Tag Archives: transportation

Under the Covers at Uber

uber-image

A mere four years ago Uber was being used mostly by Silicon Valley engineers to reserve local limo rides. Now, the Uber app is in the hands of millions of people and being used to book car transportation across sixty cities in six continents. Google recently invested $258 million in the company, which gives Uber a value of around $3.5 billion. Those who have used the service — drivers and passengers alike — swear by it; the service is convenient and the app is simple and engaging. But that doesn’t seem to justify the enormous valuation. So, what’s going on?

From Wired:

When Uber cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick was in sixth grade, he learned to code on a Commodore 64. His favorite things to program were videogames. But in the mid-’80s, getting the machine to do what he wanted still felt a lot like manual labor. “Back then you would have to do the graphics pixel by pixel,” Kalanick says. “But it was cool because you were like, oh my God, it’s moving across the screen! My monster is moving across the screen!” These days, Kalanick, 37, has lost none of his fascination with watching pixels on the move.

In Uber’s San Francisco headquarters, a software tool called God View shows all the vehicles on the Uber system moving at once. On a laptop web browser, tiny cars on a map show every Uber driver currently on the city’s streets. Tiny eyeballs on the same map show the location of every customer currently looking at the Uber app on their smartphone. In a way, the company anointed by Silicon Valley’s elite as the best hope for transforming global transportation couldn’t have a simpler task: It just has to bring those cars and those eyeballs together — the faster and cheaper, the better.

“Uber should feel magical to the customer,” Kalanick says one morning in November. “They just push the button and the car comes. But there’s a lot going on under the hood to make that happen.”

A little less than four years ago, when Uber was barely more than a private luxury car service for Silicon Valley’s elite techies, Kalanick sat watching the cars crisscrossing San Francisco on God View and had a Matrix-y moment when he “started seeing the math.” He was going to make the monster move — not just across the screen but across cities around the globe. Since then, Uber has expanded to some 60 cities on six continents and grown to at least 400 employees. Millions of people have used Uber to get a ride, and revenue has increased at a rate of nearly 20 percent every month over the past year.

The company’s speedy ascent has taken place in parallel with a surge of interest in the so-called sharing economy — using technology to connect consumers with goods and services that would otherwise go unused. Kalanick had the vision to see potential profit in the empty seats of limos and taxis sitting idle as drivers wait for customers to call.

But Kalanick doesn’t put on the airs of a visionary. In business he’s a brawler. Reaching Uber’s goals has meant digging in against the established bureaucracy in many cities, where giving rides for money is heavily regulated. Uber has won enough of those fights to threaten the market share of the entrenched players. It not only offers a more efficient way to hail a ride but gives drivers a whole new way to see where demand is bubbling up. In the process, Uber seems capable of opening up sections of cities that taxis and car services never bothered with before.

In an Uber-fied future, fewer people own cars, but everybody has access to them.

In San Francisco, Uber has become its own noun — you “get an Uber.” But to make it a verb — to get to the point where everyone Ubers the same way they Google — the company must outperform on transportation the same way Google does on search.

No less than Google itself believes Uber has this potential. In a massive funding round in August led by the search giant’s venture capital arm, Uber received $258 million. The investment reportedly valued Uber at around $3.5 billion and pushed the company to the forefront of speculation about the next big tech IPO — and Kalanick as the next great tech leader.

The deal set Silicon Valley buzzing about what else Uber could become. A delivery service powered by Google’s self-driving cars? The new on-the-ground army for ferrying all things Amazon? Jeff Bezos also is an Uber investor, and Kalanick cites him as an entrepreneurial inspiration. “Amazon was just books and then some CDs,” Kalanick says. “And then they’re like, you know what, let’s do frickin’ ladders!” Then came the Kindle and Amazon Web Services — examples, Kalanick says, of how an entrepreneur’s “creative pragmatism” can defy expectations. He clearly enjoys daring the world to think of Uber as merely another way to get a ride.

“We feel like we’re still realizing what the potential is,” he says. “We don’t know yet where that stops.”

From the back of an Uber-summoned Mercedes GL450 SUV, Kalanick banters with the driver about which make and model will replace the discontinued Lincoln Town Car as the default limo of choice.

