and market discovery.

If the Internet Protocol lost its public nature, we'd risk
shutting these miracles off…

Like other great Americans on whose shoulders I stand, I have a dream. In my dream the Internet becomes so capable that I am able to be with you as intimately as I am right now without leaving my home in Connecticut.

In my dream the Internet becomes so good that we think of the people in Accra or Baghdad or Caracas much as we think of the people of Albuquerque, Boston and Chicago, as "us" not "them.".

In my dream, the climate change problem will be solved thanks to trillions of smart vehicles, heaters and air conditioners connected to the Internet to mediate real-time auctions for energy, carbon credits, and transportation facilities.

In my dream, we discover that one of the two billion who live on less than dollar a day is so smart as to be another Einstein, that another is so compassionate as to be another Gandhi, that another is so charismatic as to be another Mandella . . . and we will comment on their blog, subscribe to their flickr stream and follow their twitter tweets."

For visions about David’s nightmares, go read his full speech.

Following up on David’s words and dreams, read this piece written by another David (Weinberger) about my vision of how we can extend the internet’s promise and path, and bundle with technology investments this country is about to make, so that we can start to live the dreams David Isenberg so eloquently expressed.

If you want to understand what it means to talk about radio spectrum, and radio waves using compelling methaphors so that it might actually make sense for you (it did for me), read this beautifully written article by David Weinberger, about David Reed’s recommendation for management of radio waves. How could we as the public evaluate what the FCC does with the public airwaves?

Addendum
If you are feeling particularly curious, and have a wee bit of nerd in you, I highly recommend this 1 hour talk by Van Jacobson about content-centric networking, which just might be the technical side of the future that I've just glossed over.

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The Grid, Our Cars and the Net: One Idea to Link Them All

David Weinberger did a brilliant job translating my complex nation-wide communications infrastructure vision into an engaging and comprehensible article for Wired.

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Radio Spectrum & the Internet Story made simple

Here is a brilliantly written article, that explains in clear language using powerful metaphors, exactly what makes the internet, openness, and wireless communications so beautiful, so powerful, and so filled with potential. If you are remotely interested in these topics, you should read it – just a couple of pages published in Salon.

Dare I give some highlights? giving you an out from reading the whole piece? They are better in context:

“Here Reed is dogmatically undogmatic: "Attempting to decide what is the best architecture before using it always fails. Always.”…If you want to maximize the utility of a network,… you should move as many services as feasible out of the network itself.”

This is the opportunity we have before us in thinking about how we build out the smart grid, and road user fees. Both huge and ubiquitous wireless networks that will roll out across the US over the next decade.

“Reed and his colleagues argued, keep the network unoptimized for specific services so that it's optimized for enabling innovation by the network's users (the "ends").
That deep architectural principle is at the core of the Internet's value: Anyone with a good idea can implement a service and offer it over the network instead of having to propose it to the "owners" of the network and waiting for them to implement it. If the phone network were like the Internet, we wouldn't have had to wait 10 years to get caller I.D.; it would have been put together in one morning, implemented in the afternoon, and braced for competitive offerings by dinnertime.”

Ok, did I neglect to mention that this article is 6 years old? And that it was written by two friends of mine? No matter. It is a must read. Here is the link again. Hey, I only read it the first time myself this morning.

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What’s “Open” Got to Do with It?

In early March, I happened to be in Washington meeting with Ed Markey. It turns out that the incredibly important words that required the $6.6 billion in smart grid demonstration projects to use "open standards and internet protocol" was his amendment! These words were modified in the final Economic Recovery Act by industry lobbyists to include "where available and appropriate."

I was in Markey’s office to explain to him why these same words should be applied to wireless demonstration projects in the transportation sector, in health care digitization efforts, and likely in education, although I don’t know. Markey was excited by my interest, and wondered if I could explain to the layperson why open standards mattered.

A week and a half later, I bumped into a state Secretary of Energy – one of the very people who would get to spend the smart grid demonstration project money. This person didn’t understand the implications of “open standards” and asked me to explain it. Over the course of the last month, I’ve met with high level officials in transportation, energy, and environment positions from several states, none of whom understood the value of openness.

