While we were doing our West Palm Beach to Toronto road trip last weekend, I started wondering how much longer the trip would be taking had we been driving a Tesla. The drive, according to Google Maps, is normally about 20 hours and 46 minutes. It's a long one. About 2,288 km. The mountains in Virginia are nice, though.
The route I threw in is West Palm Beach to Junction House (2720 Dundas St W, Toronto):
According to Tesla, this same route using a Standard Range (400km) Model X SUV is now estimated to take 34 hours.
The additional travel time is a result of charging time (anywhere from 20 - 70min per charge depending on the device) and the fact that you need to go where the chargers are. In this scenario, you end up driving an additional 155 km. However, you will end up saving money on gas.
This reminds me of something that Bill Gates argued in the talk I recently posted. Electric vehicles are the future of personal transport, but they're not great for commercial applications: planes, boats, and so on. The battery capacity simply isn't there, and it's unlikely to be there anytime soon. But perhaps the charging times can be brought down. That would help.
I'm not planning on doing this drive again anytime soon. But if any of you are, you may want to leave the Tesla at home if you're in a rush. However, using an EV would, of course, be the right thing to do for our planet.
I can get lost on Google Maps for hours on end. I love looking at maps and I love using Street View to virtually explore cities. This morning I’m honed in on Cincinnati, Ohio (a city I’ve never been to) while I listen to this podcast about their unfinished subway.
In 1916, the city voted in favor of spending $6 million on a new subway. But it was never finished and so today – 100 years later – it has the dubious distinction of being the largest abandoned subway tunnel in the United States.
The podcast I’m listening to is with a fellow by the name of Jake Mecklenborg. He has written a book on the subway’s history and has emerged as the expert on this topic. And it all started with him just throwing up a website.
One particularly interesting aspect of the subway is how it tied into the city’s flooding problems. At the time, the population density of the constrained downtown was surging and the subway was viewed as a way to stitch together desirable land and relieve some of those urban pressures.
I’m also very interested in understanding how cities got founded in the locations that they did. As in, who was the person who dropped their bag and said: “yup, this, is the spot.” Somebody had to have made a decision.
Oftentimes there were specific strategic, economic, and/or environmental reasons for a certain location. And this is something that Jake touches on. In the case of Cincinnati, flooding was again a major determining factor.
If you can’t see/listen to the podcast through the embed below, click here.
When I was a kid I remember my parents having something called a “Perly’s” in their car. It was basically a map book and it was the best thing around.
You would start by looking at a big grid of the city and then you’d find the specific area you were looking for and then flip to that page. If you were on the road a lot for work, a Perly’s was a mandatory addition to your car.
Things have obviously come a long way since then. It could take you a long time to find the street you were looking for in a Perly’s. I remember doing that from the passenger seat. Now our phones do that for us and if the connection makes us wait for more than few seconds, we get irritated.
But we’ve also moved beyond just static maps.
The other morning I was driving out to the suburbs and I saw this road sign telling me that – given current traffic conditions – it was going to take me 15 minutes to get to HWY 427.
While we were doing our West Palm Beach to Toronto road trip last weekend, I started wondering how much longer the trip would be taking had we been driving a Tesla. The drive, according to Google Maps, is normally about 20 hours and 46 minutes. It's a long one. About 2,288 km. The mountains in Virginia are nice, though.
The route I threw in is West Palm Beach to Junction House (2720 Dundas St W, Toronto):
According to Tesla, this same route using a Standard Range (400km) Model X SUV is now estimated to take 34 hours.
The additional travel time is a result of charging time (anywhere from 20 - 70min per charge depending on the device) and the fact that you need to go where the chargers are. In this scenario, you end up driving an additional 155 km. However, you will end up saving money on gas.
This reminds me of something that Bill Gates argued in the talk I recently posted. Electric vehicles are the future of personal transport, but they're not great for commercial applications: planes, boats, and so on. The battery capacity simply isn't there, and it's unlikely to be there anytime soon. But perhaps the charging times can be brought down. That would help.
I'm not planning on doing this drive again anytime soon. But if any of you are, you may want to leave the Tesla at home if you're in a rush. However, using an EV would, of course, be the right thing to do for our planet.
I can get lost on Google Maps for hours on end. I love looking at maps and I love using Street View to virtually explore cities. This morning I’m honed in on Cincinnati, Ohio (a city I’ve never been to) while I listen to this podcast about their unfinished subway.
In 1916, the city voted in favor of spending $6 million on a new subway. But it was never finished and so today – 100 years later – it has the dubious distinction of being the largest abandoned subway tunnel in the United States.
The podcast I’m listening to is with a fellow by the name of Jake Mecklenborg. He has written a book on the subway’s history and has emerged as the expert on this topic. And it all started with him just throwing up a website.
