The Internet is Not Triple Play

Five years ago, when I first started focusing on the Internet, I attended a small meeting at the Harvard Berkman Center that was given by the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. I was dumbstruck by the irrationality of what he was saying. And the FCC – which acronym I had previously glossed over with little understanding or interest – became an arm of government that I realized I should care about.

The irrational ideas, so curious and intriguing and yes, dumb founding, to my outsider and newcomer self was that the FCC had special rules for telephone, and special rules for TV, and special rules for data, as if they weren’t all the same thing! Didn’t everyone know that it was all just 1s and 0s? totally interchangeable and free flowing over both the wired and wireless world? That it didn’t make sense to think of telephone as something different from Voice Over IP?

And then of course, I learned that I was the dumb one. The FCC’s structure stemmed from the long history of the evolution of the telephone over the 20th century, which had a lot to do with what was learned from dealing with railroads over the 19th century.

The result is a bureaucracy and regulatory structure that just doesn’t make any sense for the underlying technical reality, but has structured vast ecosytems of companies built to respond to the old reality, and little inclined to change business models and give up existing profit streams (a problem in the energy and transportation sectors too).

I recently signed onto a FCC comment written by Seth Johnson that enunciates the difference between the services and the Internet. The many signers include Steve Wozniak, Clay Shirky, David Isenberg, David Weinberger, and David Reed.

While the FCC letter reads pretty technically, David Reed wrote a beautiful essay that explains in terms that everyone can understand, the distinction between the internet and the services.

To give you a taste:

..the Internet was created to solve a very specific design challenge – creating a way to allow all computer-mediated communication to interoperate in any way that made sense, no matter what type of computer or what medium of communications (even homing pigeons have been discussed as potential transport media). The Open Internet was designed as the one communications framework to rule them all.

However, the FCC historically organizes itself around “services”, which are tightly bound to particular technologies. Satellite systems are not “radio” and telephony over radio is not the same service as telephony over wires.

…The Internet really is “one ring to rule them all” – a framework unto itself, one that cannot be measured against its “wirelessness” or its “terrestriality”...It was carefully organized to incorporate innovations in transport of information, along with innovations in uses of such transport…What would happen if the FCC were to begin to recognize that all communications are to a large extent interchangeable?

What would happen if the FCC recognized the technical and practical reality? Go read David’s piece and become informed in a dramatically faster and shorter period of time than it took me.

The Internet does not equal Triple Play.

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Getting an Annual Velib Subscription

Or, how bureaucracy and security norms can kill almost any good thing.

Background: Velib has 20,000 bicycles for hire (free for < 30 minutes at a time) everywhere in Paris. This combined with a fairly bike-friendly infrastructure means that getting around Paris by bicycle is a dream.

In order to use the Velib bicycles you must first purchase a pass, sold by the day for €1 or the week for €5. Passes are purchased at the Velib kiosks and require a credit or debit card with a chip in it. While many Parisians have such a card, Americans do not. (The one exception that I am aware of is American Express Blue, however you must make a special request of Amex to please issue you a card with a chip in it. And note that while Velib will accept an Amex Blue card with a chip, none of the subway or train vending machines will, so it doesn't really do you much good in France.)

How to use your pass:

First check the line of bicycles and select one which is in good operating condition. Flat tires, etc. are common. Don't forget which number it is. Now go to the kiosk and enter your 8 digit pass number and your 4 digit PIN code. Enter the bike number. Press more buttons agreeing to take care of the bicycle. There appear to be some bugs in the kiosk software that result in this process getting short-circuited back to the beginning, so you might have to do the whole thing two or three times.

But, Ho! what's this we see? Some people just come up to the row of bicycles, wave a card over the locking mechanism, remove the bicycle and leave. What magic is this? How did they avoid the rather tedious process of interacting with the buggy kiosk software?

