AI will inevitably help us become more human than we used to be

Writer Kevin Kelly concludes that “the computer age didn’t really start until computers merged with the telephone” in the early 1980s. The Internet has of course grown since then to be central to the way our society operates and it will continue to grow. That is the baseline that begins his 2016 book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. A pretty intriguing title, and I wanted in on the secrets.

Things we can’t stop include massive copying, massive tracking and total surveillance, decentralized ownership, virtual reality that is actually real, and improved artificial intelligence and robots that will both take our jobs and create new businesses. Kelly writes that we need to embrace these changes. We don’t want to fight any one invention because the scientific process has made it so that we’ll take “solid things - an automobile, a shoe - and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service … rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear.”

Kelly has organized his book into 12 categories that are verbs like "accessing, tracking, and sharing" and posits that we look at technology this way instead of "iPhone, Uber, or shoe." Which products or companies will succeed or fail is unpredictable because those are determined by fads, fashion, and commerce. 

“Becoming” is the first area of focus. In the 1980s and 90s, young boys in chatrooms and Wall Street traders used the internet but leaders at ABC TV, WIRED, and many others scoffed at the thought of the internet going big. Many thought there would be 500 or so channels on TV that would be where the content would be created. “Instead, billions of users created the content for all the other users. There were 500 million channels.” The internet stuff the execs couldn’t imagine was that passive consumers would become active creators. We still fail to truly grasp how awesome the web has become, with its 60 trillion web pages (about 10,000 for every person alive). 

The corporations eventually realized the online world could be their distribution network, but they did not foresee that they wouldn’t be the ones making the content. YouTube, blogs, and social media were not created by big-media’s staff but by their users. We no longer even typically get customer service anymore from corporations because we can ask the global community congregating at places like Reddit subgroups. 

By now, the internet feels completely bloated, with “more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years.” But Kelly claims, in reality, “nothing has happened yet! The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning.” For instance, by 2050, just about everything with have a little AI added to it. “The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things.” We are just now “becoming” and the coolest inventions are yet to happen. 

“Cognifying” is the second inevitable and it’s all about AI. Granted, this book was released seven years ago so quite a bit has already happened, but perhaps not as much has happened as one would think. “At the rate AI is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.” AI will not look like HAL 9000 - “a discreet machine animated by a humanlike consciousness” - but rather like Amazon Web Services, “a cheap, reliable industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything and almost invisible except when it blinks off.” 

One example of being cognitive is photography. Years ago, it would have taken $100,000 and hefty bags of equipment to do everything cameras and iPhones do today to make photos treated, modified, and beautiful. Other examples could include music created in real-time as needed for soundtracks or video games, smart clothes that tell laundry machines how to wash them, advertising optimized for how many people follow and watch and what their level of influence is, matching buyers and sellers of real estate, real-time adjustments of medical care and treatments, dolls that will probably be the first really popular robots, and stats on every breath and movement of athletes to create highly advanced fantasy sports.

Google has been working on AI for decades and has always seen its search engine as a way to refine its AI rather than AI as a way to improve its search engine. Google has indeed been buying up lots of AI companies and, by its own predictions, AI should be its main product by 2026. This would be pure hyperbole, except three recent breakthroughs have made the ancient promise of AI possible: “parallel computation” has become so cheap that companies are able to use it in ways that Facebook can identify friends easily in photos and Netflix can make reliable recommendations, it’s taken a long time to get enough big data fed into the system for computers to get this smart, and the growing amount of users is helping to make it all even smarter. 

By 2100, Kelly predicts that 70 percent of the jobs people do will be replaced by automation. Assembly-line and factory workers will be the first to go. Pharmacists will be replaced by pill-dispensing machines. Office and school cleaners, truckers, and information-intensive white-collar jobs are in the AI path. But these aren’t things to worry about. No Victorian boy ever dreamed of one day becoming a professional video-game developer. Those who once farmed began working in factories and then later moved to other jobs. 

“Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.” AI’s greatest benefit is that it “will help us define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.” It’s not a race against the machines. It’s a race with the machines. “Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters” and helps us become “more human than we were.”

PopCultureLunchBox.com is now PopCultureLunchBox.org!

Now I’m really a non-profit, independent organization. The .org proves it!