We are about to spend billions and billions of taxpayer dollars on technology infrastructure and many of those advising precisely what to buy have every incentive to say that closed proprietary systems, networks, devices are the best way to go. How does this missed opportunity make you feel?

A friend blogged on this subject and I loved his headline:
Using Public Dollars to Build Proprietary Systems?

Proprietary systems have their own secret languages and secret rules. You can play only if you are invited in (by buying the ratified stuff) and you can only play the games agreed upon (your ideas for new games or new ways to play the old games are unwelcome, unheard, and impossible to incorporate). Examples of closed proprietary systems abound, but a nice irritating example would be how you have to throw away your current cell phone if you want to change carriers.

Open standards mean that different people/companies/devices could, if they wanted to, find common ground.

Here, excerpted from a piece David Reed wrote for The MIT Communications Futures Program Principal Investigator Blog is a nice description of how the internet -- which is an open standard -- works:

“The Internet is a set of agreements among members (who happen to control small, medium, and large networks). The agreement required members to carry each others’ packets, delivering them via best efforts to the hosts at the edge of the network—your laptop, Google’s server…each member of the Internet who contributed to the mutual enterprise gained connectivity disproportionate to the member’s contribution.”

As David puts it, "The Internet is not a technology, but a set of interoperable standards."

Open standards give the ability to evolve over time.

Sure, proprietary systems can evolve, the speed depending entirely on competitive pressures. Most government contracts come with nice long contracts: three, five, ten, and even 99 year terms! Why bother to innovate during the first seven years of a ten-year contract? Steve Crocker, one of the Internet’s founding fathers, wrote a really wonderful piece for the New York Times that describes how the Internet’s open standards were able to evolve over time. As he told me “We had no idea when we started [forty years ago] that this is where we’d end up.” Of course, who among us can predict the future?

Another friend offered a simple test: “If you think this is the final and best version, buy the closed proprietary system. If you think it will continue to evolve over time, go open.”

Open standards invite and encourage participation

From a Steve Crocker email “Open standards become particularly important when they enable new products and services to be built on top of existing ones. Openness is not just about enabling others to build the same products and services and compete directly. It’s also about enabling huge vistas of new inventions that brings the enormous expansion and payoff from new technologies.”

I'll close with Steve's penultimate paragraph from the NYT:
“As we rebuild our economy, I do hope we keep in mind the value of openness, especially in industries that have rarely had it. Whether it’s in health care reform or energy innovation -- [OR smart transportation adds Robin] -- the largest payoffs will come not from what the stimulus package pays for directly, but from the huge vistas we open up for others to explore.”


Some interesting links about open standards not referenced in the above:
In health care and in promoting multimodal transportation.

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Openness if we want Intermodal

Just blogged on this topic for the National Journal. Basically, if we want to be able to go between feet, bikes, carsharing, bus, transit, rail, private parking (and for freight to be similarly multi-modal), we need to use open platforms, open devices, and open up networks paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Type rest of the post here

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Why a Road User Tax is Fabulous for the Economy

The National Infrastructure Financing Commission just released its report today (OK, I know that sounds boring, but it is an important report for transportation people, and for people who use transportation), recommending that we move from the gas tax to a "vehicle-miles-traveled" tax.

You could read the report, or read my vastly more entertaining and much much shorter post on this topic at the Huffington Post here.

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The Internet is as Fundamental as Hot Water

In July I was part of a press conference supporting a bipartisan campaign Internet for Everyone. I joined Vint Cerf, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, and Tim Wu, among others. It is my firm belief that low cost ubiquitous internet access is fundamental for participation in our society today, a key tool for achieving energy efficiency (smart buildings; dynamic pricing of roads and energy to reflect peak times; and critical to innovation). This one-minute clip of my contribution sums it up nicely. You can join this important movement here.

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Mesh Networks on Transportation: will it work?

A monthly magazine for technical types, Baseline, has a long article about me and the idea of using mesh networks in the transportation realm.

