Steven Johnson has a terrific piece in New York Times Magazine called: Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble. Here is a snippet:
The only blockchain project that has crossed over into mainstream recognition so far is Bitcoin, which is in the middle of a speculative bubble that makes the 1990s internet I.P.O. frenzy look like a neighborhood garage sale.
But the point of the article, as its title suggests, is to talk about what all of this craziness could mean for the future of the internet and how, in some ways, it could be a return to what the internet was always intended to be.
The real promise of these new technologies, many of their evangelists believe, lies not in displacing our currencies but in replacing much of what we now think of as the internet, while at the same time returning the online world to a more decentralized and egalitarian system. If you believe the evangelists, the blockchain is the future. But it is also a way of getting back to the internet’s roots.
Some are calling this new, decentralized internet version 3.0. We are currently living with internet 2.0. Practically speaking though, what could this shift really mean for us?
One example that is given in the article has to do with urban mobility – a topic that is particularly relevant to this audience.
Internet 2.0 has created a winner-take-most economic model. And in the case of mobility – at least in the world of apps – that winner is Uber. But with internet 3.0 and the blockchain, this could be possible:
Just as GPS gave us a way of discovering and sharing our location, this new protocol would define a simple request: I am here and would like to go there. A distributed ledger might record all its users’ past trips, credit cards, favorite locations — all the metadata that services like Uber or Amazon use to encourage lock-in. Call it, for the sake of argument, the Transit protocol. The standards for sending a Transit request out onto the internet would be entirely open; anyone who wanted to build an app to respond to that request would be free to do so. Cities could build Transit apps that allowed taxi drivers to field requests. But so could bike-share collectives, or rickshaw drivers.
I don’t know about you, but I find this perspective a lot more interesting. I recommend you read Steven’s article. It will help you cut through a lot of the Bitcoin noise.
Stockholm has a congestion charge that is used to reduce traffic volumes in the center of the city. Toronto does not. We looked at it, actually fairly recently, but then we lost our nerve.
Stockholm’s congestion charge was first implemented on a trial basis starting in January 2006. Trials and pilots have become a common way to actually create positive change. Otherwise the status quo bias may simply be too strong.
When Stockholm started the trial back in 2006, public support was very low. Maybe 30%. But as soon as it was implemented, car trips dropped overnight by 20%. Once people saw the benefits, support grew – hitting around 70% by 2011.
Here is a brief Street Films video with Stockholm’s Director of Transport, Jonas Eliasson, talking about their experience with congestion pricing. If you can’t see the video below, click here.
[vimeo 244771087 w=640 h=360]
Toronto is now a week into the King Street Transit Pilot.
It’s still early days and transit guru Steve Munro hasn’t yet published any before and after route performance. He will. But already the sentiment seems to be clear: This shit is working. There are many recounts of people’s commute times being more than cut in half.
As somebody who walks this stretch of King every day, this isn’t surprising to me. There has been a dramatic reduction in the number of cars on the street.
What is perhaps surprising is that none of the surrounding streets seem to be any busier. I would like to see the data, but it feels as if most of the cars have simply disappeared. Are more people now taking transit? Has this been your impression?
Of course, the pilot isn’t perfect. What is not working are the signs that tell drivers they can’t drive through most of the intersections (only turn right). The circular green lights confuse them or they simply don’t care.
There have been suggestions for better signals, such as this one:
And if the pilot in its current incarnation does stick, I am sure there will be many additional improvements like this one made. But even at this early stage, Toronto is calling the pilot a “transit miracle.”
When City Council approved the pilot in the summer it had a preliminary cost estimate of $1.5 million. (Figure excludes the lost parking revenue associated with removing approximately 180 on-street parking spaces).
This is a relatively minuscule amount considering it has had an immediate impact, basically overnight, on the commute times of the 65,000 or so people who use this line every day.
And it feels even more minuscule when you consider that our Scarborough Subway extension is expected to cost $3.35+ billion to build and only service around 64,000 people a day when you look far into the future – 2031 to be exact.
The lesson here on King Street should be that light rail and surface transit routes can move lots of people very efficiently and cost effectively when you empower them to do precisely that.