Thanks - very interesting reply. I am interested because I am a transportation consultant in Oakland, with a focus on ITS and open standards. Cool that California DOT is using open source! We have done work for them in the past where they have been less enthusiastic.
If you were curious about the details of the remote traffic and weather monitoring stations I know a little about this, I was more curious about any sort of web services exposure. For example, will you expose traffic information using something like SOAP or (even better) using something from the OpenGIS Consoritum? Not a big deal, just wondering what kind of cool services I can build on top for my clients. Thanks for the reply, btw.
Any releasable tech spechs for California DOT's backend web interface? I would be curious to see them. How are you thinking of tying in weather? Just curious...
Per unit profit margin = (sale price - cost to produce) / sale price. That is, the percentage of your per unit sales price that are profits. Note that you cannot have a profit margin greater than 100% unless your product costs you negative dollars to produce.
The correct calculation is: ($300-$45)/($300) =.85.
With these math skills, you might want to rethink your rather confrontational sig.
Your analysis is - of course - totally correct. However it misses the point of fixed vs. variable costs and who bears them. For most people, a car is a desireable mode for medium distance trips, even if they use the subway to get around thier city. Most of the costs you cite are fixed costs of ownership and would be around anyway.
If you built light rail or PRT, however, you would incur BOTH costs, not just one or another. And it would probably not be true that you would be universally better off if you had light rail but no car. Don't get me wrong - I am a fan of transit - but I think that saying every urban resident has an extra $9K/year to spend on it is a little optimistic.
I am always surprised by the knee-jerk, emotional response public transit issues evokes, from both sides of the fence, but particuarly the 'anti' side. I didn't know about points (1) and (3) - very interesting. However, the poster has clearly not read my original post very carefully, since I mostly focus on the grim economic reality for innovative public transit.
Although it is true that transportation engineering circles view this with sceptiscism (I hold a masters from the transportation engineering program at Berkeley,), I think that points (2) and (4) are grossly overstated. I think that much of the transportation engineering comminity is (understandably) biased toward 'civil engineering' approaches to problems, which emphasize rules of thumb and history over innovation and modelling. I tend to believe that much of our failure to innovate in public transit can be ascribed to this prevailing attitude. I have seen no convincing academic literature that suggests that these systems are 'failures' from an engineering perspective, but I would be interested if the poster could point to some.
As I stated in my post, however, these technologies are not necessarily economically efficient. There are not good stats availible on track costs for PRT since the systems are so rare (there is the WV system, a defunct system in Hamburg, and a proposed-but-never-built system in Chicago). However, a reasonable rule of thumb is that road lanes cost ~$100K/km and light rail lanes cost ~$10M/km. PRT rails would cost somewhere between $1M/km and $10M/km; clearly, replacing enough roads to make a viable network is a huge investment and - again - subway-like throughput has never been demonstrated. But, this is not = to any sort of 'failure of engineering.'
This is a concept commonly refered to as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), a subset of Automated People Movers (APM) found at many airports. PRT has been around for a while and has somewhat fringe supporters (like me). Edward Anderson at the University of Minnesota has generated some of the most credible system designs and incorporated under Taxi2000. In fact, Raytheon developed a full test track of Anderson's concept outside of Boston; Bostonians can visit thier Marlborough, MA facility and see the future,!
The reason that PRT remains a fringe concept is related to economic challenges, not engineering ones. Although there are claims to the contrary, the general problem is that - like all public transit - PRT require a very high inital capital outlay. In dense urban areas, right-of-way costs are prohibitive. However, just as with information networks, public transit networks generate positive externalities: the larger the system, the more useful it is to everyone.
Furthermore there is little incentive to invest in expensive public works projects have prevented the testing of a fairly unproven technology. Public agencies would much rather invest in light rail systems that they have seen before than fancy driverless systems. Also, there is no conclusive proof that these decentralized systems can sustain the high corrider passenger/hour throughputs that make public transit so desirable for really dense urban areas.
Hopefully, projects like Cardiff will succeed and PRT will get recognition and legitimacy, but this is a technology that has been kicking around for a while and - as you can probably tell - is not insanely complex. As usual, economics and public policy get in the way of interesting engineering!