The article is well researched and interviews people across the industry. A sad omission is the lack of named attribution to Andrew Blumberg, my colleague who has done all of the work on privacy protection. The article also puts the cost of the in-car boxes too high by a factor of two.

My favorite is the closing paragraph:

“I see Robin as one of the global thought leaders of transportation technology,” Villa says.

Allies in the open-source community are hopeful.

“It’s completely doable with the technology that’s available today,” says Sascha Meinrath, research director for the Wireless Future Program at The New America Foundation, a Washington public policy institute and think tank, a leading expert on community wireless networks and a member of the Meadow Networks board.

“There’s pretty much no scalability limit and no throughput limit. We’re 80, 90 percent of the way there. It’s just a matter of finding a municipality, a company, a patron willing to fund this.”

Hey, it's my blog and I'll blog it if I want to :)

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The weird world of ITS, VII, IVI

Let me just clarify right away:

ITS: intelligent transportation systems
VII: vehicle infrastructure integration
IVI: intelligent vehicle initiative

It’s an insular and esoteric world that is being created by Department of Transportation and industry experts. Excellent goals are behind the acronyms. Vehicles on the highway will collect and transmit data to each other and to centralized databases so that we can: avoid collisions in intersections; avert hundred-car pileups; avoid congested highways: ultimately be able to have cars on autopilot that can squeeze more vehicles onto the same roads and move them at higher speeds safely.

I’m all for these goals. Clearly this is what the future will bring us. The thing I find insular, esoteric, and weird is the method being used to accomplish these goals.

All of these systems are based on the wireless frequency of 5.9 GHz, specifically allocated for DSRC (oops, another acronym: Dedicated Short Range Communication), specifically dedicated to wireless use among automobiles.

Now here is the question, and I ask it honestly, why do cars need their own frequency and therefore their own hardware and software?

The rest of society – that is financial, education, health, consumer, retail, emergency services – are all happily communicating on other frequencies, using equipment that is interoperable, more or less. Data bits are data bits. Right now we mingle voice, data, video, graphics, music over the same devices, and increasingly one single device. In what way is parking data, or congestion data different?

Is the security needed for transmission of financial data less demanding than that needed for transportation?

Are the wireless mobility demands required by the cell phone in my car, or the laptop in police cars different when encased in the car itself?

Curiously, this requirement for a different standard means that we can’t use the cell phones, laptops, and wireless gateways that permeate our environment. The VII, IVI, and ITS system demands a whole new network and set of investments be made before the system starts throwing off benefits. Why go this route?

It would cost much less money, be much less complicated, and be a reality much sooner if the goals of car-to-car networking were achieved with the devices and standards used by the rest of the wireless world.

Hmm. Maybe that is the point. Weird.

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Technology Recommendations for Congestion Pricing

For historical reasons, wireless systems for use in the transportation sector have taken a separate path for technology development. This divergence no longer makes sense. Every other sector in the economy is finding secure, reliable, and economical systems that use internet-protocol and are highly compatible. Continued insistence on separate radio frequencies, closed networks, and obscure proprietary standards mean that technology investments in transportation don't take advantage of low-cost high-volume components developed for the consumer market or advances in communications hardware and routing software.


Rest-of-the-World Trends: Open networks, Device Convergence, Open Standards, Extensible/Interoperable, Consumer products/parts (high volume, low cost), Redundant networks base, Robustness/Redundancy

Verus

Intelligent Transportation Systems: Closed network, DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications), Single-purpose devices, Proprietary, inflexible, lock in, high cost, path dependency, can’t leverage others’investment, centralized command & control (single points of failure)

Below are our recommendations in priority order. Wireless infrastructure investments for congestion pricing, open-road tolling, and road pricing should be:

• Open networks (the data transmission required for user-fees is very small, meaning that a huge amount of excess capacity in these networks is available and should be made available to the public given that this infrastructure is being paid for with taxpayer dollars).

• Open standards (making these networks open is only interesting and useful to others if open standards are used).

• A mesh network be employed.

• An open source mesh network be employed.

• An extensible/interoperable network should be deployed (creating opportunities for user-driven innovation, add-ons -- think Google open API model)
  

What would this system look like? What are the benefits of a system so configured?