It is called a Navigo card. A contactless stored value smart card which is used for subways, trains, and buses. You charge it up weekly or monthly then just swipe to get through the gates at the stations. Somehow these people have tied their Navigo card to their Velib account. How did they accomplish this? Just a few...ah...simple...um..."steps":

Step -6 (that is a minus sign, not punctuation for emphasis): First you must obtain a Navigo card. Spend lots of time on the Velib website and ask three friends to interpret. Is it saying that you need a Navigo to get an annual membership? And yet there is no link from the Velib.paris.fr site to the Navigo website. Yes, friends say, I need a Navigo card. Go directly to Navigo website. Finally understand that I want a regular Navigo instead of a Navigo Découverte, and make application online. Unfortunately, before I can apply I must:

Step -5 Get a permanent address. Neither Navigo nor Velib will give you anything without a permanent address, so you must find an apartment in Paris. That is a story for another blog (please provide 10 year salary and rental history in Paris for yourself and your personal financial guarantor).

Step -4: Get a Navigo card. Website is all in purple and white. The link to actually get a card looks exactly like a graphic, and not a link at all. I need an electronic passport-style photo. Thankfully I have a camera, take the photo to the special specifications, am able to crop it and upload it. Fill out form online. Push button to send! Ten days later I receive my Navigo in the mail. Excellent! Now I can...

Step -3: Go to the kiosk thinking that I will be able to purchase an annual Velib pass (only €29 for 1 year, I can't wait) at the same kiosks where I can purchase the daily or weekly passes. I assume that it will let me "charge up" my shiny new Navigo card with the annual pass information. No such luck. Annual Velib passes are only sold online or in some train stations (try finding one that will sell you one however, after I stood in a long line, the man behind the counter told me that they definitely did not sell Velib passes) or post offices.

Step -2: From the Velib.paris.fr site I learn that I need a French bank account with RIB code. That Amex Blue card that I told you about before won't do you any good now. Forty-five days after first stepping into an HSBC bank in Paris, I get an RIB code and a bank card with a smart chip in it. (45 days was what it took to open the accounts, transfer lots of money, get phone calls in the middle of the night from New York office even though they know we live in Paris, get email, snail mail, phone mail codes all of which have to put together in synchronized fashion to get my very secure bank account and then, do it all over again to open one in Paris-- impossible to do it all online in 24 hours, as it would be done for a local US bank account).

Step -1: Get my annual Velib membership! Go to website. Link options are down the right side in descending order: "Access my account; Activate my account; Non-subscribers (pre-subscribe). So, now I will "pre-subscribe." I fill out the long form online. I have all the parts (a bank account, an address, a Navigo card number). At the end of the form it says, please print this out, sign, and mail. What's that all about? Someone is just going to have to re-enter all this information on the other end.

Step +1: Still waiting for my annual Velib membership codes to arrive in the mail...

Meanwhile, Velib is wonderful and I am loving riding all over Paris.

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Cap & Trade Parking Permits

Parking, like carbon and sulphur dioxide, is dramatically underpriced. And, just like CO2, the status quo is incredibly resistant to change, despite the many large environmental externalities. In Boston (and in Cambridge), residents can park for $0 (and $8) per year, while at the same time it costs as much as $3000 a year to rent off-street garage parking. One open air parking space in Boston sold for $250,000 a few years ago. That’s $2000 per square foot!

Every time these cities (and every city) talk about raising the price of residential permits, political firestorms ensue and we end up with no change. No change means as many as one-third of the cars parked on-street aren’t driven in any given week and residents happily drive within the city instead of walking, biking or taking transit because – well, they have a car! And can park it for free!

A friend has been thinking about this problem for years, trying to come up with a market mechanism that would fix the situation. And suddenly, my environmental brain crossed with my transportation policy brain and voila – cap & trade parking! What if:

Starting today, the city issues no more parking permits and those with parking permits were allowed to sell or trade them. Suddenly, the reality that those permits are worth a heck of a lot more than $8 a year is no longer contested. People who rarely drive will have to decide whether it is worth it to them to keep owning that car, or to sell the permit for wherever the market sets the price. Today in both Cambridge and Boston, parking permits allow parking only in certain specified zones. The parking permits would transfer along those same lines. In some neighborhoods, the permits would like fetch $500/year, in others, as much as $3000.

