The high cost of cheap parking

An informative history of the birth of the parking meter and how its slowness in evolving with the times has helped to prolong the hegemony of the car and driving in America.

In his definitive book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” Donald Shoup explains that minimum parking requirements “led planners and developers to think that parking is a problem only when there isn’t enough of it. But too much parking is also a problem—it wastes money, degrades urban design, increases impervious surface area, and encourages overuse of cars.” Besides the fact that legally required lots are often more than half-empty, they result in a variety of negative impacts, from environmental runoff issues to inhospitable pedestrian zones. Instead of using the tools available to limit automobile use and encourage free-flowing street traffic, Shoup explains that planners traditionally did the opposite, requiring “enough off-street spaces to satisfy the peak demand for free parking.”

Additionally, such ordinances falsely reduced the explicit cost of city driving, transferring the true expense of so-called “free” parking to every citizen in the vicinity, diffused into taxes, real estate, product, and service fees. In effect, this legislation created an environment where “nobody can opt out of paying for parking,” says Jeff Speck, renowned urban planner and author of the book, “Walkable Cities.”

According to Speck, “people who walk, bike, or take transit are bankrolling those who drive. In so doing, they are making driving cheaper and thus more prevalent, which in turn undermines the quality of walking, biking, and taking transit.” Furthermore, our plethora of free parking resulted in a range of negative consequences still unaccounted for: “The social costs of not charging for curb parking—traffic congestion, air pollution, accidents, wasted time, and wasted fuel—are enormous,” writes Shoup.

At the end of the article, San Francisco is cited as the leading city in swapping out old parking meters for new ones whose rates can be adjusted on the fly and that can be paid in a variety of ways, including by phone (through the PayByPhone mobile app). I've consistently use the mobile app on my iPhone to pay those meters now, and it beats carrying around a pound of quarters.

However, I still find it impossible to find parking in San Francisco most places I go. Perhaps the rates aren't high enough to sit at the intersection of supply and demand curves. The ideal pricing would have most spots filled but a few spots empty at all times so drivers wouldn't spend their time circling the block looking for a spot.

I'm enthusiastic, but not overly excited

Rob Walker writes of a new punctuation mark proposed by Ellen Susan: the ElRey, a cross between an exclamation point and a period.

The underlying problem is of course overuse of the traditional exclamation mark in the email/social network era, to the extent that the meaning of this venerable symbol has been severely undermined. I can recall coming across advice when I was in college in the late 1980s suggesting that it was permissible to use an exclamation mark once every twenty years or so. Today I probably type one every twenty minutes. I’m not doing so in published work, naturally, but rather in email: “Thanks!” “Congrats!” “See you soon!” It’s not just me. Even as I was writing this paragraph, I got a  note from a highly erudite editor of a widely respected literary/cultural journal: “You are too kind!”

I actually hadn’t been kind to any excitable-making extent in the missive he was responding to. But we both knew that. Consider a non-exclamation-point version of my correspondent’s message: “You are too kind.” That reads dry, chilly, possibly even sarcastic. Which suggests how the function of the exclamation mark has changed: It no longer connotes remarkable enthusiasm; it just signals a sort of general friendliness and baseline cheer, the equivalent of saying “Howyadoin?” in a chipper voice.

I encounter this problem all the time, the phrase ending in a period that ends up looking too cold on the page. It's a curse of the prevalence of sarcasm and irony in this age that just writing something in a plainspoken way is read far too often as  disingenuous.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating the importance of conveying genuine warmth, I've had at least two arguments with friends over the tone of an email message sent with nothing but the friendliest sentiment. I've often wondered if there was a defect in the language itself.

So to compensate, I've tried all the popular alternatives to an exclamation point. Adding a smiley face:

Thanks. =)

Friendly, but it doesn't feel right for me (don't even bring up emoji). I've tried setting it in bold for visual emphasis.

Thanks.

That usually feels too serious, and while I'm usually an even keeled guy, I do feel and wish to convey genuine enthusiasm.

I'm not sure if the ElRey is the solution, but I feel the need for that mark or something like it.