And we are looking for volunteer coders. I am sure that there are many reasons for there not being more, including: non-profits do not adapt extremely quickly to new technology trends; there has simply been too much money to fund things privately until very recently; open source is a very new idea in the grand scheme of things; etc.
However, they do exist and I am sure that there will be more. There is not much to VFNY yet, but we are attempting to develop open GIS software systems to facilitate better public planning and use of data about public spaces. There is clearly a need for the non-profit sector in facilitating software that would otherwise never get built because its development and use fits in the category of a 'public good.' We think that open GIS software fits into this category. Feel free to email me: robhranac at yahoo!
Mark,
I was wondering if someone would call me on my relatively imprecise langueage. You are - of course - correct that opengis.org is a standards setting organization rather than an organization dedicated to open source. My point is that the corps behind it have been slow in implementing thier own specs and that the open souce community can do an end-around and implement them more fully than the participating organizations. Also, I think that it is a bit short-sighted to believe that opengis.org is some sort of monstrous ms in waiting. In fact, they open up specs for public comment, etc.
Opengis.org is the best organizational reference for open GIS standards. They have an international consortium of business and government agencies behind them. They have been around since 1993 and have developed several standards for developing a true open framework for GIS delivery. In fact, GIS is one of the rare applications that demands a very open approach since having geographic data is only useful as it relates to other geographic data.
Opengis.org has done a good job of specing out systems that are truly interoperable because they achieve GIS nirvana: seperating content from visualization. Reading GIS content from multiple servers and displaying it through a single user interface is the heart of open GIS. Amazingly, no major commercial vendors (ESRI, Bentley) are aggressively pursuing this vision. IMHO, this is an opportunity for the open source community to make a mark on a major emerging industry! If you are interested in working on developing an open source version of the server spec that Opengis has released, please contact me!
Hate to be a nerdy economist, but this is not the definition of a luxury
good. You have described free software as a luxury good because of how it
is produced. Luxury goods are defined in terms of their demand:
a luxury good is a good that people demand more of when their incomes rise and
which they replace with substitutes when their incomes fall. Under this
definition, Free Software might be regarded as either a normal good or inferior
good. Don't flame me here, inferior goods are just goods who have demand
curves that rise as income falls.
If it is an inferior good (possibly an inappropriate name, in a digital
economy), then its consumption will rise as incomes fall. This is a pretty
interesting thought, because unlike other goods, its price will not rise.
There is some speculation that the Irish potato famine was caused because
potatoes were an inferior good and as the Irish incomes fell, they substituted
potatoes for meat, causing a spike in potato prices, causing lower real incomes,
etc., etc. Of course, this will not happen with a free good.
So, I think that the argument that a recession will cause businesses to
substitute away from costly software is a reasonable one. The poster here
is missing the point, which has to do with consumption, not production.
If, of course, a bad economy destroys some of the production mechanisms behind
free software, its quality may diminish, but I am skeptical of this idea.
Good free software predates our recent goofy boom.
I must respectfully disagree. Business methods must live and die by execution, not concept. Business methods are not like cutting-edge drugs or hardware; they do not require multi-million dollar upfront investment in research and development in order to succeed. Unlike things like these goods, which require a great deal of basic and applied research, business methods are a dime a dozen. I can come up with 20 right here and now, if you want. I don't have to go to a lab, buy multi-million dollar equipment, and do lots of math to figure out if my results are real. This goes to the heart of a capitalistic system: if you allow people to sit around and patent every flakey idea that they have, you stifle innovation, rather than encourage it.
I would argue that Britian is allowing more individual rights, rather than fewer, by allowing a darwinistic struggle for business survival rather than a patent-fest. In fact, this competition can only make business less complacent and staid!
Don't get me wrong, I think that this is good stuff and I agree with your assessment that this sort of system is safer and better than conventional systems. In fact, the MTDB in San Diego is at least vaguely considering a somewhat similar concept of letting transit riders rent little electric station-cars that they can then use to access transit.
I like this 'RUF' approach because it integrates the function of a station car (feeder) system, with a more conventional rail (mainline) system quite seamlessly. Maybe having transit systems purchase these cars and rent them out is the way to go.
