Peak Car Use: It is Happening

I first heard the term "peak cars" about two weeks ago. And then "peak car use" showed up again in this research report

This trend is happening not only in the US, but is consistent with research of driving data in 7 other countries.

As possible causes of ‘Peak Car Use’, the paper offers up the following six factors:

1. Hitting the Marchetti Wall
2. The Growth of Public Transport
3. The Reversal of Urban Sprawl
4. The Aging of Cities
5. The Growth of a Culture of Urbanism
6. The Rise in Fuel Prices

Go read the article. Then figure out if you too are driving your car less. At it is, most people use their car's only 5% of the time. The other 95%?

put it up for rent to your friends and neighbors with

Buzzcar

(if you live in France). Or maybe just sell it altogether and use someone else's.

Carsharing is more and more becoming the obvious choice for car mobility.

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Testifying before Congress: I Can't get a Word in Edgewise

Looking for the written transcript of my testimony (March 9, 2011), I stumbled across this video clip, as prepared by the Republican-controlled House Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce website

It was billed on their page as:

"Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) questioned a supporter of the rules about how well the Internet works without government regulation, noting: “You set up a very successful company using the Internet as it was, basically the status quo Internet, and you did that without a whole lot of trouble: is that right?”



Count how many words I get to say (5?) compared to the torrent of her words. If memory serves me, what happens after this clip is she moves on to "question" the person next to me allowing them the same "response time." Yet on the Republican website about the testimony, all the quotes are from the Republican congressmen making their statements, with zero quotes from those experts who were testifying.

I realize this is politics, but the spin is pretty scandalous. The fact is, that the rules I got to play by in 2000, are not the rules start-ups today live under. In 2005, the FCC was stripped of its right to ensure fair play on the Internet, and immediately thereafter ensued lots of bad behavior on the part of the big telecommunications companies. The FCC Order, the one was testifying for, and that the House overturned, and that is now before the Senate, was to reinstate the FCC's right protect the openness of the Internet.

Associated blog entries: I wrote up immediately after testifying. and OpEd in Politico

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Net Neutrality protects Innovation & Jobs

Here is my OpEd published in Politico, days before vote in House on whether to overturn FCC ruling that protects net neutrality.

You can read my testimony before Congress and my reactions to that experience in previous blog.

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My mom's got muscles

Check it out. 85 years old and can do 10 chin ups. Here she is with trainer she has been working with. Will you look at that bicep? Don't want to meet her in an alley.

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Testifying before Congress: Net Neutrality

I testified this week to the House Subcommittee on Communications and the Internet.

Here is my written testimony and here is my oral testimony and here the video version.
In general, the Republicans who wished to repeal the FCC order tried to:

• Confuse regulating access to the Internet (telecommunications providers: i.e. Verizon and ATT for the vast bulk of Americans) which is the subject of the FCC order, and regulating services (Google, Amazon, Facebook) which aren’t under the FCC’s jurisdiction.

• Confuse controlling Internet Openness (which everyone agrees is a good thing) with controlling Access to -- and Who Defines -- that Internet: 1) an industry that tends toward monopoly power or 2) the government who should serve the American public’s interests.

• Confuse innovation, jobs, and investment in the economy created by entrepreneurs and small businesses (75% of all jobs over the last 10 years and what percent of the economy?) with the “innovation,” jobs, and investment of two telecommunications giants (ATT invested $19b last year in infrastructure).

Congressmen who had done some work in preparation for my testimony raised the following points against my personal testimony:

• Asked by two members (a talking point?): When the search term “carsharing” is entered into Google, Zipcar has an ad that runs above the first search result. How does Zipcar’s ability to buy a paid ad sync with my testimony that startups can’t afford to pay for premium services?

The first time this was asked, I said that it wasn’t relevant. What was a better comparison was to think of newspapers, where big companies could take out full pages ads, and little companies only tiny classifieds, and that the internet had changed that access into one of a meritocracy. The second time I was asked, I said “This isn’t the question at hand” to which the Congressman replied that indeed, it was his question (true). A thoughtful short response should have been: The fact that an eleven-year old company can afford to buy a Google ad has no bearing on whether a startup could afford to pay a premium for access to the Internet, nor whether other structural hurdles could be established by the duopoly gatekeepers to the Internet.

Several times, Republicans raised the idea that if the unregulated Internet worked for me to start up Zipcar before, why did I think it wouldn’t work in the future? One Congressman even repeated to me two times how easy it must have been for me to start Zipcar (I didn’t let her get away with that). The response I tried to make, and I don’t know if I did, was that the Internet was a baby industry back then, the telcos power was much less, and in fact, the industry was regulated and under the jurisdiction of the FCC (which was later taken away in 2005).

• My favorite question: It appears that Zipcar gets free parking that taxpayers have paid for, depriving these taxpayers of on-street parking dedicated to a for-profit company, as well as received other government grants to succeed….not clear to me how this has any bearing at all.

To which I replied that during my three-year tenure as CEO I had paid for municipal parking won through RFPs and had received no federal grant money at all. Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge later reminded me that the carriers have received rights of way, spectrum rights, and millions (billions?) of dollars of subsidies from government.