Mercedes S-Class? Too expensive, Kalanick says. Cadillac XTS? Too small.

So what is it?

“OK, I’m glad you asked,” Kalanick says. “This is going to blow you away, dude. Are you ready? Have you seen the 2013 Ford Explorer?” Spacious, like a Lexus crossover, but way cheaper.

As Uber becomes a dominant presence in urban transportation, it’s easy to imagine the company playing a role in making this prophecy self-fulfilling. It’s just one more sign of how far Uber has come since Kalanick helped create the company in 2009. In the beginning, it was just a way for him and his cofounder, StumbleUpon creator Garrett Camp, and their friends to get around in style.

They could certainly afford it. At age 21, Kalanick, born and raised in Los Angeles, had started a Napster-like peer-to-peer file-sharing search engine called Scour that got him sued for a quarter-trillion dollars by major media companies. Scour filed for bankruptcy, but Kalanick cofounded Red Swoosh to serve digital media over the Internet for the same companies that had sued him. Akamai bought the company in 2007 in a stock deal worth $19 million.

By the time he reached his thirties, Kalanick was a seasoned veteran in the startup trenches. But part of him wondered if he still had the drive to build another company. His breakthrough came when he was watching, of all things, a Woody Allen movie. The film was Vicky Christina Barcelona, which Allen made in 2008, when he was in his seventies. “I’m like, that dude is old! And he is still bringing it! He’s still making really beautiful art. And I’m like, all right, I’ve got a chance, man. I can do it too.”

Kalanick charged into Uber and quickly collided with the muscular resistance of the taxi and limo industry. It wasn’t long before San Francisco’s transportation agency sent the company a cease-and-desist letter, calling Uber an unlicensed taxi service. Kalanick and Uber did neither, arguing vehemently that it merely made the software that connected drivers and riders. The company kept offering rides and building its stature among tech types—a constituency city politicians have been loathe to alienate—as the cool way to get around.

Uber has since faced the wrath of government and industry in other cites, notably New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC.

One councilmember opposed to Uber in the nation’s capital was self-described friend of the taxi industry Marion Barry (yes, that Marion Barry). Kalanick, in DC to lobby on Uber’s behalf, told The Washington Post he had an offer for the former mayor: “I will personally chauffeur him myself in his silver Jaguar to work every day of the week, if he can just make this happen.” Though that ride never happened, the council ultimately passed a legal framework that Uber called “an innovative model for city transportation legislation across the country.”

Though Kalanick clearly relishes a fight, he lights up more when talking about Uber as an engineering problem. To fulfill its promise—a ride within five minutes of the tap of a smartphone button—Uber must constantly optimize the algorithms that govern, among other things, how many of its cars are on the road, where they go, and how much a ride costs. While Uber offers standard local rates for its various options, times of peak demand send prices up, which Uber calls surge pricing. Some critics call it price-gouging, but Kalanick says the economics are far less insidious. To meet increased demand, drivers need extra incentive to get out on the road. Since they aren’t employees, the marketplace has to motivate them. “Most things are dynamically priced,” Kalanick points out, from airline tickets to happy hour cocktails.

Kalanick employs a data-science team of PhDs from fields like nuclear physics, astrophysics, and computational biology to grapple with the number of variables involved in keeping Uber reliable. They stay busy perfecting algorithms that are dependable and flexible enough to be ported to hundreds of cities worldwide. When we met, Uber had just gone live in Bogotè, Colombia, as well as Shanghai, Dubai, and Bangalore.

And it’s no longer just black cars and yellow cabs. A newer option, UberX, offers lower-priced rides from drivers piloting their personal vehicles. According to Uber, only certain late-model cars are allowed, and drivers undergo the same background screening as others in the service. In an Uber-fied version of the future, far fewer people may own cars but everybody would have access to them. “You know, I hadn’t driven for a year, and then I drove over the weekend,” Kalanick says. “I had to jump-start my car to get going. It was a little awkward. So I think that’s a sign.”

