Rails to Rides: Sunday, May 13 2018 Snippets
As always, thanks for reading. Want Snippets delivered to your inbox, a whole day earlier? Subscribe here.
This week’s theme: how American urban transportation has followed the behavior of networked systems.
So far in our Snippets series on cities and what makes them tick, we’ve started out with a general observation on cities and abundance: how the structure of dense urban networks of people allows for many formerly scarce resources to be taken for granted, and how new emergent activity and wealth gets created as a result. Then we considered how city growth tends to follow three rules by which networked systems generally behave: how they grow to fill all available space according to certain rules, how that space tends to be filled by repeating copies of the same terminal units (as opposed to everything growing together), and how we find local maxima through local feedback loops and optimization. This week, we’ll look at an example of these rules in practice — urban transportation in America, and how it’s changed over the last century and a half.
When we think about the rules of space-filling (which in cities, means quite literally space-filling: it means houses, buildings, streets, utilities, and other services grow and spread out as the city expands), we can think of those rules as a tug of war between two kinds of forces. On one side, there’s what the market wants to do — which means homebuyers, real estate developers, and builders. On the other, there’s what the city and its planners want to do — manifested in laws, zoning rules, and other regulations through which the other participants can be told how and how not to behave. The terminal units, on the other hand, are generally not a reflection of central planning nor of distributed market sentiment, but rather are an orthogonal reflection of how technology has empowered us. In a world where technological progress is frozen in time, city planning would merely be a space-filling problem (which is hard enough, given the many stakeholders.) But when technology makes sudden leaps and jumps, it can challenge the established plans and layouts in ways that are hard to foresee.
Cities have always been inextricably tied to the modes of transportation as the day: the very reason they exist is to reduce the distance between citizens and thereby create new opportunity and wealth that was impossible at greater separation. Up through the 1800s, transportation within cities was mostly walking, often assisted by horses cases of special speed or heavy loads, and the resulting city geography and the repeating terminal units within it (dense tenement and stacked multi-family buildings) reflected the realities of 30-, 60- and 90-minute walking distances. But in the late 1800s, a new technological revolution happened: electricity and the electric motor, introducing streetcars as a new and dramatically superior method for moving people around the city. The electric motor made moving longer distances within cities, which previously had taken time and effort, into something cheap, easy and abundant. We now had a new template for terminal units: the electric streetcar on rails and the “streetcar suburb” of leafy streets and more private homes outside the city center. Real estate developers quickly figured out how to leverage the value of existing and future streetcar lines in order to build housing, and the “chicken-and-egg problem” for transit quickly became a non-issue: the streetcar companies and home builders could both count on each other to expand the city dimensions by rapidly filling new space along these new corridors. The change was swift and significant: by the early 20th century, American cities had the world’s most extensive urban public transport systems.
But then two important things happened. One changed the technoloy available, and the other changed the rules of the game around space filling:
First, was the emergence of oil and the internal combustion engine as new technologies. The rise of the gas-powered car introduced a new, powerful competitor to the streetcar that may have been less efficient at moving people in traffic, but were dramatically superior in terms of granting people individual independence of movement. With you own car you could drive anywhere you wanted, independent of routes or schedules, and thanks to legislation like the Federal Highway Bill, take advantage of free infrastructure while doing so. Whereas the electric motor made overland movement abundant, the car introduced a new kind of abundance: independence of movement.
Second was the continued march of American housing policy towards encouraging and subsidizing individual homeownership and landownership — none more so than one of the single most consequential pieces of the American tax code, the single-home mortgage deduction. These new incentives and subsidies opened up homeownership to the masses, and in dramatically shifted the equation around space-filling. The combination of the two — the technology of the gas-powered automobile combined with the space-filling rules around homeownership introduced two new repeating kinds of terminal units that would dominate the next phase of American city growth: the car and the suburban home.
Today, we’re facing the possibility of a distinct third shift (right on schedule, fifty-ish years later). First, we’re seeing a pointed shift in what residents demand out of their cities: dense, walkable, diverse neighbourhoods downtown have gone from being cramped, undesirable places to live to becoming the new in-demand zip codes and status symbols. This new demand, coupled with surging land and housing prices in the most desirable cities (some of which are rethinking the ways in which they ought to be zoned, others of which, like the Bay Area, are distinctly not), has reshaped the purchasing power and expectations of homebuyers and developers, and changed the way that we fill and occupy space as a result.