Actually, this site has always been non-profit, literally. But some of you may have recently noticed a “not secure” notice next to the URL. I’m not sure anyone actually ever needed to be worried, but I fixed that today by changing to a different domain.

Now back to our regularly scheduled information …

Tech is Good, But We Need Transportation Planning for the City of the Future

This article by Howard Jennings and myself was originally published by Expert Sure, CleanTechnica and Mobility Lab.

What does transportation in the U.S. city of the future look like?

Mobility Lab gets asked this a lot because it’s clear that people have had it with the crushing traffic that dominates most of our cities, and 3 out of 4 people are frustrated by their lack of transportation options.

As Forbes recently pointed out, the average traffic delay – time spent in stop-and-go traffic – per commuter is 42 hours each year, up from 18 hours annually in 1982. We’re losing patience, getting less healthy, being unproductive, wasting money, and polluting the air. And from the flip-side perspective, a new report has found that reducing the time employees spend in cars is one of best things a business can do for itself, for a whole host of reasons.

So people and businesses are slowly getting around to realizing they need to change their transportation habits, and this mindset is starting to have a huge impact on the way people everywhere – but especially in dense cities – take their daily trips.

IT STARTS WITH TECH

It’s safe to say technology has been the top enabler of this trend. And all the talk about the on-demand economy and electric and autonomous vehicles is actually a lot more interesting and sophisticated (and realistic) than the many years we all spent infatuated with flying Jetsons cars as our vision of a transportation future.

Traffic smartphone apps such as Waze suggest the most efficient route from point A to point B, adjusting along the way based on real-time speed and traffic information from other “crowdsourcing” users.

Dozens of transit agencies have apps that offer real-time travel information. And after a media investigation discovered that nearly 10 percent of buses are late to Boston’s public schools, a new app called Where’s My School Bus? was designed so parents could know if their kids were missing class.

And when package-delivery drones like those proposed by Amazon get off the ground, they hold the potential to decrease the number of truck trips on city and suburban streets.

Austin is creating an app that connects cyclists to traffic signals, which the Texas city hopes will encourage more bicycling by making lights turn green faster as bicycles approach them.

Zurich, Switzerland has long had success alleviating traffic in this realm. If too many cars are coming into the city, sophisticated traffic signals are timed to vastly discourage people from driving in. With commuter rail strategically running alongside these roads, people can bail out of their cars and jump onto transit. It’s highly rational, it works, and the city is way more enjoyable because of it. More and more places – like New York, London, Paris, Copenhagen, and Buenos Aires – are utilizing car-free zones.

uberPool and Lyft Line have a huge opportunity to play a role in reducing the total number of miles driven on U.S. roads. While these new offerings are similar to traditional carpooling, which has been around since the need to ration rubber in World War II, the ability to hail a ride with more certainty from a smartphone is proving popular.

Public transportation really needs to catch up. Once trains, light rail, streetcars, and buses become interconnected services on our smartphones, we’ll see an uptick in ridership. One of the major drawbacks to transit is that it is perceived as unreliable. But if we can check real-time arrivals, pay, ride, and transfer to all the other transit possibilities from the comfort of our smartphones – or “smart wallets,” as San Francisco transit innovator Tim Papandreou calls it – the need to own a personal vehicle will decrease.

Singapore has an “ez-Link” card that travelers can use to pay for buses, trains and taxis, while London’s Oyster card does some of the same things.

RideScout recently announced its plan to launch something called RideTap, which will be a pilot in Portland to demonstrate on-demand rides to complement the existing transit infrastructure. In other words, TriMet users will be able to book a Bcycle or Lyft on their smartphones to connect them from the end of their train ride to their destination.

THE PLANNERS ARE A’CHANGIN’

Speaking of bikeshare, that is one of the major innovations helping planners see that cities are changing before their very eyes. Since 2009, when there were virtually no bikeshare systems in North America, more than 50 cities and towns – speaking conservatively, since there are also so many systems on college campuses – have added them to their transportation networks, most recently Birmingham, Ala. Even planners in smaller jurisdictions are finding flexible bikeshare options that best work for their size and resources.

