Best Magazine Reads: GQ nails why Federer is awesome, but not my favorite tennis player

Over the years, I've come to appreciate Roger Federer's steely perfection, his Switzerland-ness, if you will.

But he's still not my favorite player.

He's awesome to behold, but in reality, you always know you're going to get the exact same forehands, the perfect one-hand backhand, the same serve percentage, and the same extraordinary-human courteous post-match interviews.

John McEnroe might be my favorite athlete, not just tennis player. I've loved watching Gustavo Kuerten and Raphael Nadal.

So GQ's April cover story on Federer summed it up for me:

Friends of mine, hitting partners, are Federer fans for real. They own his racket, his sneakers, the hat with his RF logo. When he loses, they're wrecked; when he wins, it's only slightly less painful, because it's one fewer win they get to witness. Federer fans admire not only the game but the gestalt, what he represents. Integrity. Class. Flawlessness on and off the court. Whereas my problem's always been with that same idea of perfection, the absence of blemishes. As a fan, I need some grit to grab. More for me are Andy Murray's self-defeatism, Stan Wawrinka's sourness, Nadal's nervous mannerisms. Basically, men who are capable of tragic mistakes, who demonstrate, physically and noisily, what it takes to beat back their own worst tendencies—or, just as often, fail in trying. And then there's a side of my vanity—and I'm not proud to say this here—that's occasionally thought that being a Federer fan is just too easy. 

What is Roger Federer? Roger Federer: is Swiss. Very normal, laughs a lot. On some level he's a product of the '90s—he used to have bleached hair, he had posters in his bedroom of Shaq, Michael Jordan, Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker. (Also Pamela Anderson. “I remember that one,” he said, chuckling. “She was on my door.”) He's polite, he's fastidious. He's a family man who loves movies. In private he's goofy, earnest about his interests, and he seriously doesn't mind getting excited when he tells a story. Basically, Roger Federer is kind of a dork, in the very best sense. 

“You don't want to give anything away to your opponent. I used to do that all the time when I was little. Throwing rackets, shouting, all that stuff. You give an edge to your opponent if you do that. Eventually, you develop your demeanor. Rafa has his tics. Stan has his look. I have my look. You become this shield.”

It's a good, quick read beyond that. And that photo of those hairy-man legs is almost downright shocking.

Will growth of shared mobility make people more willing to share their own cars?

This originally appeared at Mobility Lab.

As many as 95 percent of trips in big cities could be shared with no more than a 5-minute inconvenience for riders, according to a recent report co-authored by Carlo Ratti of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab.

Back in 2010, the Albany Times Union did some interesting reporting to delve into why New York State residents seemed incapable adopting a sharing mindset when it comes to driving. (Granted, 2010 was before the Uber craze, but even that kind of ride-hailing more often has a taxi feel than a carpooling one.) The paper’s own surveying found very few people carpooling and this articlegives a range of the unlimited excuses people can make for their lack of enthusiasm about sharing.

In conversations about mobility these days, sharing is understood as a necessary part of the solution for fixing overwhelming demand on transportation systems. Even (and especially) car companies are beginning to lean heavily on shared rides or shared vehicles as an important component in their future share of the transportation market.

While one kind of shared mobility question may still remain – will people eventually grow accustomed to sharing their private vehicles? – sharing a common, company-owned vehicle does seem to have a growing place.

Walter Rosenkrantz, ‎senior business-development manager at car2go, itself owned by German automaker Daimler, spoke at the Association for Commuter Transportation’s Public Policy Summitlast week in Washington, D.C. (which Mobility Lab co-sponsored).

“Carsharing has exploded. It’s kind of here to stay. The more there is out there, the more personal vehicles are going to be shared. Pretty soon it’s not going to make sense to have a car. It’s just going to be easier to get around without a car, so why have one?”