Back at Uber headquarters, burly drivers crowd the lobby while nearby, coders sit elbow to elbow. Like other San Francisco startups on the cusp of something bigger, Uber is preparing to move to a larger space. Its new digs will be in the same building as Square, the mobile payments company led by Twitter mastermind Jack Dorsey. Twitter’s offices are across the street. The symbolism is hard to miss: Uber is joining the coterie of companies that define San Francisco’s latest tech boom.

Still, part of that image depends on Uber’s outsize potential to expand what it does. The logistical numbers it crunches to make it easier for people to get around would seem a natural fit for a transition into a delivery service. Uber coyly fuels that perception with publicity stunts like ferrying ice cream and barbecue to customers through its app. It’s easy to imagine such promotions quietly doubling as proofs of concept. News of Google’s massive investment prompted visions of a push-button delivery service powered by Google’s self-driving cars.

If Uber expands into delivery, its competition will suddenly include behemoths like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.

Kalanick acknowledges that the most recent round of investment is intended to fund Uber’s growth, but that’s as far as he’ll go. “In a lot of ways, it’s not the money that allows you to do new things. It’s the growth and the ability to find things that people want and to use your creativity to target those,” he says. “There are a whole hell of a lot of other things that we can do and intend on doing.”

But the calculus of delivery may not even be the hardest part. If Uber were to expand into delivery, its competition—for now other ride-sharing startups such as Lyft, Sidecar, and Hailo—would include Amazon, eBay, and Walmart too.

One way to skirt rivalry with such giants is to offer itself as the back-end technology that can power same-day online retail. In early fall, Google launched its Shopping Express service in San Francisco. The program lets customers shop online at local stores through a Google-powered app; Google sends a courier with their deliveries the same day.

David Krane, the Google Ventures partner who led the investment deal, says there’s nothing happening between Uber and Shopping Express. He also says self-driving delivery vehicles are nowhere near ready to be looked at seriously as part of Uber. “Those meetings will happen when the technology is ready for such discussion,” he says. “That is many moons away.”

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Uber.

Hyperloop: Not Your Father’s High-Speed Rail

Europe and Japan have been leading the way with their 200-300 mph bullet trains for several decades. While the United States still tries to play catch up, one serial entrepreneur has other ideas. For Elon Musk, the bullet train is so, well, yesterday. He has in mind a ground based system that would hurtle people around at speeds of 4,000 mph. Welcome to Hyperloop.

From Slate:

High-speed rail is so 20th century. Well, perhaps not in the United States, where we still haven’t gotten around to building any true bullet trains. After 30 years of dithering, California is finally working on one that would get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a little under 2 1/2 hours, but it could cost on the order of $100 billion and won’t be ready until at least 2028.

Enter Tesla and SpaceX visionary Elon Musk with one of the craziest-sounding ideas in transportation history. For a while now, Musk has been hinting at an idea he calls the Hyperloop—a ground-based transportation technology that would get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under half an hour, for less than 1/10 the cost of building the high-speed rail line. Oh, and this 800-mph system would be self-powered, immune to weather, and would never crash.

What is the Hyperloop? So far Musk hasn’t gotten very specific, though he once called it “a cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table.” But we’ll soon find out more. On Monday, Musk tweeted that he will publish an “alpha design” for the Hyperloop by Aug. 12. Responding to questions on Twitter, he indicated that the plans would be open-source, and that he would consider a partnership with someone who shared his vision. Perhaps the best clue came when he responded to an engineer named John Gardi, who published a diagram of his best guess as to how the Hyperloop might work:

It sounds fanciful, and maybe it is. But Musk is not the only one working on ultra-fast land-based transportation systems. And if anyone can turn an idea like this into reality, it might just be the man who has spent the past decade revolutionizing electric cars and space transport. Don’t be surprised if the biggest obstacles to the Hyperloop turn out to be bureaucratic rather than technological. After all, we’ve known how to build bullet trains for half a century, and look how far that has gotten us. Still, a nation can dream—and as long as we’re dreaming, why not dream about something way cooler than what Japan and China are already working on?

Read the entire article here.

