greenpoint design

Data and the City

New York has been called ungovernable. No one would dispute that the city is difficult to manage,  but it is not ungovernable.

Take the issue of transportation, for example. New York’s metropolitan region of 20 million people is served by 20 rail lines moving about 150 million riders each year. The regional rail network converges on two stations in Manhattan — Penn and Grand Central. Add to that daily subway, car, bus and bike trips into Manhattan and you’ve got a situation that has spawned a lot of neologisms, the politest of which is probably “gridlock”. Moving millions of people in and out of Manhattan each day is a big problem to be sure, but not impossible. The problem has to be broken up into smaller pieces first and then quantified.

Charlie Komanoff  is trying to do just that. Komanoff is a transportation and energy consultant who is adding up the costs of travel into and out of New York City. He has come close to achieving that goal with the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, a massive 4.5 MB spreadsheet that will allow city planners to model the cost-time impacts of various transportation policies. The most telling finding of this three-year study is the high cost of motor vehicle traffic in New York. Komanoff figures that each car admitted to Manhattan’s central business district (the area from 60th st. to the Battery) during the morning rush generates 3.66 hours of associated delays, or about $145 worth of our time.

Komanoff is the subject of a fascinating article in the June issue of Wired, by Felix Salmon. He is also the organizing force behind Transportation Alternatives, an influential bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group based in New York.

Gadget Fetish

Couldn’t resist this fuzzy clip from 1981 where ur-techno musicians Kraftwerk demonstrate man-machine love.

IE Fades as Chrome Surges

The window through which people view the web is changing. Between March and April, usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer slipped below 60 percent, according to ArsTechnica. That’s a huge change from just a few years ago when the various versions of Internet Explorer accounted for over 90 percent of the browsers used on the net.

Mozilla’s Firefox holds just under 25 percent of the browser share and Google’s Chrome browser claims almost 7 percent of the viewing public. Google’s open-source net-viewing tool is faster than the competition and their latest release parses web pages faster still.

Although some analysts predict that the internet will be accessed primarily from mobile devices in just a few year’s time, actual mobile web usage accounts for  less than 2 percent of US web content consumption. According to a Pew Internet study, about one-third of Americans accessed the net with a mobile device in 2009. Counting mobile access is also tricky, since many mobile devices strip or otherwise obscure their user agent strings.

Browser preferences also vary greatly by venue. Sites about web tech can usually count on a majority of users viewing with Firefox; sites about the arts may see a marked preference for Safari. On this site 45 percent of users log in with Internet Explorer while 41 percent use Firefox and 14 percent prefer Safari.

Revolutionary Change Vs. Evolutionary

NPR unearthed a reminder of what revolutionary change looks like with this 1984 video of Steve Jobs unveiling the Macintosh. At the time, packing that much easy-to-use functionality into that small a package really was “insanely great.” It was a revolutionary leap forward from the DOS model of computing.

Last week Steve Jobs introduced the iPad to politely tepid reviews. By all accounts, this was an example of evolutionary change — a small step toward the unrealized future.

Twitter + Location = Utility

If you check your Twitter account today, you may notice a balloon in the right margin asking you to provide your location. This is part of a new Twitter initiative to filter tweets by location.

Having identified my location as New York City, I now see a list of trending topics in NYC. Today the top New York topic is #nowthatsghetto. While amusing, examples of ghetto-fabulous style are not exactly useful. However, it’s not hard to see that a chorus of tweets about an accident coming from GPS-enabled phones along the same stretch of I-95 adds up to useful traffic information.

Especially when paired with real-time search, as noted in this MIT Technology Review article. Last month Google incorporated real-time data into its search results, adding tweets to blog posts, Craigslist items and Etsy listings. For more on real-time search see the Google Blog. This is a big step toward tapping the human-network to provide timely annotation of real events.

Twitter has already proved helpful in a crisis. Last month, for example, when a pre-Christmas snowstorm blanketed the Mid-Atlantic states, my flight home was canceled.  My airline’s phone banks immediately flooded with calls from stranded travelers and the airline’s website offered only the stale notice that all flights had been canceled. An assiduous search of Twitter posts turned up a working number for the airline with an actual person on the other end. I was able to reschedule my flight for the next day. Score one for collective intelligence.

Next Christmas smart-phone wielding travelers may be able to sidestep weather-related emergencies with a quick search and a call and then go back to tweeting about really important stuff like #tackyholidaysweaters.