One of the many presenters for Mobility Lab's Transportation Techies in the Washington D.C. region

Planners regularly attend Mobility Lab’s monthly Transportation Techies events (highlighted here in this Washington Post feature) and help advocate for governments to open their transit data to make systems more usable for more people. And events like our TransportationCamp – which is now happening in various cities around the country and world – and grass-roots planning by groups like ioby and Cards Against Urbanity are opening old-school planners’ eyes to the creative thinking about what people want from their cities of the future. (Like welcoming and enjoyable bus stops, for instance.)

Mayors in cities all over the country are listening and beginning to be less afraid of saying “yes” to pilot projects that can often become bigger when constituents see success and private partners assist with funding.

DRIVERLESS CART BEFORE THE HORSE?

Then there are driverless cars – the supposed answer to all our transportation troubles. Transportation-demand expert Todd Litman projects that these won’t fully impact traffic congestion, automobile accidents, and car ownership until 2060.

But we think that is wildly conservative. Large numbers of people will be using these vehicles over the next decade, and we hope to see good data soon thereafter on whether driverless cars are taking trips off the road and reducing vehicle miles travelled.

Equally important is that so much of the focus on automated cars has been on the tech, while not enough attention is being paid to what the impacts will be on people and our built environment. If these vehicles remove the stress of the commute, then that’s likely to induce a lot more people to ride in them, in turn taking them out of transit modes like buses, subways, and bikeshares. The trend might actually create a net increase in vehicles.

The cars will be able to cluster closer together in platoons on roadways and urban streets. The likelihood is that we will have much greater density of cars in urban environments, which could potentially diminish the quality of the environment that so many of us are striving for with transit-oriented development, complete streets, walkable activity centers, and livability and sustainability initiatives. This area needs to be studied, and good policies need to be put in place before the driverless cars hit the road en masse.

A good thing about our newfound sharing-economy mindset is that it sets the stage for fleets of autonomous vehicles to succeed, since many people are no longer automatically thinking they have to have their own driverless cars. Potentially there might actually be fewer cars on the roads.

INNOVATION WILL DRIVE SLOWER-MOVING POLICY

We know these are the innovations that will shape our transportation in the city of the future. The question is how it will happen.

If the right people aren’t at the table – like idea man Gabe Klein, for example – cities could end up looking like Cairo, Egypt, where people drive bumper-to-bumper, making the streets look like seething, inhospitable rivers of metal. That’s a worse-case scenario, but if we have the ability for cars to travel two feet apart, it’s also pretty realistic.

How we plan affects how quickly we get market absorption. For the most part, we don’t have the space to build new roads and highways in cities. And as the abyssmal level of federal transportation spending has gone on for many years now, and our infrastructure crumbles, we don’t have the money to build new roads.

So creative spending on relatively inexpensive throughways like bicycle infrastructure and walkable communities makes a lot of sense. And the intangible benefits of refocusing on modes other than drive-alone cars make spending in those directions even wiser.

Photos courtesy of Warren Antiola and  M.V. Jantzen.

Want to Start Carpooling? Pick Up Your Phone and Get Going

Originally published by Mobility Lab.

OPTION OPPORTUNITY

Many policies and programs could do better at incentivizing the safe and tech-friendly practice of carpooling.

Nearly half of all car trips in the U.S. can technically be defined as carpooling. But that’s because we often travel together with our friends and family.

Besides those joy rides, sharing a car has had a troubling recent history – mainly when it comes to the ways we get to and from work. Carpooling for work has dropped from a high of 20 percent of all commuters in 1970 to only about 10 percent as of 2013.

We simply prefer to drive alone – whether it’s because we think we need a lot of personal space or because we’ve simply fallen into a habit.

How do I get started carpooling with my phone?

Surprisingly, the only really true, widespread carpooling app out there is Carma. Nobody else has been able to make it work. After Sean O’Sullivan, the founder, succeeded in Cork, Ireland, he was determined to make Carma work in other places. It’s currently available in the U.S. in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, Houston, Chicago, New York, Seattle, and Chicago.

Carma appeals to commuters for a number of reasons. It’s almost like playing a game – a game of commuting. Organized entirely through the app, drivers earn 17 cents a mile and passengers pay 20 cents a mile (the IRS reimbursement limit). Drivers are incentivized to pick up more passengers because they gain access to HOV3 fast lanes. When going through tolls, drivers in some places will get a message that they have been charged then soon thereafter get a message that they have been rebated the full amount. This makes it feel like they’re beating the system more, and that’s a real thrill for people, according to Paul Steinberg, Carma’s chief business officer.

Why app-based carpooling?

There are definitely traditional carpooling options available in cities across the country. But most of those programs require a lot of the offline work – like exploring spreadsheets, filling out paperwork, and making regular phone calls to fellow carpoolers – that is a big contributor to why carpooling has become so rare.

Tech-enabled carpooling is no doubt the next frontier. There is Carma, but there are also many others at various stages of development and, most importantly, at various stages of building sustainable user bases. Some of the ones that pop up in app store searches include Split, Duet Commute, Via, sRide, Scoop, and Carpool-Kids.

Also, cities sometimes have good one-stop web resources for various ridesharing options. One example is Arlington, Va.’s ride-sharing page for the entire Washington, D.C., region.

Why has Carma been one of the best resources so far?

One reason Carma is succeeding is that it gets that a company or start-up can’t just put an app up and get people to use it. Carma has worked extensively with local governments and employers to make sure they can get enough drivers and passengers and reach the same kinds of critical mass that Uber and Lyft have been able to pull off.

Another general advantage is that we’re getting closer to not having such “dumb wallets.” Carma and other transportation apps are starting to get more integrated. It won’t be too long before we’ll have all our transportation needs in one app so we can find routes, all the options, real-time ride information, and pay for it all in one spot on our phones.

If an app can take all the payment and communication hassles out of sharing a ride, then the elimination of often awkward processes will be attractive to people willing to try carpooling.

What still needs to happen to really make carpooling big time?

Carpooling apps currently have three major disadvantages:

• There is not enough promotion, education, and awareness that they exist.
• More local governments and companies need to be using them.
• Parking is still incentivized way too disproportionally in America. Parking should be something we pay for, like other goods and services in a market economy. That would be the American way. One way to fix this would be to have fewer incentives for “monthly parking prices,” according to Howard Jennings, managing director of Mobility Lab. If we made the incentives for “daily parking prices,” people wouldn’t feel so pressured to have to drive every day to get their money’s worth and they could break it up and take their bike one day, the subway the next, and maybe drive fewer days each week. That daily parking could then easily be paid through an all-in-one app.

What is the latest research on technology enabling carpooling?

There’s not a lot. But the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute notes that:

• Improving awareness, trust and willingness to ride with strangers, and flexibility in scheduling may increase carpool use.
• Incentives such as free or decreased toll rates and reduced parking prices for carpool or rideshare vehicles may also increase use.
• High occupancy vehicle lanes (HOVs) may increase carpooling and ridesharing in some circumstances; local context strongly influences the success or failure of HOVs as well as other carpool or rideshare programs.

Still, there is little to no research exactly about modern carpooling app trends. If people are becoming more accustomed to riding with non-taxi-driver strangers via Uber or Lyft, this could mean good things for carpooling programs. A National Academies study lays out that with a better and more predictable system in place, with better awareness and advertising, many drivers would be willing to try it.

And the rest of the world is already ahead of the slow curve we’re on. BlaBlaCar is available in Europe, Russia, and Mexico and lets anyone ride with anyone. It is glorified hitchhiking – with the kicker that drivers and riders have in-app reputation rankings attached. Israel-based La’Zooz is launching in the U.S. soon, with designs on becoming “the utopian hippie Uber.” And Google, on its path to driverless vehicles, is working on ride-sharing tech.

What are the latest predictions about the potential for carpooling?

Given its well-documented decline as a commuting preference over the past three decades, carpooling has a lot of potential to attract new drivers and riders, especially across suburban households not well served by transit.

It’s not entirely clear what factors are discouraging commuters from carpooling, but lower barriers to entry through app-based services would certainly help introduce new people to the mode. Additionally, as mentioned above, carpool-like ride-hailing services from familiar brands such as Lyft and Uber provide a natural jumping-on point for many people who already have those apps on their phones.

What’s behind this potential?

People are looking for ways to take the hassles of a personal vehicle that sits around and gathers monthly bills and parking and speeding tickets out of the equation. That bodes very well for the carpooling and ride-sharing industry.