• Two ill-formed, grand-standing, and not quite completed questions were trying to relate to my sensibilities as a business woman. They seemed to be aiming at this point: Wasn’t the only way to respond to market demand to build out more infrastructure? And shouldn’t a company be able to set prices any way it wanted to without government interference?

One of the questioners cut me off after a sentence reply saying that his allotted time was up. And I think I didn’t answer well or clearly to the first time this question was asked. The answer which I managed to squeeze in later in answer to another Congressman’s question was a better one, although admittedly not as nicely said as written below:

Capitalism works when markets respond to demand and competition. The Internet gatekeepers are at best an oligopoly and for most consumers a monopoly. These companies don’t need to respond to demand (they can create scarcity to raise prices) and they also don’t have to respond efficiently or cleverly because they have no competition.

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Net neutrality imperative to Protect Innovation

Here is OpEd I wrote last week for Bloomberg Government, and the interview I did for Bloomberg TV.

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Getting a Velib Annual Membership. Part 2

You will recall that my husband and I received our Navigo cards and were eagerly awaiting the arrival of our annual Velib memberships. This would allow each of us tie our Navigo card to our Velib account and use the Navigo card to unlock the Velib directly. As easy as a visit to the local pub, "put it on my tab," I'd be saying electronically. [for the record, this is literary metaphor, I’ve been to a pub about twice in my entire life.] No more lengthy interactions with the Velib kiosk. No more having to remember the number of the Velib locking post that has the bicycle I have so carefully selected as problem-free. Did I mention that some of the Velib stations are so big that half of the bicycles are on the other side of the street or around the corner?

Imagine my excitement when my letter from Velib arrived. The day had finally come! I opened the letter to find that my application had been denied.
The Velib annual application requested a €29.00 fee, to be paid with a check. Thinking that a postal money order would suffice, my husband had purchased one from the local post office and included it with my application. Velib returned the postal money order explaining that they do not accept cash.



Now I have a €29.00 postal money order made out to Velib. I can't get my money refunded from the post office because we had thrown out the receipt (1. why would I want to keep the receipt? 2. why can't the Post Office give me money back without a receipt when the postal order is from me and I'm standing right in front of them with a passport?)

So we request a checkbook from our bank. An online request of course. In order to expedite the checkbook, we selected "pickup at our branch". 3 weeks and 3 trips to the branch later we finally receive our checkbook. So we resubmit our applications with the €29.00 checks enclosed.

A week later we are again denied. Now we learn the significance of the RIB. The "Relevé d'Identité Bancaire" is a piece of paper with 4 numbers on it. The bank ID number, the branch number, the account number, and a 2 digit RIB key, essentially a checksum calculated from the other 3 numbers. There is some other redundant information on the piece of paper like the name of the bank and their telephone number, but the essential data is contained in these 4 numbers. We entered all of these numbers in the specified fields on the Velib application form, the one which we printed out and submitted. So when the application instructions asked to include the RIB, my husband thought he had done it. But no, for some inexplicable reason it is necessary to include the special piece of paper the bank gives you copies of with the same 4 numbers on it.

All of this wasn't entirely obvious to our French friends either. We asked them to look at the letter and see if they could tell what we were doing wrong. Only upon patient cross-examination did they discover that my husband had not sent in the RIB bank slip of paper in addition to filling out the required filled.

"Of course! How could you be so stupid? Of course you must send in the RIB!"

"But it contains the same information that I entered on the form," my husband protested.

"But you must include it!"

OK, so we send in the applications again. This time with the pre-printed form, the €29.00 personal check, and the the all important RIB piece of paper.

Finally our annual memberships arrive. Two separate accounts, one for each of us. The letter tell us that we must now activate our membership by going online within 45 days. I picture someone at Velib headquarters who has been specifically designated to wait the 45 days for my account to expire. He's just sitting in a room with a clock and a calendar counting down. He's going to press a big red button which has been directly wired to my account if I don't stop him.

I sign in with my special ID number I've been assigned and my secret PIN, which must be entered twice into two separate boxes. I'm not sure why one isn't enough.

Et voila! I am signed in to my account. Velib thinks my name is Chase Robin, not Robin Chase, which will cause a moment's confusion the next time I try and sign in because in order to sign in I must enter my assigned number, my secret PIN (only once now) and my last name, which Velib thinks is "Robin". I'm not sure why they think this, since they got my husband's name right.

RIght away I try to use my Navigo to get a Velib, but it doesn't work. Velib kiosk reports that it is not associated with any account. Has all our work been in vain? I go back and log into my Velib account and find that there is no Navigo card number associated with my account, even though giving my Navigo card number was an important step I had completed back in November. So I enter one in the field for Navigo card number.

Now it works!! And it is really much easier than dealing with the kiosk. Now I think nothing of swiping my card and hopping on a Velib to ride just a few blocks. My travel time is cut in half getting to the train station. I check my account a few days later and am amused to see a long list of trips, every one of them under the 30 minute free limit.

But wait! After 4 months of effort and an almost innumerable number of steps, my husband is not so lucky. Even though we applied in parallel, attended to each step in parallel, made all the same mistakes and missteps in parallel, when he enters his Navigo card into his Velib account he is told that “the staff will take it under consideration.”

Now, if we can just figure out this one last thing...

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