SF Chinatown, a place that really shouldn’t have cars.

I felt this TechCrunch article “Ride Sharing Will Give Us Back Our Cities” jumped the gun for me on issues of land use equity.  Planners have to be skeptical about how technology will change the landscape.  Our own foray into technology, the freeway, created an unforeseen sprawl landscape and car-centric culture.   Currently, the decoupling of home, work, and play is making it difficult to predict successful fixed-route transit.   Ride sharing as a permanent altering of transportation habits and infrastructure?  Let’s think about it.

Our cities, our cars?

The article is a bit confusing, because it advocates that residents give up their cars and then states those residents must adopt car-share.  This quandary reflects the assumptions made:

• People still need cars, just cars that are not their own.
  • This is a highly loaded topic with geographical and racial implications.  TechCrunch’s audience, white, smart and well-to-do, needs to ditch their spoils, but then who are the ones offering their cars as tribute to the carless?  The cited studies suggest merely mode shift to other people’s cars, not giving up ownership.  It seems to me that we’re merely shifting car usage to another group of people, the rideshare chaffeurs.
• Concentrating on helping urban residents.
  • 

    Minneapolis I-94 during rush hour, most likely not city drivers.

    Traffic is primarily an intercity (suburban to urban), not intracity problem.  Too many people in large machines wish to move between two somewhat distant locations and are funneled into one corridor.  It is not the same to state that 50,000 residents in the nearby suburb can easily give up their cars. Existing “urban” residents (likely the author means those living in pre-war city blocks) are probably not the ones causing headaches for state transportation planners.
• Cars as intracity (neighborhood to neighborhood) problem.
  • The hidden assumption is that car-use is inherently an inner city problem, that of a driver going from the Sunset District to SOMA, or Columbia Heights to McPherson Square, or Highland Park to the U of M.  Inefficiencies are abound when city residents literally drive the route of a bus or rail line.  These people can avoid freeways, people in Menlo Park, Manassas, and Maple Grove will not.  We’ve gotten urbanites onboard rideshare, but we still have increasing number of cars on city streets.
• The urban fabric will change.
  • The article suggests when people travel, they visit pedestrian-friendly places.  About 40 million people each visit Las Vegas and Los Angeles annually, both of which are hardly Jane Jacob’s favorite places.  New York gets 56 million.  Tourism is not a good gauge of transportation-land use policy.  Public Works departments are reinventing roads for the people they serve, not for visitors.
• Millennials want experiences, not things.
  • 

    This millennial is planning his awesome experience at the Northern Spark art party, but he secretly wishes he had things too.

    I’m a millennial, this is not true, and the surveyors agree. Millennials would love to own their car and own their house.  They just can’t.  Things also enable experiences, like spontaneously driving your car on a road trip and not worrying about when to return it.  Millennials want detachment from responsibility, and car-share is like driving your parent’s car.  Lastly, why is this unique to millennials, shouldn’t everyone in a healthy city want great experiences in life.

City Policy vs Startup Hacking

The article does get it right in declaring the problem at hand:

Considering the inefficient use of the personal automobile, its exorbitant cost, the sheer volume of urban land devoted to serving that inefficient use and the material efficiencies achieved through ride-sharing and ride-hailing services, we just might have a chance to radically redesign our cities. If the 20^th century was devoted to building the infrastructure to service the personal automobile, then perhaps the 21^st century will be devoted to undoing most of it.

Fulton Street road diet.

Public Works officials have already begun road diets for its “inclusive” mode design (see Fresno, CA, Louisville, KY).  It’s design is intentionally to slow vehicle traffic.  With AirBnb having defeated a major city’s ordinance, how will ride-share startups respond to future infrastructure policies (see Los Angeles’ Highland Park).

The article suggest road diets could be an outcome of ridesharing.  Arguably road diets have actually emerged from Vision Zero to eliminate pedestrian-vehicle deaths. How will rideshare companies respond when parking/stopping lanes are removed along money-making corridors, or when travel times are slowed across important thoroughfares which could affect their algorithms.  Local startup Split caters to this point of friction and curates required pick-up and drop-off locations near addresses.