The city could decide to buy some of these permits themselves, and retire them, reducing the number of cars residing in Cambridge, or providing them at reduced cost to new-to-the-city low income families.

What would this plan accomplish? Two things:

It lets permits get to market rate without politicians having to cast votes. It lets every car-owning resident participate in this new market. It gives the city a way to cap and then reduce the number of parking permits issued in the city. Permit ownership could continue to have an annual price payable to the city. The price would cover street cleaning and road repair, as well as perhaps an annual incentive to residents who don’t own a car, or to buy residents turning 16 a bicycle for their birthday. In Cambridge, a $25 annual parking permit fee would result in about $1 million a year.

It would also reduce the number of cars parking in Cambridge, and therefore the amount of driving that gets done in Cambridge. It would or could turn Cambridge into a city of residents that would rather walk or bike for local trips (which is most of people’s trips) and provide the political demand for the bike, pedestrian, and transit infrastructure that supports this way of life.

What do you think? I need some economists to weigh in.

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Mom (age 84) Not Driving #3

For the uninitiated, my mom totaled her car about a year ago, and gave it up. I've written a few updates (1) and (2) about her progress creating a new non-driving life.

Today's email from my mom (who lives in Florida):

I had a wonderful day...I went to my Yoga class and my yoga teacher brought me home. She said she admires me as most people would throw their arms up and say "my life is ruined as I can't drive." Instead I have met so many more people because I don't drive.

To-night coming home from Glady's [a shut-in friend who lives 1 mile away that she visits daily by walking there and back], I met the people that restored a junk house and have not moved in yet. I had given them some sweet potato plant and they put the sod on their yard. He was working out and I went up his drive way to say hello, and he said he wife Amanda wasn't feeling well and he wanted me to go in and cheer her up. I guess she has cancer as she has no hair and had a bandana around her head. She also has two dogs that came in with me. I miss my dog so much that I gave them a lot of attention and made friends with them. Then they had a chair or two chairs in the room that has the view and I sat down and we had a fun visit. When I left the man said they go to the grocery store twice a week and would be glad to take me. I felt that I had cheered the woman up some and made friends with the dogs so it was very nice.

And on the way up to Glady's I met two woman I already knew, one is a fireman lady and is 34 years old and the other is a 61 year old beautiful lady whose house reminds me of mine and the two of them will bike over and see me one day. Tomorrow I get a ride to church and then to a party at 7.30. The guests will come here after to see the fireworks.

Bottom line: Not driving has improved her social life and happiness.

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Tapping End User Content (2.0) for Speed & Scale

In the spring I gave a number of talks on how web 2.0 should really be talked about as 2.0 -- platforms for participation that invite and enable end-users to add their own content. Letting people tap into their own excess capacity is particularly potent because it is so low cost. And the platforms mean that this small and local content can be scaled to national and international proportions and influence.

Quickly.

IF you can get the platform right.

The video is a 4 minute edited synopsis of a 20 minute talk I gave at Columbia Unviersity a number of weeks ago for their Brite conference (Brands, Innovation, Technology). I reference chatroullette and couch surfing, both excellent examples of the phenomenon. 350.org does an excellent job of this as well.

Related blog posts of mine:
How Sharing Increases Innovation
Thinking about Scarcity & Abundance

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I want my PMV! Car-like Motorcycle-like Safe-definitely

Here’s the question: if you currently drive a car to work and for errands, would you prefer to drive a motorcycle-carlike vehicle that is one-quarter of a car? That is, one-quarter the cost, one-quarter the fuel consumption (easily 100 miles to the gallon), requires one-quarter the space to park at one-quarter the cost of regular parking, and pay one-quarter the cost of tolls.

OK, it’s true that its top speed might be 30 mph, with an average speed of 20 mph. But what if you could be traveling only with other lightweight vehicles traveling at similar speeds. [The average speed of cars is most cities is between 10-15 mph. In suburban areas you might be adding 5 minutes to your trip.]

