Robert J. Sampson’s important new book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, challenges prevailing notions of community decline. Sampson, an urban sociologist who is the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University, argues that our communities continue to matter a great deal and that our lives are powerfully shaped by where we live. William Julius Wilson lauds the book as “one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated empirical studies ever conducted by a social scientist.”
The Rice School of Architecture took ring roads from two dozen international cities, layering the ring roads at the same scale, and color coded them. The result is Ring Roads of the World, for their 2012 lecture series.
Radar has proved to be reliable over the years. But air traffic controllers can be sure of the precise location of the planes they are directing only when their radar sweeps once every six seconds. To make up for that uncertainty, controllers keep wide buffers between flights. Satellite technology will eventually change that equation and allow planes to fly much closer to one another because they will broadcast their locations with more accuracy.
In effect, airports could increase capacity without building more runways because more planes could take off and land every hour.
The Times is talking about NextGen, a program which aims to transform America’s air traffic control system from an ground-based radar system to a satellite-based system.
But this won’t help in airport delays. And it certainly won’t help circling airplanes – maybe they will circle further away from the airport – but your flight time won’t be any less. Why? Flight time is a function of distance, weather, type of aircraft, departing and arriving airports. Generally airport capacity is, besides weather, the controlling factor. Airport capacity is a fixed commodity, a commodity especially concentrated in a few key airports – mostly centered in New York City.
All together now: the limiting factor constraining airport capacity are spatial: runways, taxiways and apron (gate) space (which is finite) andphysical: aircraft type and performance, specifically engine wake vortex turbulence. The thrust from aircraft, such as the Airbus 380’s four engines just doesn’t disappear: the wake vortex of modern aircraft take significant time to dissipate. For an a380 arriving at an airport (knowing that not too many a380’s operate at any given moment), the minimum separation time for the next airplane is 4 minutes for light aircraft, and 3 minutes for a medium aircraft (based on ICAO Wake Turbulence Category). Similar requirements are necessary for departing aircraft. Add to this the time it take to land, taxi off the runway, and taxi to the gate then you have your spatial constraints. And constrained they are, especially on postage-stamp sized airports such as La Guardia which have limited runways, taxiways and gate areas.
The way to alleviate flight delays is to either attack the supply or demand side of the airport problem. NextGen attacks the intersection between the two: creating a near-infinite amount of possible flight paths to connect the airport hubs. Yet it is the airports which are still the bottleneck. To increase airport supply you can either build new airports or runways, which is difficult due to cost and NIMBY activists; or reduce demand by reducing the number of flights – which has happened due to the economy – or by edict (which no one likes). Another way to redue demand is to fund alternative transportation – namely High Speed Rail. But that is for another post.
Part of this bottleneck is our own fault: we naturally want to leave and arrive at airports at times convenient to our schedules. I love the JFK-LHR flights because I can leave at 10pm and arrive at 7am, shower and take a meeting in the morning. But so does everyone else, so there is quite a rush hour for both departure and arrivals. Now multiply this throughout the world, and you have noticeable rush hours at the airports.
Then you add externalities such as weather, emergencies, and random acts of crazy which affects an interconnected system which is the modern airline system and you get today’s situation.
None of this will be alleviated by the NextGen system, which is useful in reducing flight delays but doesn’t help to alleviate airport delays.
I guess today we will be talking about Project Glass by Google today on the Internets:
We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.
A group of us from Google started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.
If you can get past the very horrible industrial design of the glasses – a kind of cross between Geordi’s VISOR and a Orthodontic headgear – you slam right into the meat of the issue: why would you let an advertising company know and see where you are doing at every minute of the day:
There’s some incredible Orwellian doublespeak at work here, e.g., technology that “helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.” As far as I can tell, it doesn’t help you to explore your world at all. It helps Google to explore your world.
Additionally, from the video all I see is the same well-worn interaction clichés: overlay icons showing weather updates, emails and instant messages and route finding. Heads Up Displays which overlay data and information are great for specific functions requiring extreme concentration or placing discreet data which eliminates repetitive distraction. Think landing the Space Shuttle, or more everyday, driving on the highway and needing to know your speed. However, they aren’t great at supporting constantly shifting tasks and needs – tasks and needs which are situated in the urban environment will be contradictory and computationally dense.
On a lighter, but equally important note: what New Yorker doesn’t know how to get to Strand? A bookstore which, not to underplay this, is on Broadway and 12th Streetnot 12th and University as the video shows:
Below is the actual directions to Strand, via (wait for it) Google Maps:
Even this is wrong: who in their right mind wouldn’t just walk down Park and then Broadway? Come on Google: you are a mapping service for pete’s sake.
Finally, the images of the actual product are underwhelming to say the least – and quite possibly a joke: I can’t take seriously the tiny white bar actually holds the following (off the top of my head):
The designs in these concept videos are free from real-world constraints — technical, logical, fiscal. Dealing with constraints is what real design is all about. Institutional attention on the present day — on getting innovative industry-leading products out the door and creating consumer demand for them — requires relentless company-wide focus.
Compare the Google Glasses videos, with the work my friend Adam Greenfield and company at Urban Scale did with their Project Perry (Farevalue) exploration of adding an e-paper display to the standard RFID-based stored-value card:
Our Farevalue project is intended to address some of the minor but real frustrations people experience with RFID-based stored value cards.
…
But what if you had a way to know how much remained on your card before you hit the turnstile, and it didn’t require tapping on a reader? What if that information was presented to you in a friendly way, at a sufficient size that you could read it at a glance from across the room?
The difference between Farevalue and Google Glass is startling: Urban Scale actually shipped a complete idea and implementation prototype. They did the hard work of prototyping both the interaction and the hardware needed to solve a real-world problem. Google Glass appears to be a solution in need of a problem, coupled with a lack of real-world engineering knowledge. Google hasn’t gone through the pain, sweat, tears and cursing to actually prototype their concept. Rather, they have done is throw a – to be fair nicely crafted – set of glasses on pretty people and crank out a video.
The Google Glass announcement, and the glossy photo format, doesn’t get me excited, it does exactly the opposite. It makes me wonder if Google Glass will join the pantheon of other Google products: Buzz, Wave, Labs and the rest of the graveyard.
Update 6 April 2012
Jonathan McIntosh created ADmented Reality, a slightly more realistic version of Google’s augmented reality glasses – now featuring contextual Google Ads!
One thing I had completely forgotten about is how communal popular books can be. A few people have spotted “A Game of Thrones” in my pocket or saw me reading it on the subway and then started friendly conversations with me about it, something that never would have happened if I were reading it on my phone, where every book is effectively invisible to everyone but me.
I’ve often thought about this unique digital problem: Once we go to a completely digital delivery system of long-form reading material, including books, how do we signal cultual cues to others? How will my friends communicate that he reads both the New Yorker and the Economist without annoyingly working into conversation stories he’s read from the magazines? We will no longer have a physical bookshelf.
We can look to music, as CD’s are falling out of fashion and only the most obsessed still buy LP-records. Going to live concerts, browsing Pitchfork and listening to Pandora radio seem to be the new cultural signifiers. Record of these events are now being recorded on people’s Facebook wall, blogs and twitter stream (don’t get me started about recording live music with your phones).
I wonder if Pinterest-like apps are the new bookshelf.
Pedro E. Guerrero left Arizona in the 1930s to escape bigotry and to become an artist in Los Angeles. But years later, upon seeing photography of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, he headed back to Arizona. His destination: Taliesin West, Wright’s school near Scottsdale, where he sought to meet the master. He did more than meet Wright. He began a relationship that would last until Wright’s death in 1959.