RELATED: 10 interesting obscure punctuation marks

Day One: my new day job

Last night I had a dream in which I was running through the hallways of a school on the first day of school. I kept looking at my class schedule on my mobile phone and finding I'd double or triple or quadruple booked myself for classes every hour of the day. Why had I signed up for such a nonsensical class schedule? Every class I sat in on, my professor's loaded me up with assignments, all of which sounded quite formidable.

This was a new variant on a dream I used to have quite often, that iconic dream in which it's the last day of the quarter, you're running to a series of final exams, and you realize with a stomach-dropping panic that you haven't studied any of the subjects at all, not once the entire quarter. It's a dream that tends to pop up when you're feeling unprepared for something in real life, and thankfully it's been a long time since I've had it.

[Incidentally, I find it amazing how many people share that dream, and it says something fascinating about how our nightmares are shaped and drawn from our real world experiences. What does it mean that some people have nightmares about their teeth falling out or walking around naked while others, like myself, always end up in that school hallway, with no idea where our locker is, where the classroom is, or how it was possible we'd signed up for a course and been so reckless and negligent as to not crack open the textbook once the entire quarter?]

This dream last night came with a different feeling, one of excitement and an impatience to get traction, or the feeling of forward progress. As soon as I woke up and the physical universe poured in and usurped my consciousness, it all made sense. I was starting a new job today.

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to say it was still Day One all the time, across all seven years I was there. I don't know if he still says it, but in many parts of their business I'm sure he still believe it (I think on some parts of their business they're on Day Two, but it's not quite as catchy, is it?). Today was literally Day One for me at Flipboard, where I joined as the head of product.

It feels like early on Day One for Flipboard, and that's so much of what excites me. It reminds me of joining Amazon in 1997, when Amazon was a domestic online bookseller, just before it began to extend its mission to other product lines and other parts of the world. Flipboard has done so much already, and yet most of its potential still lies in the future, and I'm sure that's how so many at Amazon still feel even today. Perhaps it's a function of being in the technology industry, where it always feels like Day One in the world at large, everything set at a level best thought of as "the worst this will ever be from this day forward."

What Flipboard wants to do in many areas matches a lot of my personal interests, a lot of projects brewing in the back of my head are ones that are already being worked on at Flipboard or that would fit in with their larger mission, and so the decision ultimately was an easy one.

It did feel like the first day of school today. The first day at a very gifted school, with lots of exceedingly bright and friendly people, and really nifty school supplies (the retina display on this Macbook Pro, I mean I can't even...). It's an honor to be one of their classmates.

Quantifying human movement

A missile-tracking technology re-appropriated to tracking player movement on a sporting field is one of the most revolutionary developments in sports analysis in my lifetime. Stats LLC's SportVU product uses multiple cameras to track player movement on a field of play. The possibilities for a deeper understanding of any game are mind-boggling.

Stats LLC gave Zach Lowe of Grantland.com some SportsVU data from the 2012-13 NBA season, and he posted some observations from his dissection of that dataset. It's a goldmine. What's most shocking is that only 15 of the NBA's 30 teams have installed the SportVU camera system in their stadiums.

Basketball can be thought of a network in which you have 5 nodes distributed through space, and the goal is to get the ball to the node with the greatest chance of scoring a basket (which in turn can be based on field goal percentage space charts). Spatial analysis can analyze how consistent a team is at getting the ball to the proper node, regardless of outcome.

I first heard of the practice of tracking players' movement through space from baseball, where it was used to track defense. Traditional defensive stats are a very weak measure of defense because a player like Derek Jeter with poor lateral movement might not reach a ball that another player with greater range might get to but mishandle for an error.

Sportvision's FIELDf/x service uses cameras to track the position of players at the moment the baseball is hit, and it also tracks the trajectory and velocity of the batted ball. It allows front offices to more accurately assess the defensive skill of a player, distinguishing between a play that looks difficult and a play that actually is difficult. Gold Gloves in baseball are still the result of a flawed voting system, but thanks to the new defensive tracking tools, we have a much better idea who the real defensive stars are at each position. The only question now is whether the data will be made available to the public, or whether it's more lucrative to keep it private, licensable only by MLB teams.

Such technology is being used in multiple sports, now, and the result is an increase in the accuracy of measuring a person's true output or performance. This should, in theory, lead to more equitable salary allocation.