Second, we’re on the verge of yet another huge technological shift: as the mobile internet connects us instantaneously to other people and vehicles around us, on-demand personal transportation — whether we’re talking about Uber and Lyft or bikes and scooters, particularly when combined with public transportation — creates a truly viable alternative to cars for trips within the city that will be supercharged further with the rollout of autonomous vehicles. So, once again, we’re close to having those two keys come together: space filling plus new terminal units leading to a new reorganization of how cities will operate their transportation networks, how their citizens will move around them, and what kind of new abundance we will come to expect.
Next week, we’ll dive into one movement that has simultaneously preempted this change, struggled with its implementation, and yet still acts as a guidepost for its progression: transit-oriented development. We’ll also hear about its de-facto creator, Peter Calthorpe, who we heard from a few episodes ago as the founder of UrbanFootprint.
Elsewhere in the world:
Coming to terms with a life without water | Rosa Lyster, The New Yorker
And here in America:
America still has a heartland, it’s just an artificial one | Venkatesh Rao, Aeon
Closing the Ag / Agtech divide: lessons from the midwest | Sarah Nolet & Renee Vassilos
Judgement and epiphany on Pittsburgh’s number 79 bus | Brian Broome
Real dilemmas:
The moral cost of cats | Rachel Gross, Smithsonian Magazine
The curious case of the Fortnite cheater | Sarah Jeong, The Verge
Facebook, social media and the social contract | Om Malik
Teaching and learning:
Bizops: when you need it and why, eventually, you won’t | Yao Choong
The Knowledge Project #32: Patrick Collison (transcript) Shane Parrish, Farnam Street
The economics of writing a technical book | Justin Garrison
Unexpected directions in building design:
Other reading from around the Internet:
Varieties of argumentative experience | Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex
MIT and newly formed company launch novel approach to fusion power | David Chandler
Inside the ecosystem that fuels Amazon’s fake review problem | Nicole Nguyen, BuzzFeed News
The burnout crisis in American medicine | Rena Xu, The Atlantic
Two by Twos: aggregators versus platforms | Exponent.fm with Ben Thompson & James Allworth
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, Slack is continuing its run as the fastest growing business application in history, and recently hit some new milestones they’ve shared with us:
- 8 million Daily Active Users, and 3 million paid users,
- 500,000 organizations, including 65% of the Fortune 500 and more than half outside the US,
- 1500 apps in the Slack App directory, with 200,000 weekly active developers building on the Slack Platform:
From Tokyo to Tallahasee, Target to Ticketmaster, Slack is where work happens | Slack
As they work towards their mission of making people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, it’s clear that Slack’s customers continue to share a special kind of affection that’s unusual, if not previously unheard of, for enterprise software. (What other enterprise software do you know of where tens of thousands of users have tweeted their thanks for how much Slack has improved their working lives?) Next week, they’ll be hosting their first developer-focused conference: it’s currently sold out, but if you really would like to attend and don’t have tickets, you can join the waitlist here, and also gain links to a livestream for the main events. You can also always keep up with what they’re up to at their blog, Several People are Typing, and see available job openings all around the world in London, Tokyo, Toronto, New York, Vancouver and here in the Bay Area.
In other news, you can catch Chamath on Bloomberg talking with Emily Chang about a wide range of subjects: Tesla, Apple, data privacy, and much more:
And finally, if you want to see something really neat: the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which supports marine research and the advancement of ocean technology around the world, is using Saildrone to go search for great white sharks. The research expedition is led by principal investigator Barbara Block of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, who through years of studies have noticed a peculiar migration among the great white sharks that didn’t seem to make sense. Each fall, large numbers of sharks leave the bountiful coastal waters near California to converge on a strangely barren patch of ocean, about the size of Colorado, called the “White Shark Cafe” — but no one is quite sure why.
So a team of researchers, along with two Saildrones accompanying them, have set sail to go learn more. As Dr. Block explains, “By simultaneously studying the physical and chemical oceanography of the region, as well as observing the biodiversity while we know the white sharks are there, we can for the first time begin to assemble a picture fo the role the White Shark Cafe plays in these animal’s life histories. This information is fundamental to knowing how to protect them in the high seas.” You can follow their progress at whitesharkcafe.org, and learn more about the project here.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team at Social Capital