I merely mean to point out that transportation problems (aside from energy source technology) are not fundamentally a technology problem, they are a social and engineering problem. These systems do not exist, not because control systems are so difficult - this tech has been around - but because generating the political will to invest in costly systems upfront is very difficult.
This is a very smart idea, although it is not dissimilar to PRT (personal rapid transit), a sort of fringe and relatively unimplemented technology. As a public sector planner, I see three things to think about with this sort of 'personalized rail' approach:
(1) Capacity - These personal rail car concepts tend to fail when it comes to extremely dense corridors. As you can imagine, heavy rail can push many more people through a single rail corridor than this sort of technology. Right now you can push about 2K cars/lane/hour, compared to densities of nearly 10K for heavy rail systems. With this technology, you could decrease headways and maybe squeeze another few K through, but:
(2) Cost - these rail systems still cost on the order of $5M US/km to build, while each highway lane only costs about $200K to build.
So, you are still getting less for your tax money with this stuff. Not that I am totally against this, though. Essen (Germany) has a clever system that does this, except the cars are busses that turn into light rail. I can see these applied intelligently for mid-range suburban corridors where other forms of transit are not applicable, but this brings us to the final issue:
(3) Consumer Adoption - when you are trying to get customers to change modes and you are asking them to make large capital outlays to do so, you are asking for trouble. This is the main issue with automated highways (like those prototyped at Berkeley). You can build the public infrastructure, but without private investment on a large scale, it does not fly.
For these reasons, I think that this might be a great transit technology, but will have a hard climb to become an accepted mode in urban areas. I guess that we will have to wait for the super-magical-mysterious panacea that is IT!
I used to work for a tech company that evaluated these systems. Back in the day Irridium was thought to be a total joke - the idea was (apparently, correctly) that MEO (medium earth orbit) satellites were just too difficult and expensive to use for profitable telecom.
However, all the heat went off Irridium and its 60+ MEO satellites when Gates and McCaw backed Teledesic, which called for something like 200+ LEO satellites to deliver broadband Internet worldwide. Obivously, LEO satellites are even more complex and difficult to manage (handoffs, launches, etc.) that MEO.
I just look up Teledesic, though, and it is still going strong. Clearly still vaporware, but it is interesting that they have not given up in light of Irridium's continuing woes.
While an interesting technical idea, basic economics conlcudes that this is an untenable idea. The best example from economics is an environmental one: the tragedy of the commons in 18th(?) century England. Most are familiar with this example, but for those are not, check here.
Essentially, the same arguments that apply to envoronmental commons apply to shared, freely distributed content. Groups in economic systems tend to optimize thier own personal consumption. This is true despite sincere intentions and ideologies of individuals, at a societal level. No one will voluntarily pay for content as a for-profit enterprise.
Clearly, people are willing to defy economic rationalism for non-profit institutions, but this is a very different proposition. Show me a non-religious or non-profit organization that collects
revenues through a volunteer model!
This may be a deeper answer than you are looking for, but I believe that government agencies have fallen far short in terms of a greater vision for sharing public data. In particular, government agencies need to jump on the XML bandwagon and begin to develop consistent data format for common types public information, which they should then provide via the web.
I do technical consulting work on public sector planning issues and there is an enormous amount of public data that should be provided through the web, but is not. For example, geographic data representing public infrastructure (roads, transit, etc.) and public records (property lines, housing) are not provided using any sort of consistent framework. Because this data is kept by many agencies across the country at different levels of government (local, state, federal), there is an enormous amount of duplication and waste within agencies themselves. Indeed, there are 1,000 different GIS formats and projections; even when the data is availible digitally, there is no server from which it can be read. The Census Beareau (which has a horrible website) does the best job of data sharing through its nationally availible TIGER GIS files, but no one has even begun to create a distributed framework for sharing and combining geographic data from multiple servers, using a consistent format.
In short, publishing basic HTML pages uses only a tiny fraction of the web's capabilites to improve governments. Is there is any organization that could benifit more from a good data-sharing framework? There is a DARPA-funded project - GeoVRML - at SRI that addresses some of these issues that sprang out of the fledgling digital earth initiative. Clearly, this will require federal initiative, but if you are a government webmaster, this is the type of vision that you should be promoting within your agency.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks - very interesting reply. I am interested because I am a transportation consultant in Oakland, with a focus on ITS and open standards. Cool that California DOT is using open source! We have done work for them in the past where they have been less enthusiastic.