One potential fix for carpooling might be the creation of a major publicity campaign. And now is the time because young people are begging for transportation options that allow them to be productive, healthy, environmentally conscious, and less stressed.

Are carpools safe?

Millennials especially have much different assumptions about safety than older generations. It all depends on trust. We trust the Ubers and Lyfts of the world because they have tech-enabled data and GPS tracking on everything: where and who the drivers are, who we are, and all the payment information. As passengers, we feel that if something happens to us, at least it’s all right there in the database and anything bad can be tracked.

And one must remember that we truly are living in a very different world nowadays. The city council in Austin, Texas just passed an ordinance that tries to regulate Uber and Lyft drivers the same as traditional taxi drivers. That would mean fingerprinting all drivers before they can work. The Austin council seems to be missing the point that app-based GPS tracking is the new fingerprinting. Meanwhile, those companies are now threatening to cease operation in the city.

As for traditional carpooling, Uber and Lyft should be given credit for starting to introduce their respective carpooling variants uberPool and Lyft Line in some cities. Those services have a real chance to take trips off the road and ease traffic for all of us. Both Uber and Lyft say that 50 percent of their trips in San Francisco are now made with their carpooling services, which should start to produce some interesting data on traffic levels.

It would be great to say that the regular Uber and Lyft services take trips off the road as well, but because there is still always a driver making trips even without customers at times, much more research needs to be done to figure out that impact.

Cities – including Austin – should be focused on making these types of carpooling services work better and improve congestion rather than making it more difficult for them to operate in the first place.

A “slug-line” of riders waiting to be picked up.

Are there backup options if I commit to carpooling?

Other than any available transit options, or simply loading a few different carpool apps onto your smart phone, slugging, also known as casual carpooling or instant carpooling, is a neat option that not a lot of people seem to know about or understand. Average people get on the side of the road in designated locations and share rides. Right now, it only happens in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Houston, Pittsburgh, and a few other cities, but has great potential to expand with the help of technology.

Slugging in most of these places began after the oil embargo in the 1970s led to higher gas prices and HOV lanes, and it just stuck. People who “slug” swear by it. It works in these cities because there are HOV3 lanes that serve as an incentive. Usually, drivers will only take a maximum of two passengers.

And while slugging may, at first, seem scary, it’s really just out of the ordinary to us. In fact, according to Carma’s Steinberg, there have been zero crimes in the decades-long history of San Francisco slugging, other than one robbery of someone waiting for the ride.

What to expect in the future?

“The challenge is not the technology. The challenge is human behavior, and people don’t want to share a ride,” Steinberg said. “When drivers are driving their own car, they control the whole situation. Once you move to an autonomous vehicle and you take that control away and put it in the vehicle’s hands, you will start filling up cars immediately1.”

Steinberg said that 85 percent of the cars on the highway today have one person in them. That takes up an extraordinary amount of space, which is obviously a huge problem and why we need carpooling to work.

Steinberg noted that another challenge is that practically “1 percent of the population” has access to transit options. “The rest of America is still living in old times, where we live in suburbia and the car is the only option most of the time.”

He said a multitude of things can be done to change the way people in the U.S. think about carpooling and driving in general, including:

• The federal government should stop managing DOTs on time or vehicle throughput and measure more for occupancy.
• Extend or modify pre-tax incentives (which recently took a step in the right direction) for other ways to commute to work besides driving alone.
• The addition of HOV3 lanes by state and local leaders creates an organic environment for carpools to grow.
• The addition of tolling on some roads has proven to increase carpooling. Carma has partnered with DOTs and tolling authorities in San Francisco and central Texas to build financial incentives for carpoolers into the tolling process.
• For much more about carpooling, see Mobility Lab’s Carpool Archive, which includes:
• Commuters Use Online Carpooling to Comply With Post-Sandy Road Rules
• New App Connects Coworkers to Ride Together
• Uber, Lyft Get a Carpool Competitor in D.C.

Paul Steinberg video courtesy of Chilton Media Group for Mobility Lab.

I Was Interviewed on NPR About Transportation Technology

You can hear my interview this week with WAMU 88.5 FM, the NPR station in Washington D.C. And read the accompanying article below.

