Ford Motor Company as a transportation company not a "car" company: bike share and small scale transit

What spurs this piece is that on Friday Ford Motor Company, made some interesting announcements concerning small scale transit services and bike sharing in the San Francisco Bay area.

Millennial demographic and psychographic changes are changing the US automobile industry. With the recession, the amount of driving has declined significantly, although it's ticking back up as the economy improves and gas prices have dropped.

Even so, on a per capita basis, VMT or vehicles mile travelled, was on a decline before the recession.

The rise in urban living also reduces demand for motor vehicles, because people can satisfy their mobility needs with other modes.

These trends are intensified as more people spend more time connected to and engaged in "the Internet" in various ways, especially on mobile phones, younger demographics have less propensity to get driver's licenses and to buy cars.

Telecommunications enables car use without car ownership.   Advances in information technology and telecommunications services enable different ways of mobility that enable car use without car ownership.

Car sharing was the first highly visible example, where regular car use could be accommodated by "time sharing" through the creation of a telecommunications-connected fleet of distributed vehicles within a defined geographic area, creating a different way of "renting" vehicles, where cars could be rented for a period as short as one hour, and later by one-way services like Car2Go, by the minute.

Research shows that each car share vehicle reduces demand for automobile purchases by about 10 to 15 cars.

Ride hailing services, with lower fares subsidized by capital investment, also shift consumer spending away from car purchases.

Driverless technology is expected to be a similar game changing exogenous shock, reducing the cost to provide fractional use to the point where more people may be willing to give up car ownership in favor of car sharing-taxi-ride hailing type relationships.

(Personally I don't think it will be as transformational as people think, at least in my lifetime, for technology and cost reasons, and because it may be that a goodly number of people willing to shift from owning and operating their own car is already captured by car sharing services.)

New entrants competing to sell cars using different technologies or business models.  And other companies, be they technology companies like Google, or new companies like Tesla or Local Motors, are entering the market and compete for vehicle sales.

Tesla has repositioned the way people think about electric cars--still much less competitive on cost terms in the US because gasoline is 1/3 the cost compared to countries like the UK or the Netherlands where gasoline is highly taxed--although it's unlikely the company will ever become a successful mass manufacturer, they are helping to reset the market away from gasoline-based vehicles.

General Motors.  In the classic book on creative marketing, Marketing Imagination, by Ted Levitt, one of the chapters makes the point that GM needed to think of itself as a transportation company, not a car company. From the original article that led to the book:

"Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing custom-creating value satisfactions." Companies should be marketing-led rather than production-led. That will happen only if and when there is a total commitment by senior management (and especially by the CEO) to satisfying current customers so that they remain loyal, and, to attracting new customers. Only marketing creates or increases demand. Without demand, there are no customers.

When I read it at the time--remember I was from Michigan and pretty familiar with the industry--I was pretty impressed.  Now, I think it's more complex.  GM did think of itself as a transportation company.

They manufactured long distance trucks, small trucks, transit buses (the independent Nova Bus Corporation is the successor company), construction equipment (Terex, sold off a long time ago, and Euclid before that), locomotives (EMD, now owned by Caterpillar), and a diesel engine manufacturing company (Detroit Diesel).  (They also manufactured appliances.)

The financial company that started out providing financing to dealerships and later directly to car buyers also became a huge provider of mortgages and other financial instruments.

Later they invested a lot in information technology and engineering.

In the early 1980s, they bought Electronic Data Systems (the company started by Ross Perot) and Hughes Aircraft, the defense contractor that also created DirecTV.  GM used both companies to create the technology now used in GM's Onstar live in-vehicle information and diagnostic telecommunications system.

Other than making small trucks and Onstar, these businesses are no longer part of GM, nor are most of the automobile component manufacturing companies.

GM's problem at the time that Levitt was writing wasn't that they weren't in the transportation business, or even that they were too production focused and less marketing focused. It was that they were unprepared for exogenous shocks to the way that they did business, their business model, especially in their biggest line of business, manufacturing and selling mass market automobiles.