If you were curious about the details of the remote traffic and weather monitoring stations
I know a little about this, I was more curious about any sort of web services exposure. For example, will you expose traffic information using something like SOAP or (even better) using something from the OpenGIS Consoritum? Not a big deal, just wondering what kind of cool services I can build on top for my clients. Thanks for the reply, btw.
Any releasable tech spechs for California DOT's backend web interface? I would be curious to see them. How are you thinking of tying in weather? Just curious...
Here are a few weblogs that think about this in the broader sense:
digitalearth.org
headmap
urbansimulation
Per unit profit margin = (sale price - cost to produce) / sale price. That is, the percentage of your per unit sales price that are profits. Note that you cannot have a profit margin greater than 100% unless your product costs you negative dollars to produce.
.85.
The correct calculation is: ($300-$45)/($300) =
With these math skills, you might want to rethink your rather confrontational sig.
If you built light rail or PRT, however, you would incur BOTH costs, not just one or another. And it would probably not be true that you would be universally better off if you had light rail but no car. Don't get me wrong - I am a fan of transit - but I think that saying every urban resident has an extra $9K/year to spend on it is a little optimistic.
I am always surprised by the knee-jerk, emotional response public transit issues evokes, from both sides of the fence, but particuarly the 'anti' side. I didn't know about points (1) and (3) - very interesting. However, the poster has clearly not read my original post very carefully, since I mostly focus on the grim economic reality for innovative public transit.
Although it is true that transportation engineering circles view this with sceptiscism (I hold a masters from the transportation engineering program at Berkeley,), I think that points (2) and (4) are grossly overstated. I think that much of the transportation engineering comminity is (understandably) biased toward 'civil engineering' approaches to problems, which emphasize rules of thumb and history over innovation and modelling. I tend to believe that much of our failure to innovate in public transit can be ascribed to this prevailing attitude. I have seen no convincing academic literature that suggests that these systems are 'failures' from an engineering perspective, but I would be interested if the poster could point to some.
As I stated in my post, however, these technologies are not necessarily economically efficient. There are not good stats availible on track costs for PRT since the systems are so rare (there is the WV system, a defunct system in Hamburg, and a proposed-but-never-built system in Chicago). However, a reasonable rule of thumb is that road lanes cost ~$100K/km and light rail lanes cost ~$10M/km. PRT rails would cost somewhere between $1M/km and $10M/km; clearly, replacing enough roads to make a viable network is a huge investment and - again - subway-like throughput has never been demonstrated. But, this is not = to any sort of 'failure of engineering.'
This is a concept commonly refered to as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), a subset of Automated People Movers (APM) found at many airports. PRT has been around for a while and has somewhat fringe supporters (like me). Edward Anderson at the University of Minnesota has generated some of the most credible system designs and incorporated under Taxi2000. In fact, Raytheon developed a full test track of Anderson's concept outside of Boston; Bostonians can visit thier Marlborough, MA facility and see the future,!
The reason that PRT remains a fringe concept is related to economic challenges, not engineering ones. Although there are claims to the contrary, the general problem is that - like all public transit - PRT require a very high inital capital outlay. In dense urban areas, right-of-way costs are prohibitive. However, just as with information networks, public transit networks generate positive externalities: the larger the system, the more useful it is to everyone.
Furthermore there is little incentive to invest in expensive public works projects have prevented the testing of a fairly unproven technology. Public agencies would much rather invest in light rail systems that they have seen before than fancy driverless systems. Also, there is no conclusive proof that these decentralized systems can sustain the high corrider passenger/hour throughputs that make public transit so desirable for really dense urban areas.
Hopefully, projects like Cardiff will succeed and PRT will get recognition and legitimacy, but this is a technology that has been kicking around for a while and - as you can probably tell - is not insanely complex. As usual, economics and public policy get in the way of interesting engineering!
I am about to start working full time for one: Vision for New York.