The numbers indeed look impressive. Car2go’s membership surpassed 2 million in 2016. But looking more closely, those are global numbers, and people in the U.S. haven’t always behaved like those in other countries, especially when it comes to transportation. In fact, carsharing revenue in North America is expected to drop – given faster growth in international markets – to just 23 percent of the global total by 2024. And numbers for projected U.S. growth in carsharing can be difficult to come by.

Further, think anecdotally. When I have conversations with residents of the D.C. region and mention the concept of sharing – even in a place as traffic-clogged as the nation’s capital, where there are tons of alternatives to driving alone – I get blank stares. They may as well be saying to me, “I spent $30,000 for my nice car, why would I let someone else tag along on my commute?”

Surprisingly, it appears we have little understanding regarding the fundamental question of whether or not people are even willing to share their own vehicles in the first place.

And if people are willing to share, is that number going up or down? Does “shared mobility” include being in a small, non-transit vehicle with strangers? The pieces of the sharing economy and shared mobility that are working fabulously – AirBnB for home rentals, bikesharing – are not shared at the same time but rather used continuously.

“I’m not sure people think about their transportation [as shared resources]” said the Shared-Use Mobility Center’s Sharon Feigon, who also presented at ACT’s conference. “People join carsharing programs when their car is broken down, they have a major break up [in a relationship], or have just moved to a new city. They try it as temporary thing and it ends up working for them.”

She’s right: it often takes a major life change to get people to think about not just sharing, but the overall way that they move around.  A brief survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that, in 2015, only 44 percent of U.S. adults were familiar with the sharing economy. More specifically:

According to our data, 8 percent of all adults have participated in some form of automotive sharing. 1 percent have served as providers under this new model, chauffeuring passengers around or loaning out their car by the hour, day or week. Of all the categories we examined, this is the one in which consumers would most like to see the sharing economy succeed.

Today, many people simply don’t share their vehicles, for any number of reasons, despite the emergence of some rental-like services like GetAround. But there is hope, because even though nobody wants to share their cars, they all want other people to share their cars.

“Unless you raise parking prices or make it prohibitively difficult to drive, you can’t change the balance,” Feigon added. “[The Shared-Use Mobility Center is] not fixated on whether people do or don’t like to share. There is something healthy about it, given the rise of [sprawl- and auto-driven] loneliness, and land use that promotes pedestrian activity is inherently social and also involves physical activity. Setting up the conditions for that is really good.

“In my own experiences, taking the train, I catch up with people I know. And you don’t have to deal with anybody if you don’t want to. [Taking transit or sharing] can make you more accepting of different kinds of people,” she said.

Other than focusing on people who are making major life changes, one demographic Feigon suggested could be ripe for more sharing is women with school-age children, who drive the most of any category of people and make lots of short trips that conflict with the poor ways we’ve designed our communities.

“That was not the biggest category of drivers 50 years ago,” she laughed.

We often hear how technology alone won’t change behavior; rather, it takes true willingness of people. But with getting people to share, technology may currently be a helpful motivator.

Along with that hope, it’s a safe bet that more research about the willingness of people to share and, specifically, what could make them share seats in their own cars, is equally critical.

Photo, top: car2go cars parked outside of a light rail station in Austin, Texas (Lars Plougmann, Flickr, Creative Commons).

SXSW audio: How to Uber-ize public transit to save it

This originally appeared at Mobility Lab.

Our panel at SXSW in Austin last month, How to Uber-ize public transit to save it, agreed that there is a lot that public transit can learn from Uber in terms of selling the public on its worth. At the same time, we also agreed that Uber absolutely can’t replace transit.