First, the company was heavily bureaucratic and slow (see the book On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors, by John DeLorean, which is a great book and an important influence on my thinking concerning organizations, 2005 blog entry).

Second, they needed to rethink how they conceptualized the car market, from the standpoint of positioning, design, and quality, and in terms of how the market could change,.

Third, in the face of the potential for change, they needed to rethink their labor and production systems, and the provision of health care and pensions--newer companies weren't stuck with the same set of legacy costs, and European companies, with national health systems, didn't have to pay for employee health care.

The market changed in terms of style and design preferences and the because of the rise of the cost of gasoline, and because of competition, business and labor relationships developed in the 1930s-1960s were no longer economically viable nor sustainable.  Increasingly, the company made money only on big cars, and trucks, not small cars.

Cars lined up in Brooklyn to buy gas during the 1973 gas crisis, when there was limited availability of gasoline.  Photographer unknown. 

In terms of design, what happened is that design style preferences shifted in favor of what we might call a European sensibility--BMW and Mercedes but also Lexus, a Japanese make, vs. Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Chevrolet.

In terms of "the type of car people wanted," when gasoline became expensive, people's preferences for types of cars shifted, and because European and Japanese companies were already building cars based on the paradigm of expensive gasoline, the market shifted their way.

1980s BWM ad.

With a loss in market share, both because of more competition as well as a production model built for cheap gas and no competition, the company was increasingly vulnerable, until it finally entered bankruptcy after the 2008 recession.

Current responses to changes in the automobile market.  These days the company is moving on electric car production--the introduction of the Chevy Bolt could change the automobile and oil production and retailing industries far more than Tesla ("Pressure on the pump," Financial Times), driverless car technology, invested in Lyft, a ride hailing company, and created its own car sharing operation including providing loans on purchases vehicles for ride hailing operators ("GM launches Maven brand, car-sharing in Ann Arbor," Detroit News).

Ford Motor Company.

Back in the day Ford was a transportation company too, making tractors and farm equipment, heavy trucks and small trucks, airplanes(!), and even for a brief time, rail transit vehicles.

The company also was a big producer of its raw materials, ranging from rubber to steel, and automobile parts, and for a few decades owned Philco Electronics, producing products like television sets and car radios, for the consumer and business markets, as well as for military applications.

The company was a leader in real estate development in Detroit after the 1967 riots, aiming to support the city's rebirth.

Ford has had their issues remaining relevant in the face of competition from Asian and European car manufacturers too.

When they were flush, they bought a bunch of other car makes, such as Jaguar, Mini/Land Rover, and Volvo (GM did some of that too, e.g., Saab), and in the US, moved their headquarters for the newly created "Premier Automobile Group" to Irvine, California, to be closer to its customer base compared to Detroit ("Ford to Move Luxury Lines Offices to Irvine," Los Angeles Times, 2000).
.
After selling off or closing all of those operations, Ford sticks to manufacturing cars and light trucks.

Unlike GM and Chrysler they still own their financing unit, because by anticipating the crash and doing a huge refinancing, they managed to stave off bankruptcy.

More recently, Ford created a technology and innovation unit in the Silicon Valley, partly to focus on driverless car technology, but also to spur innovation more generally (Ford tries to disrupt itself in Silicon Valley," MarketWatch, "Ford invests $182 million in Silicon Valley tech firm, USA Today, and "Ford doubling Silicon Valley workforce in push toward self-driving cars," CNBC) in responses to changes in how the industry is organized and how people will be using cars, but buying fewer of them, in the future.

Besides developing driverless car technologies, the company is developing telecommunications- enabled services like the FordPass app, which unlike Onstar, while car-focused, accommodates other mobility use, as well as parking, and has created a separate business unit, Ford Smart Mobility LLC, to coordinate investments beyond traditional ways of car manufacturing.