One of the most unique things about sports, in contrast to the business world, is that salaries are largely public. Technology companies often speak of transparency as a core principle, yet the one area transparency has not worked is in compensation (except for really senior officers at publicly traded companies).

The primary reason it wouldn't work in business is that measuring performance is nowhere near as simple as it is in sports, where all players perform in front of an audience of millions in every contest, and where widely available statistical output is seen as a decent proxy for value.

In fact, in business, measuring skill and value is so difficult that even interviewing and hiring are processes with high error rates. Separating a person's value from their context is extremely complicated, and even in sports, statistics are a poor measure of future production when the competition is unevenly distributed, as it is in high school, college, and the minor leagues (if it were easier to evaluate athletes in those levels, you'd expect professional production of draft picks to follow a nicely descending curve down and to the right, but instead it's quite lumpy).

For certain crafts, it's become easier to evaluate skill. For designers and programmers, for example, you can examine a body of work, say a portfolio or previous code, and you can ask candidates to solve problems live. Given the money involved in sports, I'd expect more and more to be spent on trying to evaluate a player's true performance. That might involve asking potential draft picks to wear tracking devices during games, or teams might simply start installing systems like SportsVU in more and more stadiums so player performance can be more accurately quantified.

As a sports fan, I'm curious to see what types of data we'll be able to see in broadcasts of the future. The number of miles run by each soccer player on the field. The average angular differential between where a tennis player hit a ball and where their opponent was at the moment of impact. Which center fielders in baseball would have likely caught a ball that ended up splitting the gap for a double against the player in center field at that moment. The open shot percentage that any NBA team gives up, on average (an open shot being defined by the nearest defender being over X feet away at the time of the shot). The possibilities are endless.

Some find the increased statistical dissection of sports dull and soul-deadening, but I suspect the opposite is true, that when we translate human motion into figures, we'll truly appreciate just how remarkable the world's greatest athletes really are.

Misc

The United States walks the least of any industrialized nation. Studies employing pedometers have found that where the average Australian takes 9,695 steps per day (just a few shy of the supposedly ideal “10,000 steps” plateau, itself the product, ironically, of a Japanese pedometer company’s campaign in the 1960s), the average Japanese 7,168, and the average Swiss 9,650, the average American manages only 5,117 steps. Where a child in Britain, according to one study, takes 12,000 to 16,000 steps per day, a similar U.S. study found a range between 11,000 and 13,000.

America's walking crisis. The problem, of course, is that much of the United States was laid out with the expectation that we'd all be driving. It would be interesting to see some of the companies selling pedometers, like Fitbit, Jawbone, or Nike, to release some data on average steps walked by region. Among the reasons I miss New York City, one of the main ones is how much that city rewarded pedestrians in every way.

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A good overview of the debate over whether the economic growth from technological innovation is plateauing or just in a temporary adjustment lull.

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Also related to The Great Stagnation, here's a post speculating what would happen if we all just popped Modafinil all the time so we only needed to sleep about a quarter as much each day without losing mental acuity.

That might be good for economic output, but it also might just accrue to increased time on the sofa. If Netflix starts mailing you Modafinil pills, consider it creative marketing for House of Cards 5.

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Is soccer irreparably corrupted by match fixing? Even if it is, does it matter if people are still paying and watching in high numbers?

It's a crisis less felt in the United States because we don't really follow the sport the same way we do other sports, but if this were one of the three majors (football, basketball, baseball), the outrage would be much higher. We enjoy the concept of sports as games with somewhat probabilistic outcomes.

Perhaps the illusion that outcomes are not predetermined is sufficient? The most profitable enterprises are those which are, on the whole, deterministic, even as they offer probabilistic outcomes in any single trial. The monument to that is Las Vegas.

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Isn't it strange that some of our best reviews of TV shows come in book review journals? As evidence: Friday Night Lights, Breaking Bad, and Homeland. Yes, for those keeping score, two of those are by the talented Lorrie Moore, so that explains a lot of it.

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ESPN the Magazine is consistently disappointing in its content, but a recent issue on perfection included a great article on Tiger Woods constant quest to reinvent his golf swing, with this gorgeous graphic (PDF) illustrating the differences among the four major incarnations of his swing .