"Cities Rethink Wisdom of 50s-era Parking Standards"

Peter Smith — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:51:22 +0000

That’s the headline from an Associated Press story today, which details how 50-year old parking regulations are crushing our cities and towns:

WASHINGTON – Alice and Jeff Speck didn’t have a car and didn’t want one. But District of Columbia zoning regulations required them to carve out a place to park one at the house they were building.

It would have eaten up precious space on their odd-shaped lot and marred the aesthetics of their neighborhood, dominated by historic row houses. The Specks succeeded in getting a waiver, even though it took nine months.

“The Parking Professor,” Donald Shoup, is quoted. We first mentioned Professor Shoup here.

The whole “fix parking” meme seemed to get a boost when the NYT wrote about car-less or reduced-car condo construction in cities like Portland and Seattle. One interesting tidbit from the article: dropping the car parking requirement from a downtown condo could remove as much as $40,000 from the cost of that condo, an important consideration, especially if you are an affordable housing advocate. (Or even if you’d just like to own your own home someday.)

San Francisco micro-condos Cubix were recently completed, in part because they didn’t have the heavy parking requirements of more traditional condo developments. The $300,000 pricetag for about 300 square feet is what you’ll get, which doesn’t necessarily sound great, but that price is a lot more doable for people than the typical cost of a San Francisco home – $750,000. Less parking means more residences and people, fewer cars, more density and all the great things that can come with increased density.

In the Q&A session of John Pucher’s talk at SFU (for which I haven’t completed the transcription yet), Pucher noted how we needed to change laws so that proper bicycle development had to occur from the outset of each new project. He mentioned one example—how many policies in European countries prevented urban sprawl; only in extreme circumstances could builders get permission to build housing so far away from everything else. It’s just one example of a public policy that can help us get to a more bikable, sustainable future. Things that are closer together are easier to get to by bike.

New parking regulations—such as dropping or reducing “parking minimums”—would help cities increase their population densities in productive, sustainable, and life-enriching ways.

Where Is Michael Jones?

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 May 2008 01:29:39 +0000

Or is it Michael T. Jones?

In any case, there is a Michael Jones who presented at the 2007 Where2.0 conference (not the 2008 conference; the one that just finished a few days ago). He is listed as the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Google Earth. He might now be the Chief Technology Evangelist for Google. He co-founded Keyhole Corporation before Google bought them and renamed their product Google Earth. He’s done time in serious positions at a couple of other companies, including Silicon Graphics—the premiere high end (visual) computing platform of several years ago (they’re now on the downslope). In short, this guy can make stuff happen; we need to put our idea in front of him. Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

Around twelve minutes into his presentation, Jones says:

“At Google, we don’t know when to tell users what they need. We respond to users with whatever they want.”

That’s good news, because we know what we want. And we’ve done good work so far in building this combined expression of support. Very good work.

In my last position, I worked as a technical support engineer. I dealt firsthand with what people were doing with our products out in the field, and I came to get a decent understanding of how feature requests were prioritized within our company. I decided that it was probably similar to the way a lot of companies did things. Every time I ran into a situation where a customer requested or asked about some particular feature, I logged it in our feature-tracking system. Easy enough. That would act as a natural “vote counter,” so to speak. It wouldn’t be the whole story, but it was an important part.

An emerging company often has very definite ideas of what types of products it hopes to build—and that is often a good strategy—but when they finally get real customers making real demands, the company building the software has the opportunity to listen to those customers and builds what they want. It can be a very democratic form of product building, depending on how good a company’s feedback loop is.

As customers of Google Maps, we want to continue to build momentum for this feature request until it reaches a fever pitch. We’ve been making good progress in making sure that a lot of people know about our request. We can be almost certain that some folks on the Google Maps/Transit/Earth teams know about our petition because we’ve had actual Google employees sign the petition (at least they claim so, and I’ve no reason to doubt them).

As a support engineer, when I witnessed the “critical mass” of a feature request, everyone in the company had heard about it from more than one customer or source. Myself and the other support folks would know of a few customers who wanted some feature. Sales folks would hear about it over the phone or from site visits. The CEO and biz dev folks would hear about it during partnership and strategy sessions. And then, one day, you’d be in the break room, grabbing a Diet Snapple, and there’d be a support person, and a sales person, and a couple of developers, and field engineer, and we’d shoot the breeze about whatever, and then…boom. Somehow the feature request would come up and we’d all decide informally that yes, this feature request was going to happen. Now all that remained was to formalize it, and figure out when it would be implemented and released. (OK, that’s not exactly how it went down, but it’s close enough. )

That’s the kind of effect we’re looking for. Even if a person is only familiar with the concept, that’s one less person that won’t have to have the value proposition explained to them, so when they’re in that circle—in the break room or in the board room—and the feature request comes up, they may not say, “Yes! That’s the best feature request ever!”, but they also won’t say, “What the heck is that?”