Friday's announcements.  Ford is buying Chariot, a company like Bridg (see the past blog entry "Intra-neighborhood (tertiary) transit revisited because of new San Diego service") that does small scale van and bus based transit (Ford has long made chassis and/or vehicles for this market) unlike services like Uber or Lyft, which for the most part are focused on moving one person at a time.

-- Ford press release

From the Motley Fool article "Why Ford Is Investing In High-Tech Buses and Bike Sharing":

Chariot currently operates about 100 shuttle buses in the San Francisco Bay Area that follow routes that are crowdsourced based on passenger demand. The idea is that the shuttles fill a gap between taxi services and traditional bus lines. Significantly, they also provide a lower-cost alternative to ride-hailing services like Uber Technologies.

Ford Motor Company and bikes?   Ford also signed up to be the title sponsor of the San Francisco Bay bike sharing system, putting in enough money to expand the system to 7,000 bikes (coincidentally manufactured in Detroit), which will make it the second largest bike sharing system in  North America ("Ford backs massive bike share expansion in the San Francisco Bay Area," TechCrunch).  Who would have guessed.

 From the article:

Ford’s sponsorship will see the Bay Area’s supply of shareable bikes expand from 700 to 7,000 by 2018, with 1,350 bikes going to the East Bay, and hundreds of new bike-share stations established to distribute the bikes.

The locations of the bike stations are still being determined, but these will be in and around Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose, not just in San Francisco.

They will also be integrating bike share information into their FordPass app.

In terms of the bike share decision, my sense this is more about the company and its branding and positioning in the Bay Area technology ecosystem specifically, as a way to market the company as innovative and a great place to work in a community with a great deal of competition for skilled talent, and less about taking on broader "transportation company" positioning.

The commuter shuttle service.  The van thing isn't a new idea.  Note that Chrysler too "was a transportation company" for a long time, and besides boat engines, they created VPSI, Van Pooling Service Inc., now called vRide, the original van pooling organization, which happens to be big in the DC area, where distantly located employees of federal agencies often use the service to commute in to their jobs in Downtown Washington and the Pentagon.

After separating from Chrysler, eventually the company was acquired by Enterprise Car Rental ("Enterprise Holdings acquires vRide vanpooling business," press release).

What's happened is that cloud computing and wireless communications systems make providing this kind of service a bit cheaper and easier, including easier to "recruit" riders, called "ride matching," just as these technologies have enabled car sharing systems like Zipcar and Car2Go.

It won't change the world but it is an important element of transportation demand management, and Chariot will have access to more capital which will speed expansion of the service, perhaps beyond the capabilities and financing possessed by Bridg.  And they'll be able to count on some additional sales of vans and bus chassis.

FTA report on WMATA safety failures should surprise no one

People work at the scene where two transit trains were involved in a crash in Washington June 22, 2009. Two Washington, D.C., subway trains collided during the Monday afternoon rush hour, killing four people and injuring 70 in a mass of tangled metal. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas (UNITED STATES TRANSPORT SOCIETY

After the bad crash in 2009, when 8 people died as a result of failures in the signalling system--which turned out to be the result of co-mingling signalling equipment from different vendors, who did not guarantee cross-vendor interoperability, I wrote quite a bit about the need for a new systems approach to fixing problems at WMATA:

-- "Talking a lot, but not really saying anything," (2009)
-- "Will nine deaths lead to a better governance, oversight, and management system for WMATA? Or not?," (2009)
-- "Missing the real issue about WMATA," (2009)
-- "The WMATA Board did fail and needs to take responsibility for it," (2010)

Clearly, six years later, things haven't changed all that much, given:

• the continued incidents of workers dying in track accidents ("Metro employee dies four days after being struck by train," WMATA press release)
• sending trains onto the system with 10 cars, when 8 is the maximum length ("Metro Investigating 10-Car Train Incident on Green Line: DCist," DCist)
• the recent fire in January, which sickened dozens and killed one, which turns out to have been the fault of systemic failure to properly seal connections between the powering system for the trains and the electricity line ("NTSB recommends Metro make emergency fixes to power lines," Washington Post).  

