All Streets
Via Andrew Sullivan, an amazing map of the United States just showing roads and nothing else: all streets | ben fry
All of the major metropolitan areas and geographic features show up as a result.
Via Andrew Sullivan, an amazing map of the United States just showing roads and nothing else: all streets | ben fry
All of the major metropolitan areas and geographic features show up as a result.
From the NY Times: Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam
There are some nice quotes by my colleague and co-author Andrew Odlyzko. Internet traffic growth is estimated at 50% a year, which is still very large, but one suspects that percentage growth will continue to slow as saturation is reached for various internet markets. We continue to march up an S-shaped curve, exponential growth does not continue forever. The ability to use cable or wireless bandwidth more efficiently, and to expand capacity is huge, even assuming no major technological advances. One wishes transportation networks had similar flexibility.
The other point to be noted is the continuing use of transportation metaphors (road hog and traffic jam) to describe the internet. Transportation metaphors provide a way to connect readers with the subject, but we should not go too far down the road of employing metaphors when a direct description of the technology will do.
From the NY Times: Navigating With Feedback From Fellow Drivers . The article describe a GPS device from Dash Navigation in which every car is a probe, that reports information back other drivers in the club. This is an idea (hardly original I suspect) I analyzed in Levinson, D. (2002a) The Economics of Traveler Information from Probes. Public Works Management and Policy 6(4) pp 241-250 (April). The model in the paper implies probe information can be very good for detecting incidents, but will be almost useless for recurring congestion, because the lag in the data will be too long to take advantage of it.
From Stuff:
Under siege, users declare 'email bankruptcy' -
Users overwhelmed by their incoming email (underwhelming in their ability to manage time?) are just dumping their inbox.
It would be nice if we could do that in transportation ... a queue forming at an intersection, we will just delete all the cars and start again.
From today's SFGate - Tanker fire destroys part of MacArthur Maze / 2 freeways closed near Bay Bridge
Ouch.
The agencies involved already seem to be following the rapid reconstruction plan post-Northridge rather than the decade long (1989-1997) reconstruction post-Loma Prieta.
Updates at Nwzchik.
A recent post on Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog : The Glamor in Mass Transit (?) basically talks about the efficiencies of scale. Sun computer, which Schwartz leads, has long argued the network is the computer, and has been trying to move intelligence back from the decentralized desktop into the highly centralized information technology control center.
The comparison between mass vs. private transportation and mass vs. private computing is worth noting. Everyone has a mental image of mass transit, though that image varies by individuals, some who see it is valuable, some as something they would not touch. The perception of course is shaped by their individual experiences, preferences, locations, and so on. Mass transit is efficient in certain specific contexts, but it requires users give up an element of freedom and (in general) spend more time traveling.
The personal computer revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s enabled individuals to have control over their computing environment, without relying on a third party to provide that service. This provided freedom (I can write my own programs, and run them when I want in real-time, not having to go down to the computer center and load my program on to the Cyber at Rich Hall at Georgia Tech, and wait 20 minutes for the output to be printed (in below zero F temperatures, really, in Atlanta, January 1985, you can look it up .. Reagan's second innaugural was delayed by the same coldfront) so that I can do a homework problem for Professor Betamax's Fortran class (the course was videotaped, and was replayed every hour, so we could attend when we wanted). I hear horror stories of people who work in controlled environments like Lotus Notes, where they can't deal with email conveniently but require using a browser with a sluggish email program behind it.
So as much as we might curse personal computers, or cars, freedom of action is what they provide.
A good mass transit system, like the so-called web 2.0, can provide the same freedom through its ubiquity, and free the user from the need to manage complex systems (automobiles, computers), focusing only on the higher level decision (what I want to do, what I want to say, where I want to go). But it builds in additional dependencies (will the internet be up? will I have to pay to get access in a hotel room to my data? will the bus show up on time? does the bus really go there? what will google do with my data? do I want to see personalized ads based on my research paper on transportation?).
Freedom from and Freedom to are important distinctions. I would much rather have Freedom to act than freedom from cost or risk of acting.
What should be owned and what should be rented or provided as a service is one of those essentially tug-of-wars that shape every aspect of the modern economy. There must be some economies of scale, or we would not see scale, but there must also be diseconomies, and loss of freedom is one of them.
Our first report in the Access to Destinations Series: Development of Accessibility Measures
has finally been released.
The most interesting finding (which still awaits corroboration) is that despite the rising congestion of the past decade, accessibility in the Twin Cities region (measured as the number of things (jobs, workers, etc.) that you can get to in a fixed period of time) has been improving. Clearly this would be because there are more things per unit time, not because you can cover more distance per unit time. Increasing density increases accessibility, this is why cities form in the first place, it is nice to see it in the data. More in the final report. Thanks to my colleague Ahmed El-Geneidy who did most of the number crunching.
A nice blog post comparing maps vs. landmarks as wayfinding techniques, Cognitive Daily: Different ways of finding your way, based on the published article:
Fields, A.W., & Shelton, A.L. (2006). Individual skill differences and large-scale environmental learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(3), 506-515.
Apparently maps are superior to landmarks for learning (according to this experiment).
Having been in Japan last week, it would be nice if all the maps actually were oriented the same way, (i.e. North is up), rather than the apparently random orientation they seem to have.