And we are looking for volunteer coders. I am sure that there are many reasons for there not being more, including: non-profits do not adapt extremely quickly to new technology trends; there has simply been too much money to fund things privately until very recently; open source is a very new idea in the grand scheme of things; etc.
However, they do exist and I am sure that there will be more. There is not much to VFNY yet, but we are attempting to develop open GIS software systems to facilitate better public planning and use of data about public spaces. There is clearly a need for the non-profit sector in facilitating software that would otherwise never get built because its development and use fits in the category of a 'public good.' We think that open GIS software fits into this category. Feel free to email me: robhranac at yahoo!
Mark, I was wondering if someone would call me on my relatively imprecise langueage. You are - of course - correct that opengis.org is a standards setting organization rather than an organization dedicated to open source. My point is that the corps behind it have been slow in implementing thier own specs and that the open souce community can do an end-around and implement them more fully than the participating organizations. Also, I think that it is a bit short-sighted to believe that opengis.org is some sort of monstrous ms in waiting. In fact, they open up specs for public comment, etc.
Opengis.org is the best organizational reference for open GIS standards. They have an international consortium of business and government agencies behind them. They have been around since 1993 and have developed several standards for developing a true open framework for GIS delivery. In fact, GIS is one of the rare applications that demands a very open approach since having geographic data is only useful as it relates to other geographic data.
Opengis.org has done a good job of specing out systems that are truly interoperable because they achieve GIS nirvana: seperating content from visualization. Reading GIS content from multiple servers and displaying it through a single user interface is the heart of open GIS. Amazingly, no major commercial vendors (ESRI, Bentley) are aggressively pursuing this vision. IMHO, this is an opportunity for the open source community to make a mark on a major emerging industry! If you are interested in working on developing an open source version of the server spec that Opengis has released, please contact me!
Woah, Commander Taco, watch that generation gap.
Hate to be a nerdy economist, but this is not the definition of a luxury good. You have described free software as a luxury good because of how it is produced. Luxury goods are defined in terms of their demand: a luxury good is a good that people demand more of when their incomes rise and which they replace with substitutes when their incomes fall. Under this definition, Free Software might be regarded as either a normal good or inferior good. Don't flame me here, inferior goods are just goods who have demand curves that rise as income falls.
If it is an inferior good (possibly an inappropriate name, in a digital economy), then its consumption will rise as incomes fall. This is a pretty interesting thought, because unlike other goods, its price will not rise. There is some speculation that the Irish potato famine was caused because potatoes were an inferior good and as the Irish incomes fell, they substituted potatoes for meat, causing a spike in potato prices, causing lower real incomes, etc., etc. Of course, this will not happen with a free good.
So, I think that the argument that a recession will cause businesses to substitute away from costly software is a reasonable one. The poster here is missing the point, which has to do with consumption, not production. If, of course, a bad economy destroys some of the production mechanisms behind free software, its quality may diminish, but I am skeptical of this idea. Good free software predates our recent goofy boom.
I must respectfully disagree. Business methods must live and die by execution, not concept. Business methods are not like cutting-edge drugs or hardware; they do not require multi-million dollar upfront investment in research and development in order to succeed. Unlike things like these goods, which require a great deal of basic and applied research, business methods are a dime a dozen. I can come up with 20 right here and now, if you want. I don't have to go to a lab, buy multi-million dollar equipment, and do lots of math to figure out if my results are real. This goes to the heart of a capitalistic system: if you allow people to sit around and patent every flakey idea that they have, you stifle innovation, rather than encourage it.
I would argue that Britian is allowing more individual rights, rather than fewer, by allowing a darwinistic struggle for business survival rather than a patent-fest. In fact, this competition can only make business less complacent and staid!
Don't get me wrong, I think that this is good stuff and I agree with your assessment that this sort of system is safer and better than conventional systems. In fact, the MTDB in San Diego is at least vaguely considering a somewhat similar concept of letting transit riders rent little electric station-cars that they can then use to access transit.
I like this 'RUF' approach because it integrates the function of a station car (feeder) system, with a more conventional rail (mainline) system quite seamlessly. Maybe having transit systems purchase these cars and rent them out is the way to go.