So in fact I am not surprised at all that the recently released report by the Federal Transit Administration on WMATA's safety finds systemic problems, according to the Washington Post ("FTA report: There are significant flaws in Metro's safety").

Granted I still have to read the report, but my sense is that to change, WMATA needs a fundamental redesign, from top to bottom.  E.g., this recent Post article from March, "Addition to Metro safety manual suggests problems at control center," discussed how WMATA issued new guidance for the operations center personnel, after the fire at L'Enfant Plaza, for "people not involved in managing the incident to not talk."  It's pathetic that it's necessary to issue such instructions.

About 20 years ago, New Yorker Magazine ran a great piece about the bureaucracy and dysfunction in the Chicago Post Office ("LOST IN THE MAIL").  My sense is that WMATA operations are roughly at the same level of dysfunction.

Besides looking at the "human factors" approach of evaluating failure as a way to implement necessary process redesign and structural changes (see for example, "How mistakes can save lives: one man's mission to revolutionize the NHS," New Statesman, the RISKS-L online forum, and Computer-Related Risks by Peter Neumann), reading the article in yesterday's paper, it occurs to me that maybe where WMATA needs to look for assistance is to Boeing and Airbus, and their experiences completely redesigning their plane design, logistics, and manufacturing processes.

The New Statesman explains the human factors approach in the context of how after the death of his wife from an avoidable error, an airplane pilot is working with the British National Health service to apply airplane safety and crash analysis protocols to health care to reduce errors and deaths. From the article:

In the 1990s, a cognitive psychologist called James Reason turned this principle into a theory of how accidents happen in large organisations. When a space shuttle crashes or an oil tanker leaks, our instinct is to look for a single, “root” cause. This often leads us to the operator: the person who triggered the disaster by pulling the wrong lever or entering the wrong line of code. But the operator is at the end of a long chain of decisions, some of them taken that day, some taken long in the past, all contributing to the accident; like achievements, accidents are a team effort. Reason proposed a “Swiss cheese” model: accidents happen when a concatenation of factors occurs in unpredictable ways, like the holes in a block of cheese lining up.

James Reason’s underlying message was that because human beings are fallible and will always make operational mistakes, it is the responsibility of managers to ensure that those mistakes are anticipated, planned for and learned from. Without seeking to do away altogether with the notion of culpability, he shifted the emphasis from the flaws of individuals to flaws in organisation, from the person to the environment, and from blame to learning.

The science of “human factors” now permeates the aviation industry. It includes a sophisticated understanding of the kinds of mistakes that even experts make under stress. So when Martin Bromiley read the Harmer report, an incomprehensible event suddenly made sense to him. “I thought, this is classic human factors stuff. Fixation error, time perception, hierarchy.”

Transportation sectors, particular railroads and transit, are supposed to be applying the human factors approach already, but it's obvious that WMATA is not doing so in a very deep and considered manner.

Boeing and Airbus introduced new plane designs, initially without changing their logistics, operations, and manufacturing practices, and were pushed to the brink of failure, with huge cost overruns and multi-year program delays.  To succeed, they were forced to significantly change how they built planes. The Wall Street Journal had a great piece on this a couple weeks ago, "Airbus-Boeing Speed Race Increasingly Takes Place on the Ground." From the article:

A lot of lessons have been learned by both manufacturers in the last four to five years,” says Aengus Kelly, chief executive of AerCap Holdings NV, one of the world’s largest airplane-leasing companies. Mr. Kelly, a buyer of A350s and Boeing’s rival 787s, says the planes “are arriving on time and on spec.” ...

When Boeing in 1997 tried to double output of its popular 737 model within one year, its production systems weren’t ready. Chaotic assembly lines and incomplete planes caused painful losses amid a sales boom. 

Boeing in December 2012 created a commercial-jet development unit to streamline decision-making and speed work. Mr. McNerney credited the unit with successfully introducing the 787-9, a second, slightly larger version of the Dreamliner that hasn’t suffered the technical glitches of the first version. ... 