Are you saying yes? Are you focused on the one-quarter the price part? And one-quarter the space to park?

I have this theory that lots of Americans would choose this option. And even more if they access to a second car, owned by them or shared nearby, that they could use on the small percentage of trips where they need a bigger and faster car.

Last week I got to ride (not drive) in one of GM’s eight EN-Vs (electric networked vehicles, pronounced “envy” – what an excellent name).[Video with the trend/business explanation; video with the EN-V/people dance performance]. It was enormously fun. My guess is that this vehicle will not be sold for ¼ the price of their regular cars, but some models could be. So I wondered:

Why would people switch? Because
 63% percent of all trips (and 75% of all work commute) they take are already alone in their car
 they would reduce the 18% of their income they spend on their car today
 they would not be beholden to price spikes in fossil fuels
 they want to find parking everywhere
 they want to be in the uncongested lane

Why do people not do it today?

 Well they do, particularly in Asia
 Here in America none of us relish the idea of going up against truck traffic, SUVs, or regular cars
 Motorcycles, as we know them, are scary (for some) to drive, you get wet and cold, and they are incredibly dangerous (60 times the fatality rates of regular cars – because of speed and the going head to head with much heavier vehicles).

Personal motorized vehicles would address an enormous number of problems associated with today’s cars: cost, congestion, pollution, CO2 emissions, parking. And I think consumer’s would choose them, based on cost, convenience, reliability, autonomy.

The problem lies with the extreme difficulty of enabling transitions. Two suggestions to get us there:
1.Take some lanes or some roads and make them accessible only to light weight and low speed vehicles (bikes too could travel these lanes, and we could split current lanes in half and get as many as 4 times the vehicles (and people traveling) in the same amount of space). These lanes could be used starting today by bicycles, motorized and electric bikes and small motorcycles. Think of all the people who would buy these vehicles and switch to these lanes if we gave them a lane of traffic.

2. Change the regulatory and safety requirements for these vehicles in line with the lesser accident risk. This would mean a lower cost to introduce new types of vehicles that meet the qualifications. And maybe even no driver’s license (!). In Europe today there are small engine electric vehicles that people can drive to get to work when their license is revoked. And in the US, we similarly don’t require licenses for small engine motorcycles.

Are you ready? What do you think? Would you switch?

And for the record, in dense metropolitan areas, it would still be faster to walk shorter distances, and take transit in dedicated lanes or rails, and never ever have to worry about parking.

See here for photos of lots of microcars
And here to take a virtual tour of the microcar museum.

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Cars are like 2-liter Sodas

Two-liter sodas are meant for parties: to be consumed by lots of people on special occasions and in a short period of time. If you buy a 2-liter soda under other conditions, you usually end up drinking too much yourself or letting some go to waste.

Cars are like that. Despite the fact that we usually drive alone, and that we don’t drive 24, or even 12, and not even 6 hours a day, cars are only sold in the big gulp size. And so, we consume them too much in our efforts to get our money’s worth, and lots of our car’s value goes to waste.

Traditional carsharing lets some people consume just the amount of car they want. But small-minded documents (leases and insurance documents) make it illegal to share your own car with someone else for money, or to formally pay an individual to use their car.
If we want to have fewer cars in cities and towns, and fewer cars mined out of the ground, stored on our streets, and returned to landfills, we need to create the insurance and regulatory means by which this kind of just-right consumption is possible.

Ditto for sharing car rides, for which it is also illegal in most countries to pay for the driver’s time and effort in addition to defraying some of his car costs. A California start-up Spride Ride has found a legislator who is trying to address some of these problems, but it is one state, and even that bill isn’t going far enough.

Legislators and policy-makers around the world: realize that some people want single-sized servings of cars and rides – or maybe even the opportunity to buy a 6-pack of individual servings – but only some of us want the 2-liter bottle. And unless you think the government or big business can provide those individual car-servings in every geography and to every desiring population, you’d do best to get rid of those barriers so that some us can serve up our excess car capacity and sell it to our neighbors.

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