Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1057

Uber is currently testing a feature in a few neighborhoods in Boston and San Francisco called Uber Express POOL . 

Like the regular version of Uber POOL, this is a shared ride. But with Express POOL the app now automatically generates “smart spots” that are easy to drive to and close to the origin and destination of multiple passengers.

So instead of a direct pick-up and drop-off, you now need to walk a few blocks to one of these dynamically created “smart spots.” In exchange for the added inconvenience, you get 25% off your fare.

What’s immediately fascinating about this feature is that it further blurs the line between Uber and public transit. These “smart spots” are effectively low-volume and ephemeral transit stops that pop-up based on demand and then disappear.

It makes the notion of a fixed stop and transit schedule, particularly in low usage areas, seem inefficient. Now imagine if we created some sort of visual marker on the street every time a “smart spot” was emerging based on demand.

It is clear that Uber is trying to price these rides so that they are competitive with conventional public transit. And there’s no reason that this technology couldn’t also be applied to larger vehicles, such as buses.

I find this fascinating. And it’s a perfect example of what we talked about in yesterday’s post . This is software and networks being layered on top of the built environment.

This evening I attended the 27th Annual Toronto Planning Dinner . It’s an annual dinner for people in planning and development, put on by the University of Waterloo Planning Alumni of Toronto. Thank you Wood Bull LLP for the invite.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Anthony Townsend . He is the author of  SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia . I haven’t read it (yet), but his talk offered a preview of it and I think it would be of interest to all of you.

It deals with many of the topics that we discuss on this blog, one of which is the interrelationship between our physical environment and the networks and software layers that we are now building on top of it.

These layers have the potential to augment and enhance our cities (maybe make them smarter), but they also have the potential to do us harm. One important issue that Townsend brought up is that of privacy.

Cities used to enable anonymity. 

When essayist and art critic  Charles Baudelaire wrote about “modernity” in 19th century industrializing Paris, it referred to an ephemeral and fleeting kind of urban environment. Pass someone on the street and you may never see them again. That must have felt sad at the time.

Today we live in a fish bowl. 

Networks connect us, check us in, ping us when we are nearby people we know, and help us find people to meet and date. And we already have devices, like Alexa, that spy on us in our homes so that companies can serve us targeted ads. (This is deplorable by the way.)

Will the city of the future endeavour to do the same as we equip it with more “smarts”?

I guess that’s why Townsend believes that privacy will define a big part of 21st century urbanism. There’s no doubt that it will be very important.

I recently tested out BMW’s self-parking feature. I think it’s called parking assistant. But that doesn’t feel quite right, because it didn’t really assist. It actually did everything.

As soon as you slow down and start driving past parked vehicles, the car automatically starts scanning and measuring the length and depth of available spots. You see this happening in realtime on the car’s display in plan view.

Once it finds a suitable spot, all you have to do is basically stop and press a button. No need to steer. No need to accelerate or break. No need to turn your head. It all happens automatically.

After the car had parked, I immediately got out to see what kind of skills it had. It was inches away from the curb on both tires and 100% parallel to the curb. 

I have to admit that I did feel a tad uncomfortable letting the car do everything. I am so used to turning around and being in control. I don’t even have a backup camera in my car.

But this feature is probably (I’m guessing) already more capable than many human drivers when it comes to parallel parking.

For those of you in the know when it comes to cars, this may be old news. But I was super impressed. And it was a good reminder of what’s coming down the pike.