When Airbus began building the new A350 around the same time, Mr. Brégier demanded that lessons from the superjumbo shape planning. He forced staff from disciplines such as engineering, procurement and production, who previously had worked in isolation and communicated through a slow bureaucracy, to cooperate from the outset, allowing them to better anticipate and solve problems. 

A350 program chief Didier Evrard, whom Mr. Brégier brought over from MBDA, began by focusing more on how the plane would get built than on what it would look like.  Early on, the A350 resembled its recent predecessors, with a string of delays that left it about one year behind schedule. By mid-2012, preparations Mr. Brégier had ordered started paying off.

For example, reading about the failures in the WMATA Railroad Operations Control Center, including lack of checklists and necessary manuals, I remembered something I'd read about Boeing, although I can't find the citation.

Weld inspectors used to go into planes carrying many pounds of blueprints, and had to thumb through them to find information relevant to the specific location of the welds they were to inspect.  Now there are laser-identification and Ipad-based applications that direct them to the welds and the information they need for inspection, simultaneously (also see "Visual Work Instructions and the Paperless Factory," Assembly Magazine).

According to the Assembly article, "electronic work instructions are ideal for manufacturers that produce complex products; high-mix, high-volume items; and products with short order-to-delivery cycle times."

The same is likely to be true for WMATA rail and bus operations.  "Electronic work instructions" can help simplify the oversight systems and ensure that the procedures are followed instead of ignored.

Just like how software prevents government agencies from hiring people if money hasn't been promoted, inspection software applications can be configured so that inspection approval and funds aren't released, if the work sleeve hasn't been properly sealed, etc.

However, whether or not substantive change will occur is a question I can't answer.

Chattanooga as a "smart city": next steps

One of the speakers at yesterday's introduction of the new Brookings Metropolitan Center report on "Innovation Districts," was the Mayor of Chattanooga, Andy Berke.

The Mayor came to the attention of Bruce Katz at Brookings because when the Center published the book Metropolitan Revolutions (see my book review), Mayor Berke took it as a challenge in terms of framing how smaller cities could forge a similar innovation path comparable to large cities like Boston and San Francisco.  ... that by definition, the innovation century isn't the unique province of large cities.

I think that's very interesting.

Chattanooga.  It happens that in 2010 I was part of a bidding team for the bike share system there (we placed highly but didn't win) and so as is my want, I learned tons about the state of the city at that time, including the landing of a new VW manufacturing plant, expansion of Alstom's power plant manufacturing operation there, that it is a big regional headquarters for the TVA, a big insurance company is based there, the decent coverage of the city by the local newspaper, the Chattanooga Times-Free Press, etc.  (And Sugar's BBQ has great barbecued jalapeno poppers.)

(Note that the city is very much car oriented, many blocks downtown are parking lots, wide streets have as many as four lanes of parking (one on each side of the street and one on each side of the median) and there is a lot of vacant space and buildings in need of spiffing up.)

The City of Chattanooga owns the local electricity distribution company.  In Tennessee, electricity is generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal era initiative that started with hydroelectricity generation.  Distribution is coordinated through various public firms across the state.  In Chattanooga, the Electric Power Board is the local electricity utility and it is an agency of the local government.

Chattanooga's Smart Grid and 1 Gigabit Internet.  Being able to link with an electric car charging infrastructure was an element of the bike share element of the RFP, so I had to learn a fair amount about the city's initiative around the creation of a "Smart Grid" electricity infrastructure nettwork, including the creation of a 1 Gigabit Internet network that includes every building or structure that is wired for electricity.

All of those things happened before the current Mayor was elected in 2013, and he had been in the State House, not local government, previously... and he wasn't accurate in the brief presentation in describing how "The Gig" network came about.  It pre-dated Obama Administration initiatives, although the EPB ended up paying for 1/3 of the project with funds from the federal government, which accelerated build out of the system significantly--it had been planned for full build out by 2020, instead they finished last year.

