Tag: transportation

Tesla Founders Blog

Now, you maybe can argue that there are a lot of necessary changes as the company has grown and scaled. And obviously, transitions are always difficult, even with careful planning. But axing nearly the entire executive staff, letting the world’s foremost EV motor engineer go, trimming down the service organization before the job of opening the first service center is done, ripping through the firmware team – and doing it by random firings on a daily basis – are all hard to explain.

tesla is dead. too bad, this would have been awesome to overcome the fascination with internal combustion that erectionally challenged people have

SUV Delusion

At first you think that, considering dad’s expanding waistline, she’s looking to get some exercise. But it turns out she’s embarrassed to be seen in an SUV, since “people in that [presumably urban] part of town are riding bikes and have hybrids and stuff.” Ah, but the family truckster is a hybrid, dad points out nonchalantly.

you are still driving an SUV, asshole.

Transit stops on Garmin

One of the biggest benefits of transit agencies making their raw schedule data publicly available, as TriMet and others have done, is that riders are free to do interesting things with the information that the agency itself might not have thought of or have taken the time to do themselves. Case in point: Brett Warden in Portland is using TriMet’s GTFS feed to create a POI (points of interest) file for his dashboard-mounted GPS.

nice open geodata example

Google Transit Implications

This isn’t about Google at all. The issues Google Transit raises merely go to the core of what we do with local public transport data. This is all part of a much wider data liberalisation/control agenda. In the case of public transport information, there are real benefits to data liberalisation, even if that means there is no way to recover the costs of gathering the data

hopefully this will force the agencies to make their transit data freely available, as some enlightened ones like BART already do

Is Zipcar revolutionary?

The founder of zipcar on how mesh networking leads to radically transparent transportation economics, which is what makes people turn on a dime. We need this now.

If we’re going to spend out oodles of money for wireless infrastructure for our transportation systems for congestion pricing and for road pricing, we should be making those open networks using open standards, i.e., things that consumers and businesspeople have devices that hook up to. We’d actually do an open source communications platform. And we can transform this required investment in transportation wireless infrastructure into something that’s an economic development boon and that makes information ubiquitous and very, very low cost, while we’re making CO2 — the old economy — high cost.

DayJet

6 years ago, I was on the book-tour circuit discussing my book Free Flight, which had just come out. It was about several parallel innovations in the aviation biz — more efficient engines, cheaper and better ways of building planes, safer ways to navigate and control the planes — that might together make “air taxis” part of the solution to the misery of hub-and-spoke airline travel.

air taxis are here.

The only crowded parts of today’s system—the runways and approach paths to the big hub airports—are precisely the places air taxis plan never to go. The DayJet planes fly at altitudes basically unused by other aircraft, 4500-7500m. (Very small planes fly lower than that; airliners and corporate jets fly higher.) “What’s the biggest airport we’ll ever go into?. A place like Savannah or Knoxville. Where the airlines are is where we don’t want to be.”

an update on dayjet

The reinvention of air travel

It didn’t take very long to figure out that if you replace one $25M plane with 25 $1M planes, it fixes a lot of problems. And if you couple that with doing it by the seat instead of by the plane, that lets you interleave packets, or payloads, and increases the efficiency even more. So it became very clear that we needed to build a large, self-optimizing network that would take a lot of other factors into consideration, like the physics of the airplane, the temperature, the loads. The beauty of aviation is that it’s like physics meets business, right? How much you can carry depends on temperatures, altitudes, runway lengths — and safety is all expressed in terms of parameters that the optimizer has to take into account as it starts shuffling around customers. It’s not a straight optimization, it has to be done in real time, and it has an incredible number of constraints.

fighting the NP-complete fight to give passengers on-demand routing. no more sucky hubs, yay for small airports.