Glen Park’s BART streetscape redesign eliminated a coveted stopping lane in favor of an extended pedestrian waiting area.

So the article speaks for a car-less future with cars.  It would be like suggest e-cigarettes (vaping) will herald the end of smoking. In actuality the future urban fabric may be fully to eliminate the car itself.   Currently, it would be more important to see rideshare’s effect upon transit, if it’s complementary or in actuality duplicative.  In 2012 TCRP wrote a 72 page report on ridesharing only to conclude:

Evidence that ridesharing complements public transit is limited, according to this examination of the state of the practice. Even though ridesharing has been around for decades as a travel mode and despite the benefits that a number of agencies have experienced a good deal of skepticism about combining ridesharing and public transit still exists.

I was discussing web programming with a bunch of urban planners only to find blank stares. To laypersons, the web is like a magical television feed that pipes into their computer screens from far away.  In reality, a web is a simple set of instructions telling your computer to create something fun and interesting.  In explaining the process of how entire technology departments create effective and maintainable websites, I had to describe the “stack” which like a layered cake allowed multiple people to seamlessly develop a website.  I stumbled in connecting each role to more relatable jobs, until recently I realized a fun analogy could be a restaurant.

The Ingredients – Code

All life began with the computer and a plethora of languages available to create the web with.  HTML is just the seasoning and plate presentation of a server-side steak dinner, which could be built of Python and php.  Sometimes these languages come pre-packaged into libraries, like pre-made sauces that help speed up the process.   Or if it’s good and you can’t tell the difference, we’ll serve you a WordPress frozen soup we’ve heated up (a content management system with our own spices). 

The Back Kitchen – Dev-Ops

Those who play with Linux servers sit in the dark back room making sure we can keep up with the booming web traffic of our hardcore ninja app.  Servers are the stoves that keep things cooking and feeding the masses.  Someone in the back has to know how to fix the deployment blender.  Purging logs like washing dishes.

The Cooks – Back-End Programmers

These people are wizards with server-side code.  They know exactly how long to prep and cook the steak.  They’ll slice zucchini the way you need it.  Server-side languages manipulate and produce the expected data, like measuring the ingredients exactly for a perfect souffle.  They execute recipes with precision so they’re not always concerned with how pretty things look once on the plate.

The Sous Chef – Front-End Programmers

In past days there were webmasters who tinkered with plain text.  Today front-end web languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript support the ability to have fully interactive and visually pleasurable websites.  They turn that raw server information into beautiful plate presentations that excite and challenge the eye and palate.  The back-end hands over the useful data, the grilled steak, and the front-end positions the steak on the plate, assembles the side dishes, and puts finishing touches.

The Head Chef – User Experience Designers

The head chef creates the plates and recipes everyone is busily cooking and perfecting. They set the look, the standard, the expectation.  A web designer today is designing user experience and providing visual guides to websites in addition to pixel perfect templates. Granted, a designer doesn’t necessarily drive the show come table service, they certainly set the way things will be done when they’re not there.

The House Manager and Host – CTO & Support

The chef doesn’t call all the shots, the ultimate decisions end up with the restaurant owner.  A development team is guided by a Chief Technology Officer who permeates all processes and layers.  Along with support people, they also solve client-facing problems and emergencies — the confused or disgruntled patrons.  Their steak is undercooked, there’s a hair in the soup, the waiter is rude, the web can “break” at many points in the process and so they come in to address these administrative issues.

The Wait Staff – Sales and Marketing

The business development and “growth” people will jab me in the side for calling them the wait staff.  In reality their role is very similar, they are selling the product and standing by it.  They’re delivering a promise to patrons that the menu is going to give them that great experience, for a price.  And any good salesperson will keep the client or diner happy.   These people also in turn inform and drive the development of new features or changes to the code base, like a waitress sharing dining feedback, and so are important parts in a successful code base.

So there you go, that’s a restaurant version of the web “stack.”  Each person and layer is integral to the process that creates a good website that evolves to meet its market and demand.  Now, I’m starving for food, there’s an app for that right.