The EPB in Chattanooga figured out in 2007 that while implementing a smart grid to manage their network ("How Chattanooga beat Google Fiber by half a decade," Washington Post) they could also integrate high speed internet services simultaneously, so they did. From the article:

There, the effort to bring cheap broadband to the masses began as a simple engineering problem: The city's electric company, EPB, needed a way for its systems to monitor and communicate with new digital equipment being installed on the grid. Meanwhile, city hall was learning that the country's biggest phone and cable companies wouldn't be starting service there for a decade or more. So EPB became an ISP. Now it operates some 8,000 miles of fiber for 56,000 commercial and residential Internet customers. With today's rollout, gigabit service will cost $70 a month ...

Chattanooga spent $330 million on its new network, raising $220 million in bond money and winning $111.5 million in federal stimulus dollars. (The money from Washington was like icing on the cake; by the time EPB applied, it had already reached its initial targets and with the additional funds cut a 10-year construction plan down to three years.) Along the way, EPB fought several court battles with Comcast and the state cable association. Even before all this, Chattanooga had to lobby the state government for permission to let EPB participate in the telecom market.

It is an interesting example of a public-civic initiative by a publicly owned electricity  that "investor-owned" "public" utility companies have not matched.

... and I think about Chattanooga often when I hear opposition expressed to smart meters (part of Takoma DC is a hotbed of opposition to smart meters) because their world hasn't crashed and burned as a result of having the technology, in fact it's saving money and reducing outages ("Smart Grid Saves EPB Chattanooga $1.4M in One Storm," Greentech).

The Gigabit network isn't enough:  Chattanooga as the city government has a big opportunity to up its game.  While the Mayor is very active in promoting "The Gig" as an element of the city's economic development program and as a key element not only in business recruitment but as an opportunity for existing businesses and organizations to transform how they operate, it occurred to me while he was talking that Chattanooga hasn't taken "The Gig" to the next level in terms of what are called "Smart City" initiatives.

It's not enough to be ahead of other US cities, when at the world city-global city scale, world class cities are aiming to achieve much more from "Smart City" initiatives.

Note that I haven't been there lately, so I am not up with the latest developments, and clearly they are moving in the direction of what I am about to suggest already, as evidenced by various Gig City projects underway, including GigTank, a startup accelerator project focused on the smart grid and how to leverage it.

Living labs.  Specifically I am thinking of Helsinki, where a digital community was created in the Arabianranta district starting in 1998, as part of the process of building and creating that area and is called "Helsinki Virtual Village"--built on what at the time, a 10 megabit network, was a big deal.

It turns out that there is a European Network of Open Living Labs that links similar initiatives in other countries.  Yes, MIT does this kind of stuff in various labs, but in Helsinki and other cities such efforts play out in actual communities.  For example, Hamburg has similar digital neighborhood initiatives comparable to Arabianranta in its HafenCity project.

-- Helsinki Living Lab
-- Innovation Communities, Forum Virium Helsinki

City "Smart City" Initiatives.  The Helsinki Virtual Village program informed the creation by the municipality of an initiative to develop new applications and integrate "information and communications technologies" (we call it IT or information technology while in Europe they mostly refer to this as ICT) at a wide variety of scales and projects, which they have organized through a city agency called Forum Virium Helsinki, which is designated as the city's "innovation unit."   From the website:

[FVH] develops new digital services and urban innovations in cooperation with companies, the City of Helsinki, other public sector organizations, and Helsinki residents. The aim is to create better services and new business, plus to open up contacts for international markets.

Right: an implement of Transit Screen for San Francisco.

While focused on mobility exclusively, Arlington County Government's Mobility Lab is another kind of example of such a unit.  The Transit Screen information system is a start up business that grew out of a Mobility Lab initiative.

Street lights as sensor networks.  I've started seeing articles about street lights as information points ("Will Streetlamps Become Information Hubs for Cities?," Government Technology), because as the lights are replaced with LED systems, the capacities and capabilities for how the lights can be used and the poles networked becomes much greater.