New Commuter App Takes Holistic View: Money, Time, Health, Environment

By: Martin Di Caro
April 30, 2015

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A screenshot of the Web version of the CarFreeAtoZ app.

Commuters’ options are multiplying. For those who can leave their cars at home, there’s Metrorail, the bus, taxicabs, or Capital Bikeshare. Or they can use their smartphones to order rides with Uber, Lyft, or Sidecar. A new on-demand bus system called Bridj is launching in D.C. There’s also ZipCar and Car2Go. And some apps, like RideScout, help you pick the best choice depending on where you are at the moment.

These options help commuters figure out the fastest way to get from A to B. But a new app is trying to get traffic-weary travelers to think more holistically about their trips.

It’s called CarFreeAtoZ.com, the creation of Arlington County Commuter Services, Mobility Lab, and the transit-tech firm Conveyal. The idea behind the website is that saving time and money are only two pieces of a successful commute. What about the effect on your health? On the environment?

“Say you want to think about what would be the best thing to do on Monday through Friday every day for your commute. You can sit down on Sunday and look at CarFreeAtoZ and put in your home address and your work address and it will tell you a list of options,” said Mobility Lab’s Paul Mackie.

“The best options won’t necessarily be the fastest ones. It will be the one that also factors how it will affect your health, how it will affect the environment, how much time will you save and how much money will you save,” Mackie said.

Expected to be available on smartphones by the fall, the program can be used in a Web browser now.

The first question you are asked at CarFreeAtoZ.com is how do you usually get around? The options are I drive alone; I carpool; I bike; I take public transit; I walk.

After making your choice a map of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region appears. You then enter a starting point and your destination. Then click "Find my best option."

Each transit, biking, or driving option will list how much money you might save, weight you can lose from exercise, the percentage of CO2 emissions that can be reduced, and hours of productive time gained – all compared to making the same trip driving alone.

The website also helps commuters locate Bikeshare stations near Metro to finish the last legs of their trips on a bike.

“There are a lot of apps out there that show you how many bikes are at a station in the Bikeshare system. But with this you can take Bikeshare to bus or Bikeshare to train,” Mackie said.

Are Fearful, Lurking Parents a Reason for Uninspired Transportation Choice?

This article was originally published at MobilityLab.org.

I’ve been enjoying danah boyd’s book titled It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.

She is a researcher from Microsoft, New York University and Harvard who toured the country for the past several years interviewing teens about why they seem so addicted to social media and whether they are destroying their brains and their lives in the process.

Her findings are basically that the kids are alright and it’s probably the parents who are crazy.

What does this have to do with alleviating traffic congestion by promoting better transportation options? Well, while the parents are aggrieved over their kids’ technological addictions, they are often pushing their children towards having virtual relationships due to their clamp down on the mobility freedoms most of us probably enjoyed in our own youth.

From boyd’s book, on page 90:

From wealthy suburbs to small towns, teenagers reported that parental fear, lack of transportation options, and heavily structured lives restricted their ability to meet and hang out with their friends face to face. Even in urban environments, where public transportation presumably affords more freedom, teens talked about how their parents often forbade them from riding subways and buses out of fear. At home, teens grappled with lurking parents. The formal activities teens described were often so highly structured that they allowed little room for casual sociality. And even when parents gave teens some freedom, they found that their friends’ mobility was stifled by their parents.

Parental fear of letting kids have freedom to move around seems pretty irrational. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime against youth declined 77 percent from 1994 to 2010. In 1994 and before, we were all undoubtedly biking around town with our friends and swimming unsupervised at fishing holes that would unquestionably be off-limits today.

Teens have apparently been brainwashed. They do a lot of self-policing of their mobility as well, according to boyd:

Teens regularly echoed parental fears, also arguing that today’s world is much more unsafe than it previously was.

It doesn’t help that public spaces – almost as if they are actual people – can practically be seen frowning upon kids when they try to enter. Policymakers have enacted countless freedom-crushing curfews and loitering laws. My old McDonald’s parking lot in Edwardsville, Illinois – where I spent countless hours socializing as a teen – will never be the same. Businesses as well ban teens, some even going so far as to install sound technology that emits high-pitched sounds only young people can hear.

