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In the classic 1967 film The Graduate, a family friend offers young Ben one word as guidance for his future: Plastics. Good call.
Google is having that consigliore moment right now with cities. Like Mr. McGuire in the film, it wants to whisper just one word: Parking.
A couple of weeks ago, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet (GOOGL), was being pressed about when he thought major cities would begin seeing the self-driving cars everyone’s talking about. He offered a strange insight.
He said it depended on the availability of parking. There wasn’t much pushback because, quite frankly, Schmidt has a history of nonsensical comments. However, this time he may have actually spilled the beans about how the company thinks about the future of cities.
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| The solution to urban congestion may be staring you in the face. |
Recently the mid-Ohio city of Columbus was awarded a $40 million grant for winning the Department of Transportation Smart City Challenge. We all know cities are going to use the Internet of Things to get smarter.
And by smarter, the inference is they will use low-cost sensors to collect information that will get sent to the cloud, where powerful computer networks will crunch the data into something actionable – so traffic moves more efficiently and public resources are better allocated. That’s the dream.
The engineers at Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs have some ideas. Like all things Googly, their solution involves machine learning and a heaping helping of data. Basically, they believe the single biggest hassle of city life is congestion and the biggest cause of congestion is motorists driving around looking for places to park. Countless studies back up this idea. Solve the parking problem and you solve congestion. To do that, Sidewalk developed a cloud-based application called Flow.
Flow combines data — from Google Maps, Streetview, the current sensors on all smartphones and new ones from parking meters – to estimate what spaces are available at any given moment. When a motorist arrives in the city, Flow directs him to the closest available spot. That’s cool.
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The magic — and the attraction to cities like Columbus — is that Flow can take this to another level by also including unused spaces outside offices, stores, banks and other private lots. These virtualized spaces can then be monetized by the city according to demand. So they might be cheap on the weekends or late afternoons and then get a bump during sporting events or concerts. Think Uber’s surge pricing meets Airbnb for cars. Sidewalk is pitching these spaces as another source of revenue worth an additional $2,000 per space annually.
For its part, Sidewalk would handle all of the billing through an integrated payment system and collect all of the sensor data. In the second phase of Flow, the app would make optimized transit suggestions based on location and preferences, including ride-hailing, Zip cars, taxis, public transit and even bicycle sharing. Columbus would get a 1% fee off the top.
All of this is not without risk. Buying in means giving up a lot of data up front and giving up a good deal of control over Mobility-as-a-Service in the future. Being the first mover could be very lucrative for Sidewalk. It could also extend corporate reach into public services in a profound way.
Still, it does kinda feel like the future we’ve been promised. It’s government and technology working together to make life more serene, less complicated. It’s strange that the way to get there is figuring out parking. Investors should give Google credit.
Best wishes,
Jon Markman
{ 18 comments }
I find it all very Orwellian and depressing. People living more and more like machines themselves.
Exactly my feeling, Bill. The deep state creates another problem for them to capitalize on. High real estate prices are not exactly conducive to building parking structures; although the resulting congestion should have called for this all along.
Excuuse me. Did the “deep state” buy 18 million new cars in 2015?
Spot on, Bill.
“It’s government and technology working together to make life more serene, less complicated.”
I very much doubt that. In order for Flow to work it must also be the mechanism that allocates and enforces parking, so someone doesn’t steal your Flow Serenity by parking in your place.
Flow will also be intimately tied to Tow. There will be no serene latency if Flow calls Tow.
i read google’s plan is to eliminate google’s parking lots with self driving cars. a continual loop of self-driving cars would pickup and drop off employees eliminating the need for employees’ cars to sit on google’s parking lots all day. obviously, that is the future everywhere.
i know people with 2 artificial hips and 2 artificial knees. we’re already becoming robots. not so depressing.
It may end up being a waste of money. I’m guessing that the average owned car today remains unused and parked for twenty hours a day or more. When autonomous driving becomes the standard, the cars on the road will mostly be owned by the likes of Uber, Lyft etc. and will almost never need to be parked as they will autonomously go on to the next passenger. All of this will lead to less cars required to serve transportation needs of the public. More users equals less cars and less parking requirements.
Good point, look at who will own the ride sharing companies.
Think vertical integration, vertical parking and control.
Ok, so your application finds you a parking space – how do you keep somebody else with a 66 VW bug and no cell phone or any other device from taking it? And as to the software developers at Google and everywhere else, they’re increasingly staying at home to do their programming. Seriously, why live in the very expensive and congested Bay Area when you can telecommute and live in Hawaii or Mammoth Lakes for less?
Self driving cars have little to no practical application in civil applications due to the fact that the algorithms are daylight/fair weather only; and, because of unresolved MASSIVE product liability issues. But, think how things could have gone differently in Iraq if we had self driving military convoys instead – no dead/disabled soldiers.
For every complex problem there is usually an obvious and simple solution – that’s usually WRONG! Cars, and people who own and drive them are a little more complicated than the simplistic notion the GOOGLE can solve everything.
In a conversation with my grandson who was a city planner for Sacramento ca. I complained about all the new car sizes bike lanes in ca. He told me it is part of long range ca. Plan to FORCE us out of our cars. They are systematically reducing parking spaces in Sac. To Force us onto public trans. Or a bike.
It’s ironic that cities (metropolitan areas) became necessary to deliver commercial goods and people around in order to save transit time. This worked well at the pace of horses and carriages on muddy streets. But, because we didn’t adapt to accommodate faster technology, the system became dysfunctional… literally choking itself to death! Is this just another example of the public sector dragging it’s feet at everyone else’s expense?
On average a car is parked somewhere 95% of the time. 20 – 30% of city traffic is people searching for a parking spot. The technology is available to do what is implied, but the question to be answered is can it be made profitable?
Some years ago because no one could give me a satisfactory answer to how deregulation changed the trucking industry, I decided to drive a big rig over the road myself. In the 4 million miles I drove and sitting in traffic jams from the big dig in Boston(Beantown), L.A.(Shaky), Dallas-Ft. Worth Mixmaster(Big D &Cowtown), Mickey’s House in Florida, Chicago(Chi Town) and just about every seaport and airport on the East Coast, I can assure you the people in the traffic jams where I was were not seeking parking. The granddaddy of them all is the George Washington bridge going in to New York but on the way I often passed through Columbus, OH and how that city got award for SmartFlow is beyond comprehension unless a lot has changed. Private parking lots usually have liability requirements so how renting spaces on private properties will be an alternative is to be seen. A lot of Tow if Parked Illegally signs will have to come down.
So we should 1. Buy Alphabet, 2 sell Tesla? 3. Stay in cash? ? ? What’s the point?
INDEED! lots of propaganda, no actionable suggestions or ticker symbols .LOL ( userless info aint it?)
Every city needs a circle of large parking garages so the city then can ban outside traffice from overcrowding the streets. The car drivers must then use the bus and taxi services and also the subways to go shopping, then return to the parking garages and go home.
Use the KISS principle – Keep It Simple Simon
Well said Fairway, and, moreover, private car owners will be able to alight and send their cars home or to out of town parking lots.