The Smart City sensor networks in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Manchester measure different elements of the urban environment: Carbon Monoxide; Nitrogen Oxide; Temperature; Humidity; Light; and Sound.

Intelligent transportation systems.  There is a lot written about this and many cities are developing smarter traffic signal systems that "learn" and are integrated--motor vehicle operators clamor for coordination to reduce wait time at traffic signals.  But few US cities are at the point of integrating multiple mobility information and tolling networks, although El Paso is exploring it, as an element of simplifying cross-border crossings between Mexico and the US, which creates massive traffic tie-ups.  Interestingly, the initiative is a local one, rather than one involving national governments.

Plus the Mobility Lab example, etc.  (European cities are farther ahead on such ITS installations more generally.)

Minneapolis 311 mobile application on a Smartphone.

Smarter citizens.  There has been a lot written about "apps for democracy" and various cities have created mobile applications of various sorts.  Much of this discussion frustrates me because the fundamental issue is more than just sending in an e-complaint, but whether or not cities are open to innovation and the democratic impulse.  I wrote about that here, "All the talk of e-government, digital government, and open source government is really about employing the design method."

The Manchester UK-based Future Everything, a digital lab and annual festival, has a publication, Smart Citizens, which is on the broad topic of "how cities can create the policies, structures and tools to engender a more innovative and participatory society."  That's what we need to discuss and a city like Chattanooga could be a "living lab" for such a process.

Also see "The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online" from Wired Magazine, the Digital Communities magazine and website, which is published by Government Technology, "Digital socialism and the 'non-planners'," etc.

Digital City Festival.  For 19 years, Manchester's Future Everything has been delivering an annual festival on the digital city.  Chattanooga could start a similar event.

Conclusion: reaping the advantages in smallness.  Still, Mayor Berke is on to something.

While big cities have the advantage of bigness and all the agglomeration economies that size enables, it can be hard to marshal the resources and leadership necessary to bring about transformational change in bigger cities. Too many people and organizations are empowered to say no, and they do, often.

By contrast, a city like Chattanooga has a potential advantage in being small, because it can be easier for the local political and economic leadership of the city to come together with citizens to move innovation forward.

Plus sometimes, smaller places believe that they need to "try harder" in order to be able to compete with larger places, making the community a bit more willing to think out of the box.

By contrast, too many people in big cities are content to rest on their laurels, because they don't look outward enough, past the immediate community and more towards the network of cities, especially the network of globally-relevant cities, where innovation is happening all the time.

Of course, not just any small city can do this.  Chattanooga has a lot of assets, including a state university based downtown and a community college with strong technical education programs based on the river just outside of the core.  The city still has major manufacturing companies actively producing goods, including big operations for VW and Alstom Power Generation. There is a committed philanthropic community.  And they are well-placed for freeway and railroad transportation and they aren't too far--118 miles--from Atlanta, perhaps the South's most important city.

Even so it can be hard, because oftentimes, their initiatives have to be approved by the Tennessee State Government--"The Gig" network project was challenged in the courts by the private sector and other entities and the city needed enabling legislation from the State Legislature.

Chattanooga Stand community survey materials were designed by Casey Yoshida.

When I was there, I was impressed with the variety of initiatives in the city, including the Enterprise Center, which supports small business development, the super impressive community visioning citizen initiative, Chattanooga Stand, which is a ground up citizen initiative promoting community engagement and improvement, and the city arts unit, among others, the strong philanthropic community (one of the main foundations is funded from original investments in the Coca Cola Company), the creative output by various local design and advertising firms, and the marketing efforts of the tourism organizations and the chamber of commerce, etc.

So I think that the city definitely has the potential to move forward and become one of the country's "smartest cities," moving beyond "The Gig" to "US Smart City 2.0".

