I like this bench seating at New Chitose Airport. All of the seating faces the glass/tarmac, which is where people want to be looking. Each bench has 3 seats — a pair and a single, separated by a flat lay down area. It seems to work well because there’s a surface to put your stuff down on and because, in these situations, many people don’t seem to want to sit beside a stranger. So even if you tried to squeeze in more seating and you replaced each hard surface with a 4th one, I’m sure there would be a lot of wasted space as a result of people using their bags as stranger blockers. I don’t know for sure that this configuration seats more people per square meter, but it certainly feels more comfortable. And given that this is Japan, there’s a good chance that someone gave careful thought to this space plan.

One of our partners shared this video with me today:

And it is possibly one of the greatest 39 seconds of interview you'll ever watch.

It is a video of Jim Fahy interviewing James Horan about the construction of Ireland West Airport. The important context is that Horan was a parish priest in Knock, County Mayo, and he desperately wanted an airport so that pilgrims could more easily visit the Knock Shrine.

However, critics felt that an airport in County Mayo was just not feasible. The area was too foggy and too boggy (I had to look this one up).

But Horan successfully campaigned to have one built and he did somehow find the money. Though maybe not the following week. The campaign apparently took a lot out of him, and he died shortly after the airport opened.

But in the end, he got it built.

It takes a special kind of person to accomplish what most people view as boiling the ocean (i.e. an impossible outcome). And when you watch the video, it will become obvious to you that James Horan was that kind of person.

Frederic Filloux publishes a regular newsletter called the Monday Note. It's generally all about tech and new emerging business models. His latest post, called "Code, on wheels," is about Tesla and the software revolution that is currently underway in the car industry. And it's a good reminder of just how unique Tesla appears to be as a car company and how software is bound to infiltrate all aspects of our economy. Already you're hearing people make a distinction around "pure" software companies. This is necessary because of how ubiquitous it has become.

Here is a a longish excerpt from Filloux's article:

But the ultimate leap in value will be the creation of an application ecosystem. The limit will only be the imagination of app creators. As an example, airport operators are likely to develop apps to manage car traffic and passenger flows. Here is a use case: Your flight departing from San Jose Airport leaves in an hour. Your dual app system — one in your phone, the other in the car — checks the flight status, the gate, and the traffic. It notifies you when it’s time to leave. Once in the vicinity of the airport, the app guides you to the parking space nearest to the gate. An alternative and slightly more futuristic scenario involves you dropping your car in front of the terminal, then letting the autopilot send the car to the long-term parking lot a few miles away (this will soon become feasible as geofenced environments such as airports will be well-suited for Level 4 autonomous driving).

Again, this implies major changes in the way car software is currently handled. These scenarios require the car and the phone apps working seamlessly, exchanging data in real-time with the airlines, the airport, the navigation system of the car, the parking infrastructure, and eventually, the autopilot. We are not there yet, but by that time, the dust will have settled: either carmakers will have developed their own OS — along with the SDKs to foster the development of third-party apps — and/or, tech giants will have taken-over, leveraging their current market positions in the phone sector to impose their own norms. I always thought that Apple had that in mind when it hired legions of engineers for its Titan project and filed applications for self-driving cars to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I doubt that they completely gave up on the idea of replicating what they achieved for the 500 billion smartphone market with the 3 trillion dollar car sector.

There are many in the planning world who are quick to dismiss autonomous electric vehicles as being more of the same. They're still cars, right? For better or for worse, the internal combustion engine was massively transformational to cities -- just as previous advances in transportation were. But what comes next is still mostly unknown because, even if you assume that autonomy is a foregone conclusion, it's unclear how this and an app ecosystem could change how "cars" function in our cities. What will be the spatial impacts?

It is, however, clear to me that when things do start to really change, it will be because of software.

Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash