Zipcar vs Hertz ~ Imitation = Sincere Flattery!

Ken Belson in today's NYTimes article Hertz Tosses Some Car Keys Into the Ring, Battling Zipcar describes Connect, the Zipcar-esque service from car rental giant Hertz...

"Like Zipcar, Connect by Hertz members can make reservations online and use swipe cards to open their cars, which will be parked at 10 lots in Midtown Manhattan. In a nod to Zipcar’s success in signing up young drivers, the Toyota Prius and the Mini Cooper will be among the first 35 cars that Connect by Hertz will offer in New York. Hertz has 40,000 cars in the New York area. By comparison, Zipcar has about 5,500 cars in 13 big cities, including 1,400 cars at 300 sites in the New York metropolitan area."

Zipcar is one of my favorite urban innovations -- co-founded by the ever-delightful MIT Sloan alumna (and multi-company entrepreneur) Robin Chase! Here's Robin's TED Talk.

Zipcar IPO? ~ Emergent Carshare Newco Files...

Innovation Economist Scott Kirsner notes that Zipcar has filed with the SEC to undergo a public offering of stock (an IPO). See here the so-called red herring and decide for yourself their investment-worthiness! I'm personally very optimistic and salute the key founding crew -- including the incomparable MIT alumna Robin Chase -- for their vision in creating this wonderful urban venture in the first place!

Cape Cod Rail ~ Legacy & Heritage Train Lines

There's well over a century and a half history of railway links between Boston and Cape Cod. Today, alas, only a shadow of that remains. But perhaps there's opportunity for revival as heritage rail or even commuter and tourist rail, especially with more people willing to go "asset-light" and use Zipcar when needed for local travels. Anyway, here's a couple nice historical maps...

Chicago Forward ~ Gabe Klein on Friendly Cities

I'm now sitting at Media Lab listening to DUSP guest speaker Gabe Klein, the Chicago DOT Commissioner speak on Chicago Forward: Building a User-Friendly City. The soft-start to the talk is this lovely Cities for Cycling Streetfilm... Chicago's an amazing transit hub with four Class One railroads, a dual-hub airport, bike net -- but it's also "bottleneck city" with congestion, safety issues, and lots of fat people and kids. Klein was previously a bike business manager, then with Zipcar, then food truck business, and then DC's transport guy (including helping roll out Capital Bikeshare). Very interesting transitions!  In DC, he helped steer bikelanes down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue!

Among the compelling trends he spotlights are the share economy, digital public ways, robust multimodal hubs, far more public/private combinations, and more. Chicago Forward is his city's action agenda embracing Safe Transit (including the issue of automatic traffic enforcement, safety zones, and the unbelievable "freedom-to-kill" drivers currently have today over pedestrians and bicyclists), Rebuilding & Renewing, Layers of Options, Complete Streets, and more.

Recommended Readings 080831 ~ On Garbage, SF, Booze, Caucasia, Cruelty, MENACA, Africa, Talent, Debt, Cars, Spouses, and Robots...

Few tasty info-morsels this past week including...

• Garbage is a lead economic indicator according to Laura Ruane's piece in USA Today Slowing Economy Curbs Garbage, where she quotes Kevin Kiernan manager of waste services in Washington state. The Times's Anna Shepard writes Waste Not, Want To Know More reviewing the new book The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste.
  
• Lovely review in the WSJ of the year's best SF entitled No Time Like The Present. Plus John Tierney in the NYTimes writes about Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master? about futurist Vernor Vinge and his Singularity ideas.
• Senior Editorial Writer at the WSJ, Collin Levy, opines College Presidents Stand Up for Common Sense? I'll Drink to That, rightfully applauding those university leaders who are fighting against the unworkable, immoral, and unconstitutional age-discriminatory 21+ drinking age laws in the US.
• In their own words in the FT: Why I had to recognize Georgia's breakaway regions by Dmitry Medvedev versus Moscow's plan to redraw the map of Europe by Mikheil Saakashvili.
  
• Arther Herman opines in the WSJ about Russia and the New Axis of Evil, pointing out the scourge of oil-rich dictatorships fueled by profligate democracies. Philip Stephens in the FT opines that Putin seeks to map the boundaries of greater Russia. Bernard-Henri Levy opines in the WSJ that Russia Is Brazen, Europe Weak. Marshall Goldman opines in the Globe about The Russian power play on oil, natural gas reserves. Zeyno Baran questions in the WSJ oped section Will Turkey Abandon NATO?
• Martin Samuel opines in the Times that China's apologists are wide-eyed and clueless, pointing out "it's wonderful what you can do with total control over your people" and"the regime will go back to its old ways quicker than a Jamaican sprinter." Ouch.
• In the Wingnut vs Faithful department, we have Steve Bird's Times piece on Muslim guilty of cruetly over boys' ritual flogging. Add that to the list of disgusting practices like pedophilia, child brides, rape as punishment, stoning for adultery, fatwas for publishing opinions, killings over comics, and other things justified by religion.
• Very interesting interview of MTN chief Phuthuma Nhleko by Andrew Parker in the FT about MTN's plans to dominate emerging telecoms markets.
• Lovely to see Fashion Designer Makes a Statement in Sierra Leone as Katrina Manson writes in a Reuters piece published in the Globe.
• Good to read the Times piece by Jeremy Page that in Afghanistan, Opium production falls as farmers reap benefit of swapping poppies for wheat. Similarly, Marian Fam writes in the WSJ that Yemen Wields Capitalism in War on Narcotic Plant.
• FT's Andrew Jack reports on The worm that turned back, about Former US president Jimmy Carter spending 20 years eradicating the Guinea worm.
• The Times's Jessica Brown writes that Investors drop BRICs for the Middle East. Colleague Kate Walsh writes that big investment funds are targeting African agriculture, land and livestock, including game and biofuel crops on more marginal lands.
  
• At the same time, writes Andrew Kramer in the NYTimes, Russia's Lazy Collective Farms Are a Hot Capitalist Property. And Yuka Hayashi writes in the WSJ that Sleepy Side of Japan Stirs as Russia's Far East Booms.
• Thomas Donlan opines in Barron's that there's Danger Ahead: Science Shortfall, with the US losing leadership in tech because of foolish immigration and tax policies.
• The Times's Suzy Jagger reviews film I.O.U.S.A in Film tells some home truths about US debt mountain.
• Good to see FT story about Zipcar by John Reed titled European drive for car-share club, indicating expansion and potential IPO.
• Lesley Downer in the Times writes about the Weapon of Mass Seduction, a professional femme fatale hired by spouses to entrap straying partners in Japan.
• Scott Kirsner writes in his Innovation Economy column about Robots On The Move, the growing robo-cluster in Massachusetts.

Nano Car, Macro Consequences...

Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and GoLoco.org, fears the congestive and ecological consequences of more vehicles in the same amount of space. Add 40% more cars and... pray she says about the TATA low-cost Nano car.

Instead she argues for more sustainable and viable solutions for transportation, things which influence people's behavior through incentives, including congestion pricing, market-rate parking, car sharing, and more, as her solutions-over-time graphic illustrates...

Ride-Sharing 2.0 ~ Social Nets & ICT Enabled...

Interesting article in the NYTimes recently by Anne Eisenberg titled Need a Ride? Check Your iPhone, about Avego and Carticipate, two iPhone-enabled automobile ride-sharing ventures -- going well beyond classic hitchhiking, static carpooling, or analog ride-boards. This arena of social network-enabled and info & communication technology ICT-accelerated ride-sharing is another essential urban innovation making for ever more livable, sustainable, and vital cities. Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase and her fellow MIT-alum husband Roy Russell have created another contender here, GoLoco.org, an easy way to share trips with friends -- and the friends of friends. Using a system which alerts users about travel opportunities, they turn social networks into travel networks...

Collaborative Economy ~ Chase @ TEDxHarlem

Here's Zipcar and Buzzcar co-founder Robin Chase's TEDxHarlem slides on her Collaborative Economy talk...

Shared Solutions ~ Robin Chase in 2009 Time 100

Congratulations to MIT Sloan alumna Robin Chase for being named a 2009 Time 100 Builder & Titan! The salute is written by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark who notes...

"The culture of the internet, at its best, involves people working together to make life better. Sometimes called cooperative capitalism or social entrepreneurship, it is practiced every day by millions of individuals and a small but growing number of for-profit companies. [...] Robin's work [founding Zipcar carshare and GoLoco rideshare] illustrates what's best about people using the Internet: not well-intentioned yet futile do-goodism but business that's also a community service. It's about people using the Internet to work together in the service of one another."

Great stuff. We need many more such shared solutions!

We Cycling!

I just met with MIT alumna Alison Cohen, founder and CEO of the brand new BlooBike bicycle sharing organization. Very exciting the progress she's made in just a few short months with this new venture. Ali reminded me of Robin Chase, another MIT alumna, and her entrepreneurial ventures Zipcar and more recently GoLoco.org. Robin has been rather skeptical of bike-sharing. Until recently, that is, because as Robin writes on her blog, after visiting Paris and seeing Velib, she "eats humble pie" and is now a supporter! In Success of Paris bike-sharing, Robin shares her core experience. Details of the Velib deal and operations is self-evident. Finally Robin speculates Where will bike-sharing work in other cities, etc.

Black Boxes ~ Safety & Improvement Systems

Zipcar and GoLoco co-founder and MIT alumna Robin Chase opines today in the NYTimes about Driving by the Numbers, making the case for access to vehicle informatics, and specifically for...

"...simply more transparency. Indeed, there is a relatively easy solution that would help identify problems before they affect thousands of cars, or kill and injure dozens of people: allow drivers and carmakers real-time access to the data that’s already being monitored. Current federal law requires annual emissions and safety inspections for all cars. A mechanic plugs an electronic reader into what’s known as the onboard diagnostic unit, a computer that sits under your dashboard, monitoring data on acceleration, emissions, fuel levels and engine problems. The mechanic can then download the data to his own computer and analyze it. Because carmakers believe such diagnostic data to be their property, much of it is accessible only by the manufacturer and authorized dealers and their mechanics. And even then, only a small amount of the data is available -- most cars’ computers don’t store data, they only monitor it. [...] But what if a car’s entire data stream was made available to drivers in real time? You could use, for instance, a hypothetical "analyze-my-drive" application for your smart phone to tell you when it was time to change the oil or why your "check engine" light was on."

Excellent idea! And I think part of a larger movement to have the equivalent of airliner flight-recorders -- a.k.a. Black Boxes -- much more widely deployed -- in cars, all vehicles, certainly fleets, in our houses, our offices, on our pets, and certainly on our selves and loved ones. Spyware? No, think of it as a booming Improvement Informatics venture opportunity domain.

Dimitris Papanikolaou ~ Mobility Dynamics @ MIT

Excellent to interview Dimitris Papanikolaou on MaximizingProgress.tv tonight! A researcher in the MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities group, Dimitris specializes in understanding the role of incentives and pricing and policies on managing fleets of shareable vehicles. This is part of a larger effort to build Mobility-on-Demand systems. Systems like Zipcar, born here in Cambridge, and Velib, the Parisian bike-share, are both example urban ventures which are changing how people need cars and other vehicles in the city. Many of my friends, for instance, have no interest in owning a car. Instead they rent, on-demand, when they need one! But understanding such systems well enough to make sure they operate effectively is not easy. Bikes in the Velib system, for example, tend to accumulate at popular destinations which today means employees have to re-distribute them, a major expense. So Dimitris uses MIT's System Dynamics computer modeling and simulation method to see how incentives and discounts and pricing can motivate users to keep the overall system in balance. Very cool!