-- URENIO Intelligent Cities - Smart Cities - Innovation Ecosystems research program, Europe/Greece

Transportation-related computer applications "Hack day"

GGW tells us of Arlington County Transportion Partner's Mobility Lab, and an event they are having tomorrow, for coders to join together and brainstorm and create projects. See "Hack with the Mobility Lab for Fun and/or Profit."

Putting digital phone apps in perspective: NYC 311 service

According to the writeup of the award-winning 311 nonemergency calling number for New York City in the June issue of Government Technology (page 44 of the digital edition), in June 2010, after more than 2 years in service, over 100 million telephone calls were received.

A digital phone application was released in 2009, about 13,000 downloads of the application have occurred.

Blondie -- Hanging on the Telephone

Incremental change can be as easy as starting with a sign

Personally, I don't think this sign is very explanatory... (Image credits to come.)

I thought it was pretty funny to read an article in the Examiner, "Faulty GPS makes Va. neighborhood a truck obstacle course" about how bad GPS directions for the area around Rte. 1 in Fairfax County are directing large trucks into streets unable to accommodate them. Residents are calling for the streets to be declared closed to trucks.

But because most local roads are under the control of the Virginia Department of Transportation, it is a relatively long process to get such a regulation in place.

The same thing happens in many other places. In the UK, they've created signs to warn drivers when GPS directions are incorrect.

Why not start with a sign? You can do one for under $200...

From the article:

Stranded semi-trucks, sent astray by errant GPS systems, have fouled up a tiny 1940s-era neighborhood tucked between South King's Highway and Route 1 in Alexandria, leaving Fairfax County and the state to find a fix for fallible technology.

Several times a month, tractor-trailers and other enormous vehicles miss a tricky turn from North King's Highway onto traffic-heavy Route 1, home to mega-destinations like Target, Office Depot and Lowe's. Instead, the vehicles wind up on South King's Highway, neighborhood resident Edward Walker recently told the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. From there, GPS technology sends the truckers on a shortcut back to Route 1 - on narrow, steep Pickett and Franklin streets, where the trucks and buses simply can't fit.

Walker approached county supervisors armed with photos of a truck jack-knifed, another in a ditch, another forced to back out onto busy South King's Highway, as well as pictures of broken trees, mangled fences and rutted lawns. ...

A fix likely won't arrive for nearly a year, however. First, VDOT has to study the county's no-truck recommendation, and then GPS companies need to get around to updating their systems. That's a quarterly process, said a spokeswoman for Garmin International Inc., a GPS manufacturer. Companies then rely on the GPS owner's diligence in downloading updates.

Iphone app for Zipcar

From Zipcar:

You've probably heard the big news that Zipcar now has an iPhone™ app. But did you hear all the cool stuff you can do with it? You can find and reserve Zipcars while walking down the street. You can honk your Zipcar's horn from across the parking lot. You can even use it to make pancakes! (Just kidding. But hey, two outta three.) If you haven't yet, download the Zipcar App for free.

As you use the app, please keep carrying your Zipcard. That way, if your iPhone runs out of juice, isn't getting service, or gets lost or stolen, you can use your trusty Zipcard to keep on zippin'. Scan your card once at the start of each reservation, then for the rest of the trip you can lock and unlock the car with just the iPhone. (Pssst. You don't need your Zipcard to honk.)

We worked hard on this app and we hope you dig it. If you have a chance, swing by the App Store^SM to rate and review us. Not rocking the iPhone? Check out our mobile page for what you can do with BlackBerry®, Android™ and other high-tech gizmos.

It's scary when the impetus for urban improvement comes from IBM...

A supplement in Good Magazine ("Rethinking Cities: Introduction") also was included in the Friday edition of the New York Times, and lists eight urban innovations/best practices projects, 3 from outside the U.S., and 5 from inside the U.S.

IBM likes intelligent transportation systems and other projects that require hefty use of information technology hardware, software, and systems integration, because they can make money on it.

But then, if making money can drive municipal innovation, real improvements, fine. They are motivated to push the changes forward, more so than activists maybe, who get tired of working the system and lack the resources and financial incentives that corporations like IBM do have.