Independent travel on public transit is often forbidden by the parents of teens boyd interviewed. “Even in cities, many teens never ride public transit alone except to take a school bus to and from school,” she writes.

In 1969, 48 percent of children in grades kindergarten through eighth grade walked or biked to school compared to 12 percent who were driven by a family member. By 2009, those numbers had reversed; 13 percent walked or bicycled while 45 percent were driven. In a safety-obsessed society, parents continue to drop off and pick up students well into high school.

[Along with implications for childhood obesity,] walking or biking to school historically provided unstructured time with friends and peers. Even when teens commuted alone, they often arrived early enough to get some time with friends before heading home. This is no longer the case in many of the schools I observed.

We have to remember that when you’re younger, you always want to be older. Kids see adults in places like bars, clubs, restaurants, and even public transit where they are not allowed. Somehow within that mix, we, as a society, have to do a better job of helping our children go through the coming-of-age process in ways that will create the local and global communities for them that we once had as kids ourselves.

Photo by TheeErin

The Search for the Perfect, Magical Transportation App

This article was originally published November 20 at Mobility Lab.

I’m constantly on the look-out for the perfect, magical app that will help me get from place to place.

 

Biking to work from Maryland to Virginia, as I do almost every day, I used to utilize bikeplanner.org, which helped me find the least-painful routes up the monster hills out of Takoma Park.

But now bikeplanner.org, which also featured the safest and quickest routes on easy-to-view OpenStreetMaps, seems to have died a quiet death.

 

Sometimes I throw my bike on a WMATA bus or the Metro, but that is no longer as fool-proof in the wake of the NextBusDC app’s also-quiet death. At least you can access the same information online in a browser, but that’s not as convenient when jumping from work to restaurant to bar to home and all points in between.

 

 An exciting contender in my search is RideScout, which had its beta in Austin this summer and launches in Washington D.C. today. The company is showing D.C. some love with a launch party at startup campus 1776 tonight. D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, D.C. Taxicab Commissioner Ron Linton, several members of Congress, and former White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra are all slated to attend.

 

CEO Joseph Kosper, a Mobility Lab contributor, told me RideScout is a smartphone app that “connects riders with a range of ride-service providers. The RideScout aggregation platform ranks ride-convenience factors such as cost and time to recommend a ‘best ride’ from all ride options available: public buses, transit, subway, taxis via Hailo, limos, shuttles, car2go, Capital Bikeshare, pedicabs, and peer-to-peer ride sharing.”

 

Kopser began formulating the idea of aggregated ground transportation when he was employed at the Pentagon. He became frustrated with his short commute from North Arlington, and while he had many options to get to work, he had no immediate information or booking capability to take advantage of those options.

The social ridesharing functionality included in the app was born out of his commitment to reducing the number of single-occupancy vehicles on the road.

 

Mayor Gray approves of RideScout’s efforts. “It’s one of my goals as mayor to help the District of Columbia become one of the healthiest, most livable cities in the country,” Mayor Gray said. “I’m happy to be a part of RideScout’s launch because they are working towards a similar goal – helping to make existing and emerging transportation resources more accessible to all our residents.”

 

Steve Carroll, director of business development and strategy, noted, “Twenty years ago, the mashup of the internet and the PC enabled sites like Expedia™ and Kayak™ to aggregate sufficient information to allow travelers to search for and book airline reservations from the comfort of their own home. Today, the proliferation of GPS and mobile technologies enables RideScout to link its users immediately with multiple ride options as they walk to the curb.

 

“RideScout is unique because mobile applications usually link riders with only one mode of transportation, with no way to see and compare options in real-time. Frustrated consumers, forced to reference multiple applications and websites, give up and revert to driving their own cars rather than seek alternatives. RideScout solves that problem,” he added.

 

RideScout officially launches in D.C. today, but the beta apps have been available in iTunes and Google Play for some time. Users can connect to public transportations options, Capital Bikeshare, car2go, Hailo taxis, DC Pedicabs, and more from the app. The company plans to expand to more cities as it adds national-level transportation providers.

 

Part of this effort includes improving the social-ridesharing function and allowing users to personalize the app in regards to which forms of transportation they see most prominently.