The PowerPoint slideshow that ran in the background throughout the session

I moderated and asked the panelists (Doug Kaufman of Transloc, Mike Russel of Texas Christian University, and Marlene Connor of Marlene Connor Associates) a series of questions, including:

• In what ways should and shouldn’t public transit become like Uber?
• Is transit nearly perfect in any place in the world, so much so that services like Uber and Lyft aren’t even necessary? Where are the candidates in the U.S. for making an “ultimate connected city?
• What things do you think could get people in the U.S. to change our 100-year-old habit of always defaulting to driving alone?
• What needs to happen with data sharing for public transit, private service providers, and even roads to all truly work together and make our transportation system benefit from where we are technologically?
• What do you think autonomous vehicles will do to transit?
• We don’t know much about what President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao will do, but it seems safe to say they will want private services to complement transit as much as possible. Is this smart and how can it happen?
• Thinking of technology and AVs, if car companies and tech companies become the big breadwinners, in what ways can that trickle back down and provide jobs and income equality?
• If the public sector’s role in mobility were reduced (it has been doing some great things like USDOT’s Smart City Challenge and FTA’s Mobility On Demand Sandbox grants), what do you think would happen to the transportation opportunities of unbanked people and people in rural areas?
• What do you predict we’ll be discussing 5 years from now if this panel reunites?

We finished by fielding about a dozen audience questions from the 200 or so people in attendance.

Listen to the session above or here (except the introduction, which appears to have been edited out by SXSW)

On-demand “flying Ubers” could ease East Coast traffic

This article originally appeared at Mobility Lab.

What would happen to congested urban traffic if some trips could simply be picked up and moved into the air?

That’s a question players from Uber to Airbus to NASA are seriously studying. But to Bruce Gunter, who often has to take unnecessarily long car trips from his home in Virginia Beach to Richmond to visit family, some of the pieces of this “on-demand urban air transportation” puzzle are missing.

“I’m frustrated because most of the research is being done in California and there’s nothing in Virginia along the Interstate 95 corridor. It’s almost comical because almost all the work is being done by NASA [from its offices in] Langley, Va.,” Gunter laughed.

Gunter has more than a passing interest in what can no doubt be simply referred to as flying cars. He is managing director of Veetle, a company that is producing these VTOLs (vertical take-off and landing vehicles). But he also has deep knowledge of lengthy Federal Aviation Administration processes, especially from his days working at Cirrus, which has gotten extensive news coverage about its parachute-deploying small planes.

“We’re a very small company, with big ideas.” Gunter said Veetle is operating on about $1 million in its first year but that once it starts marketing and gathering investments, it could be a $200 million to $300 million effort. “Unless you’re a legacy company like Boeing or Airbus, this is all about putting tons of companies together to put the planes together.”

On-demand air travel in Virginia

Uber, in a report it released last year, predicted:

Daily long-distance commutes in heavily congested urban and suburban areas and routes under-served by existing infrastructure will be the first use cases for urban VTOLs. VTOLs will have greatest appeal for those traveling longer distances and durations [and] a small number of vertiports could absorb a large share of demand from long-distance commuters since the “last mile” ground transportation component will be small relative to the much longer commute distance.

Along Virginia’s stretch of I-95 or in other congested nearby cities like Richmond, Virginia Beach, and Washington, D.C., flying cars could certainly be an option worth exploring.

“This could broaden the scope of how people get around, even more than what Uber has shown us already with cars,” Gunter said, adding that passengers would reserve a plane just like an Uber, but would instead, unlike an Uber, head to a designated rooftop to jump in.

He added that it’s great Uber is one of the few players in the market, but that the ride-hailing company can’t do much until it has an actual product like the kind Veetle is developing. “Logistically, we could be the aerial Uber, for lack of a better term.”

Keys to making flying Ubers a reality

Some of the bigger keys, besides simply getting the public to change long-ingrained travel habits and developing policy guidelines, include making trips inexpensive, reliable, and shared in the sense so they would be more like transit than personal vehicles.

Uber further predicts:

In the long-term, VTOLs will be an affordable form of daily transportation for the masses, even less expensive than owning a car. Normally, people think of flying as an expensive and infrequent form of travel, but that is largely due to the low production volume manufacturing of today’s aircraft. The economics of manufacturing VTOLs will become more akin to automobiles than aircraft. Initially, of course, VTOL vehicles are likely to be very expensive, but because the ridesharing model amortizes the vehicle cost efficiently over paid trips, the high cost should not end up being prohibitive to getting started.