Imagine a mesh "white box" in every car that travels through the city. The device would cost between $30-$50 in the volumes needed and be built using low-cost, widely available standard hardware components and open source software. (EZ passes hardwares cost $28). Each car would become a node in a dynamic mesh network, routing and repeating packets of data. People who purchase and install the devices in their cars can be given the first $100-$150 in congestion fees for free. System security requirements would be no different than any other wireless infrastructure, and preserving ample bandwidth for the purpose of collecting fees can be assured. Implementers would need only be responsible for providing key backhaul nodes (e.g., at critical intersections, exits, etc.) while end-users would drive the node density necessary to expand the network. The implications:

• The amount of capital required to implement, maintain, and extend a congestion pricing system is reduced in several ways:
• Congestion pricing hardware, and the majority of the wireless infrastructure, is financed and installed by end users.
• Less infrastructure installed means less to maintain
  
• This dramatically reduces the debt burden required and the cost of financing it.
• Because the devices are self-configuring, there are reduced engineering costs.
  
• Reduced installation costs (simply plug them into the vehicles).
• The system can come online and be operational in less time than a system of tags and beacons, and therefore the free premium given to drivers would be a net revenue wash.
• Very low on-going communications costs because the system relies primarily on free peer-to-peer data transmission.

• System redundancy is inherent in such a network. There would be no single point of failure and no need for redundant systems to be designed and included.

• Car location and charging could be based on GPS position or triangulation of vehicles relative to other vehicle and gateways (where the data enters the internet) similar to systems used by Loki and TomTom. [A discussion of protecting locational privacy is discussed in another paper.]

• An in-vehicle mesh-based system allows infinite flexibility in the congestion pricing system.

• The initial pricing cordon chosen by the city can be changed over time without additional on-street hardware investment (At considerable expense, London expanded its cordon from the CBD to a larger section of London after 4 years).
• A dynamic real-time congestion pricing could be implemented covering all city streets, eliminating undesirable edge effects created by a cordon, charging based on actual congestion, increasing public perception of system fairness (charges based on real congestion, not arbitrary geography)

• Enforcement would not be based on cameras and license plate photography, but rather on-the-ground enforcement officials determining whether individual cars in their proximity have an active device. High fines/tickets can be given to those vehicles without the device that are within the congestion pricing zone.

• "Tourist" vehicles passing through the congestion pricing zone can pick up a device at gas stations, highway rest areas, and convenience stores. The cost of the device would be required as a deposit (in cash or by credit card) with an additional amount paid for anticipated fees. On exiting the congestion pricing zone, these devices can be returned with the deposit and unused funds returned to the driver. Those who choose this system would not be eligible for locational privacy, nor the free service premium given to those individuals who buy the device outright.

• Facilitates layering of additional services and applications on a de-prioritized basis vis-a-vis congestion pricing/network data, creating additional potential revenue sources and value to users (e.g., internet access, social networking software, geolocational advertising, real-time traffic/congestion data for drivers).
  

• Can be utilized to send emergency communications messages to all cars, cars in specific areas, etc.
  

There are considerable positive "externalities" that this system would give to the city that adopts it:

• Because the network is open to all, within the congestion pricing zone, Manhattan would effectively be one dynamic wireless hotspot
  
• A ubiquitous wireless network throughout the city, open to all, will generate an untolled/untold amount of innovation and economic development.
• Over time one can anticipate other devices joining the mesh created by the vehicles. Each one of these devices leverages the existing investment of all the previous devices, contributes to the mesh, and gets the full advantages of zero cost peer-to-peer communication within the city. These new devices might be those purchased by other city departments (homeland security, police, emergency vehicles, education, health, social services), or by city residents (mesh-enabled laptops, cell phones, PDAs). The result is a scalable, resilient communications system. Different user classes and/or prioritization schemata can be utilized to ensure critical communications have access to this robust and redundant communications infrastructure.
• An open tech system avoids path dependencies and ensures maximum extensibility during a time of rapid technological innovation and evolution.
  

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