I merely mean to point out that transportation problems (aside from energy source technology) are not fundamentally a technology problem, they are a social and engineering problem. These systems do not exist, not because control systems are so difficult - this tech has been around - but because generating the political will to invest in costly systems upfront is very difficult.
This is a very smart idea, although it is not dissimilar to PRT (personal rapid transit), a sort of fringe and relatively unimplemented technology. As a public sector planner, I see three things to think about with this sort of 'personalized rail' approach:
(1) Capacity - These personal rail car concepts tend to fail when it comes to extremely dense corridors. As you can imagine, heavy rail can push many more people through a single rail corridor than this sort of technology. Right now you can push about 2K cars/lane/hour, compared to densities of nearly 10K for heavy rail systems. With this technology, you could decrease headways and maybe squeeze another few K through, but:
(2) Cost - these rail systems still cost on the order of $5M US/km to build, while each highway lane only costs about $200K to build. So, you are still getting less for your tax money with this stuff. Not that I am totally against this, though. Essen (Germany) has a clever system that does this, except the cars are busses that turn into light rail. I can see these applied intelligently for mid-range suburban corridors where other forms of transit are not applicable, but this brings us to the final issue:
(3) Consumer Adoption - when you are trying to get customers to change modes and you are asking them to make large capital outlays to do so, you are asking for trouble. This is the main issue with automated highways (like those prototyped at Berkeley). You can build the public infrastructure, but without private investment on a large scale, it does not fly.
For these reasons, I think that this might be a great transit technology, but will have a hard climb to become an accepted mode in urban areas. I guess that we will have to wait for the super-magical-mysterious panacea that is IT!
I used to work for a tech company that evaluated these systems. Back in the day Irridium was thought to be a total joke - the idea was (apparently, correctly) that MEO (medium earth orbit) satellites were just too difficult and expensive to use for profitable telecom.
However, all the heat went off Irridium and its 60+ MEO satellites when Gates and McCaw backed Teledesic, which called for something like 200+ LEO satellites to deliver broadband Internet worldwide. Obivously, LEO satellites are even more complex and difficult to manage (handoffs, launches, etc.) that MEO.
I just look up Teledesic, though, and it is still going strong. Clearly still vaporware, but it is interesting that they have not given up in light of Irridium's continuing woes.
While an interesting technical idea, basic economics conlcudes that this is an untenable idea. The best example from economics is an environmental one: the tragedy of the commons in 18th(?) century England. Most are familiar with this example, but for those are not, check here.
Essentially, the same arguments that apply to envoronmental commons apply to shared, freely distributed content. Groups in economic systems tend to optimize thier own personal consumption. This is true despite sincere intentions and ideologies of individuals, at a societal level. No one will voluntarily pay for content as a for-profit enterprise.
Clearly, people are willing to defy economic rationalism for non-profit institutions, but this is a very different proposition. Show me a non-religious or non-profit organization that collects revenues through a volunteer model!
This may be a deeper answer than you are looking for, but I believe that government agencies have fallen far short in terms of a greater vision for sharing public data. In particular, government agencies need to jump on the XML bandwagon and begin to develop consistent data format for common types public information, which they should then provide via the web.
I do technical consulting work on public sector planning issues and there is an enormous amount of public data that should be provided through the web, but is not. For example, geographic data representing public infrastructure (roads, transit, etc.) and public records (property lines, housing) are not provided using any sort of consistent framework. Because this data is kept by many agencies across the country at different levels of government (local, state, federal), there is an enormous amount of duplication and waste within agencies themselves. Indeed, there are 1,000 different GIS formats and projections; even when the data is availible digitally, there is no server from which it can be read. The Census Beareau (which has a horrible website) does the best job of data sharing through its nationally availible TIGER GIS files, but no one has even begun to create a distributed framework for sharing and combining geographic data from multiple servers, using a consistent format.
In short, publishing basic HTML pages uses only a tiny fraction of the web's capabilites to improve governments. Is there is any organization that could benifit more from a good data-sharing framework? There is a DARPA-funded project - GeoVRML - at SRI that addresses some of these issues that sprang out of the fledgling digital earth initiative. Clearly, this will require federal initiative, but if you are a government webmaster, this is the type of vision that you should be promoting within your agency.