One particularly interesting aspect of the subway is how it tied into the city’s flooding problems. At the time, the population density of the constrained downtown was surging and the subway was viewed as a way to stitch together desirable land and relieve some of those urban pressures.
I’m also very interested in understanding how cities got founded in the locations that they did. As in, who was the person who dropped their bag and said: “yup, this, is the spot.” Somebody had to have made a decision.
Oftentimes there were specific strategic, economic, and/or environmental reasons for a certain location. And this is something that Jake touches on. In the case of Cincinnati, flooding was again a major determining factor.
If you can’t see/listen to the podcast through the embed below, click here.
When I was a kid I remember my parents having something called a “Perly’s” in their car. It was basically a map book and it was the best thing around.
You would start by looking at a big grid of the city and then you’d find the specific area you were looking for and then flip to that page. If you were on the road a lot for work, a Perly’s was a mandatory addition to your car.
Things have obviously come a long way since then. It could take you a long time to find the street you were looking for in a Perly’s. I remember doing that from the passenger seat. Now our phones do that for us and if the connection makes us wait for more than few seconds, we get irritated.
But we’ve also moved beyond just static maps.
The other morning I was driving out to the suburbs and I saw this road sign telling me that – given current traffic conditions – it was going to take me 15 minutes to get to HWY 427.
Have you ever wondered how they come up with those time estimates?
There are a few ways to do it. But here in Toronto along the Gardiner Expressway and Lake Shore Boulevard it’s done using your mobile phone. Phones have unique network identifiers called MAC addresses. And when they try and connect via Bluetooth or Wifi they actually send out their MAC address.
So what happens as you’re driving along is that your phone’s MAC address is being picked up at various locations. And since the distance between these various reception points is known, it’s pretty easy to determine how fast you’re traveling. That’s how they come up with those time/traffic estimates.
This data is anonymous but, in theory, the city also knows if people are speeding when the traffic is light.
This same technology is being used by many retailers and shopping malls to track how people move through their spaces. It’s used to see, among other things, which merchandising strategies are working and what synergies one might be creating (or not creating) with the tenant mix.
But getting back to traffic, there are obviously ways to collect traffic data without any additional physical infrastructure.
As I was about to leave the suburbs and head back downtown, my phone somehow knew I was about to do that (perhaps because I was stopped at a Starbucks near the highway) and so it decided to tell me this:
It wasn’t the best notification to receive on my phone, but I was impressed nonetheless. This traffic data is collected using GPS data transmitted from mobile phones using Google Maps, Apple Maps, and so on. Clearly we’ve come a long way since the days of manually leafing through a thick Perly’s.
At the same time, it feels like we are still pretty far away from solving the problem of urban congestion. Every big city in the world is grappling with this issue.
Part of the problem, I think, is the belief that there’s some sort of silver bullet – more highways, a magic smartphone app, and so on – that will enable everyone to be able to drive around in their own car by themselves. I don’t believe that’s possible in big cities. And the sooner we get away from that toxic thinking, the quicker we’ll solve this problem.
Have you ever wondered how they come up with those time estimates?
There are a few ways to do it. But here in Toronto along the Gardiner Expressway and Lake Shore Boulevard it’s done using your mobile phone. Phones have unique network identifiers called MAC addresses. And when they try and connect via Bluetooth or Wifi they actually send out their MAC address.
So what happens as you’re driving along is that your phone’s MAC address is being picked up at various locations. And since the distance between these various reception points is known, it’s pretty easy to determine how fast you’re traveling. That’s how they come up with those time/traffic estimates.
This data is anonymous but, in theory, the city also knows if people are speeding when the traffic is light.
This same technology is being used by many retailers and shopping malls to track how people move through their spaces. It’s used to see, among other things, which merchandising strategies are working and what synergies one might be creating (or not creating) with the tenant mix.
But getting back to traffic, there are obviously ways to collect traffic data without any additional physical infrastructure.
As I was about to leave the suburbs and head back downtown, my phone somehow knew I was about to do that (perhaps because I was stopped at a Starbucks near the highway) and so it decided to tell me this:
It wasn’t the best notification to receive on my phone, but I was impressed nonetheless. This traffic data is collected using GPS data transmitted from mobile phones using Google Maps, Apple Maps, and so on. Clearly we’ve come a long way since the days of manually leafing through a thick Perly’s.
At the same time, it feels like we are still pretty far away from solving the problem of urban congestion. Every big city in the world is grappling with this issue.
Part of the problem, I think, is the belief that there’s some sort of silver bullet – more highways, a magic smartphone app, and so on – that will enable everyone to be able to drive around in their own car by themselves. I don’t believe that’s possible in big cities. And the sooner we get away from that toxic thinking, the quicker we’ll solve this problem.
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