Another matter is whether the vehicles would create noise and air pollution. Gunter said the battery technology is still at least a decade away to make them powered fully by electric propulsion. Until then, they would need to be “some kind of hybrid” of gas and electric. But he added that the noise would be minimal because they would operate somewhat like drones, which the public already largely understands as being relatively quiet.

Also, would we simply be displacing traffic jams on the roads for ones in the sky?

“I’ve got 6,500 hours of flying and, in my experience, it’s rare if you ever see another airplane. If you do, it’s near the big airports by places like New York and Atlanta,” Gunter said, adding that VTOL traffic is mainly a matter of being managed effectively.

As science-fiction-y as it seems, we may indeed be hearing more about on-demand urban air transportation soon. Uber is sponsoring an invitation-only conference April 25-27 in Dallas.

Photo by Uber.

Who's the best TV news comedian now that Jon Stewart's gone?

Is it any coincidence that soon after The Daily Show with Jon Stewart went off the air, "fake news" becomes a buzzword?

I really miss his best-ever regular takes on politics and the media. To me, his former correspondent Samantha Bee is the best of what remains in his aftermath. But she's only on TV once a week.

Of course, now President Donald Trump sets the news every day with his early-morning tweets. With his endlessly fascinating and constantly out-of-left-field opinions, one could argue there's an amazing new comedian taking Stewart's place. But really, the next-best thing to Stewart is this new book, The Daily Show (The Book).

I have only just begun reading it, but here are four interesting nuggets to whet your whistle:

1. Bob Mould's composition "Dog on Fire" was the theme song, and it was performed by They Might Be Giants. I always wondered what that song was, and I love the former Husker Du frontman, so I love Stewart just a little bit more now knowing that fact.
2. His first guest, on January 11, 1999, was Michael J. Fox, who was then starring in Spin City.
3. One of the reasons Stewart was so much better than his predecessor Craig Kilborn at taking on the news was that one of his writer hires was Ben Karlin of The Onion.
4. Stephen Colbert filed reports for Good Morning America before he started working for Stewart. Well, actually, he got one report on the air after about 20 ideas he pitched that didn't make GMA's cut. Oh, those silly networks.
5. A year before Stewart began his majestic run, he has a cameo in Dave Chappelle's Half Baked as an overzealous stoner who thinks everything is so much better on pot, including staring at the stars. (I just happened to watch this recently for the first time, and give it a very fun-loving 3.5 out of 5 stars.)

Best Magazine Reads: How I can relate to one man's vision for the perfect ski resort

All new employees at my workplace take an Emergenetics test so that all team members can be on the same page by playing off each other's talents. In my profile, I have a ton of red and yellow, which means I'm heavy on sociable and creative traits and less advanced on analytic and structural ones.

Maybe that's why I thought that an article in the April issue of Men's Journal, King of the Hill: How Vail Resorts Conquered the Ski Industry, is so intriguing. Rob Katz has built Aspen Resorts into a ski-resort behemoth, buying up resorts throughout North America and watching the company's stock become a darling of Wall Street.

Katz gives all new employees a similar personality test, and his personal traits are a lot like mine: red for "drive," while not being so strong at the analytical. That has smartly led him to focus on building incredible reams of data about his customers so he can channel that drive and emotion into the correct directions, directions he may not instinctively understand without that data.

Men's Journal notes that "the data is Vail's secret weapon, and not just because it helps people avoid lift lines." The company has an Epic Pass that allows Vail to know which runs skiers are taking, with whom, and can then market to them accordingly with, for example, pictures of aggressive skiers or moms and kids on the slope.

Despite the very uncertain future of the sport, even melting snows and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns are not keeping Katz and Vail from doing everything as right and enjoyable, from a business standpoint, as they possibly can. Even if it's a potentially short-term future.

That's the kind of venture I've always liked being a part of - having passionate leadership to do one small industry or corner of the world as absolutely as well as possible. It's a pretty inspiring magazine read.