From Sea to Shining Sea – By Rail

Now that air travel has become well and truly commoditized, and for most of us, a nightmare, it’s time, again, to revisit the romance of rail. After all, the elitist romance of air travel passed away about 40-50 years ago. Now all we are left with is parking trauma at the airport; endless lines at check in, security, the gate and while boarding and disembarking; inane airport announcements and beeping golf carts; coughing, tweeting passengers crammed shoulder to shoulder in far too small seats; poor quality air and poor quality service in the cabin. It’s even dangerous to open the shade and look out of the aircraft window for fear of waking a cranky neighbor, or, more calamitous still, for washing out the in-seat displays showing the latest reality TV videos.

Some of you, surely, still pine for a quiet and calming ride across the country taking in the local sights at a more leisurely pace. Alfred Twu, who helped define the 2008 high speed rail proposal for California, would have us zooming across the entire United States in trains, again. So, it not be a leisurely ride — think more like 200-300 miles per hour — but it may well bring us closer to what we truly miss when suspended at 30,000 ft. We can’t wait.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

I created this US High Speed Rail Map as a composite of several proposed maps from 2009, when government agencies and advocacy groups were talking big about rebuilding America’s train system.

Having worked on getting California’s high speed rail approved in the 2008 elections, I’ve long sung the economic and environmental benefits of fast trains.

This latest map comes more from the heart. It speaks more to bridging regional and urban-rural divides than about reducing airport congestion or even creating jobs, although it would likely do that as well.

Instead of detailing construction phases and service speeds, I took a little artistic license and chose colors and linked lines to celebrate America’s many distinct but interwoven regional cultures.

The response to my map this week went above and beyond my wildest expectations, sparking vigorous political discussion between thousands of Americans ranging from off-color jokes about rival cities to poignant reflections on how this kind of rail network could change long-distance relationships and the lives of faraway family members.

Commenters from New York and Nebraska talked about “wanting to ride the red line”. Journalists from Chattanooga, Tennessee (population 167,000) asked to reprint the map because they were excited to be on the map. Hundreds more shouted “this should have been built yesterday”.

It’s clear that high speed rail is more than just a way to save energy or extend economic development to smaller cities.

More than mere steel wheels on tracks, high speed rail shrinks space and brings farflung families back together. It keeps couples in touch when distant career or educational opportunities beckon. It calls to adventure and travel. It is duct tape and string to reconnect politically divided regions. Its colorful threads weave new American Dreams.

That said, while trains still live large in the popular imagination, decades of limited service have left some blind spots in the collective consciousness. I’ll address few here:

Myth: High speed rail is just for big city people.
Fact: Unlike airplanes or buses which must make detours to drop off passengers at intermediate points, trains glide into and out of stations with little delay, pausing for under a minute to unload passengers from multiple doors. Trains can, have, and continue to effectively serve small towns and suburbs, whereas bus service increasingly bypasses them.

I do hear the complaint: “But it doesn’t stop in my town!” In the words of one commenter, “the train doesn’t need to stop on your front porch.” Local transit, rental cars, taxis, biking, and walking provide access to and from stations.

Myth: High speed rail is only useful for short distances.
Fact: Express trains that skip stops allow lines to serve many intermediate cities while still providing some fast end-to-end service. Overnight sleepers with lie-flat beds where one boards around dinner and arrives after breakfast have been successful in the US before and are in use on China’s newest 2,300km high speed line.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: U.S. High Speed Rail System proposal. Alfred Twu created this map to showcase what could be possible.[end-div]

The Most Beautiful Railway Stations

[div class=attrib]From Flavorwire:[end-div]

In 1972, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and The New York Times’ very first architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable observed that “nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.” A comment on the emerging age of the jetliner and a swanky commercial air travel industry that made the behemoth train stations of the time appear as cumbersome relics of an outdated industrial era, we don’t think the judgment holds up today — at all. Like so many things that we wrote off in favor of what was seemingly more modern and efficient (ahem, vinyl records and Polaroid film), the train station is back and better than ever. So, we’re taking the time to look back at some of the greatest stations still standing.

[div class=attrib]See other beautiful stations and read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Grand Central Terminal — New York City, New York. Courtesy of Flavorwire.[end-div]