Michael Jones also says in that presentation that Google realizes that not everyone has cars. That’s another plus.

Google Earth is not technically Google Maps—what we’re primarily concerned with—but they’re very closely related. A certain Michael Jones (I’m not sure if this is our Michael Jones, because there is also a Michael T. Jones listed, though it’s probably the same person) will be presenting at yet another upcoming developer conference that starts tomorrow: Google I/O. (“I/O” typically means “Input/Output,” as in you put information into a program [input] and get information out of that program [output].) But in this case, Google says the I/O stands for “Innovation in the Open.” Innovation and open standards continue to be a very contentious issues on the internet; companies want to be on the correct side of things, but they also want to make sure they don’t give away the farm.

Google I/O is Google’s big, annual developer conference. And this year they’re doing a lot of geo-related workshops. There will be 15 geo-related sessions, and I’ve listed them below. For full info, check out the Google I/O site.

What to say to Mr. Jones, or any of the other folks in attendance, you might chat up? You can figure it out for yourself, I know, but if I was there, as a developer with a pet concern, I’d have my 10-second and 30-second pitches ready — they might go something like this:

“Hi Michael, I’m Peter Smith. Good presentation (hopefully!). Have y’all talked about doing bicycle navigation, like bicycle routing and directions, in addition to the default car routing?”

The bicycle navigation might not sink in at first, so it’s easiest to just give a synonym immediately after. Routing is the “mappy” technical term I’ve seen used when discussing directions. If he needs more info:

We want bike directions. Bike routes. There is an online petition right now with 33,000 signatures and growing. It started about three months ago at GoogleMapsBikeThere.org. Google Maps’ default directions option is “Drive There.” Some major cities have “Take Mass Transit”—that’s awesome. And now we want a “Bike There” option so the growing numbers of us on bikes can figure out how to get from Point A to Point B safely. And as soon as that is done we want a ‘Walk There’ option. Nokia is releasing a pedestrian routing option for their upcoming Web 2.0 releases. People are going crazy for this stuff. 40% of all trips are less than two miles from home. Two miles is biking and walking distance. Most car pollution occurs within the first few minutes of operation. People want to get healthy and save the environment—we just need to meet them half way. Lots of people are working on mashups to provide this, but that’s not prominent enough. We want to mainstream bicycling, and we want Google’s help.

It’d be cool if we could just drop a stack of cheap business cards on one of the tables at the event.

Here is the list of geo-related sessions:

	From Mashups to Mapplets	Wed 11:15am – 12:15pm	Geo
	David Day

	Flash API for Google Maps	Wed 11:15am – 12:15pm	Geo
	Michael Jones

	Harnessing StreetView, Static Maps, and other new additions to the Google Maps API	Wed 12:30pm – 1:30pm	Geo
	Ben Appleton

	The World’s Information in Context	Wed 1:45pm- 2:45pm	Geo
	Michael T. Jones

	Map Mashups Session	Wed 3:00pm – 4:00pm	Geo
	Paul Rademacher

	Hands-On Maps API: Basic & Advanced	Wed 3:00pm – 5:15pm	Geo
	Pamela Fox

	Maps and Geo Session	Wed 4:15pm – 5:15pm	Geo
	Bart Locanthi

	Parsing and Generating KML with Google’s KML Library	Wed 4:15pm – 5:15pm	Geo
	Michael Ashbridge

	Advanced KML	Thu 10:15am – 11:15am	Geo
	Bent Hagemark

	My Maps Editing API	Thu 10:15am – 11:15am	Geo
	Keith Golden

	Hands-On Maps API: Basic & Advanced	Thu 10:15am – 12:30pm	Geo
	Pamela Fox

	How to Index your Geo Data	Thu 11:30am – 12:30pm	Geo
	Lior Ron

	Advanced Ruby Scripting for Google SketchUp	Thu 12:45pm – 1:45pm	Geo
	Sang Ahn, Scott Lininger

	Fireside Chat: Google Maps & Earth	Thu 2:00pm – 3:00pm	Geo
	Google Geo engineering team

	Hosting your Geo Data, an Overview of Design Options	Thu 3:15pm – 4:15pm	Geo
	Mano Marks

Google Maps Bike There...for a safer, healthier, happier world. :-) » Development

"Cities Rethink Wisdom of 50s-era Parking Standards"

Where Is Michael Jones?