From Buses on Bars to Self-Driving Cars | Ep. 6

Shifting into a faster gear from our last episode, Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi continue investigating how humans have hitched rides from each other over the last 250 years. From hailing hackney coaches on filthy mud streets to boarding trams to hitchhiking with your thumb out to hailing taxis to using ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft to a possible future of self-driving cars, this is a story of land travel, communication, and cartography. New episodes every Tuesday from March-June.

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SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype
Link: claritype.com

Dr. Brian Taylor (UCLA)
Book: The Drive for Dollars

Darren Delaye (DoorDash)

Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude. 

--
Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi
Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund
Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia
Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz

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Transcript

0:02

- Okay, all right.- Hi.- And then you're....- One more time.- You're listening to...- Keyboard and Quill.- From StarTree, creators of the Real-Time Analytics Summit.- And podcast.- Hey, I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- This is Keyboard and Quill. In this episode, we're gonna continue exploring how we get around. We'll look at how land travel has expanded over time and how it's landed us in a world where we regularly get into cars with strangers we met on the internet.- So let's rewind the basic structure of cities when the only way to get around was either a horse or your own two feet. Here's Professor Brian Taylor on the factors that were limiting the growth of cities in the pre-industrial era.- There were limits to how big a town could get because you could only go as far as you could walk. Now, horses were used as sort of beasts of burden to move goods around but it was difficult because you had thin wheels, often with wood spokes, maybe metal capping it, pulling through mud, a slosh of urine and horse feces and other problems in the street. So it took a lot of energy to move things around. If you wanted to be in a horse drawn carriage to move around many cities, it was difficult and expensive to do because it took a lot of horsepower, literally horsepower to pull you through the mud on a heavy vehicle.- So the city sounded like a relatively disgusting and unhealthful place to be and walk around in at that time and I don't think we fully appreciate how bad that was. So what changed between then and now? Let's ask Dr. Taylor again.- So what was the big breakthrough? Well, railroads had been around for a while for movement of heavy vehicles between cities and then to do some connections rails were run down streets in towns and what happened is, when you took that wooden omnibus that was slogging through the mud and put it up on rails, suddenly the amount of energy required to move that cart plummeted. And the speeds went from something on the order of two miles an hour to six miles an hour so you've tripled the speed and it took about a quarter of the energy, a third of the energy to do that. So now working class people could move around on these vehicles. It was much easier to move goods around the city. You could move much faster and immediately cities started spreading out.- And what we're talking about here, what Dr. Taylor is talking about here is the emergence of trams. Trams pulled by horses. Now horses are still dangerous, you still don't wanna get run over by one but that horse drawn tram situation only lasted so long. Let's see what came next.- Then you had another breakthrough and that was essentially that you replaced the horse with an electric motor, which interesting now is that we're talking about replacing automobiles with electric motors, internal combustion engines with electric motors. So you put this electric motor on and this was in the late 1880s and that required you to string up catenary all over so that it could draw electricity and then it grounded it into the steel wheel and the steel rail, that's how you made the connection. So you ended up stringing these wires all over to run these electric motors so the street cars could now operate even faster and much cleaner. Suddenly horse manure was gone, trillions of flies wouldn't be hatched, disease plummeted, and a remarkable change as a result of this. And these exploded between about 1890 and 1910.- This sounds like it did make cities an even nicer place to be. But it's not like this is happening in a vacuum, like most other things we've been talking about. Communication technologies are advancing.- Yeah, you have like the telephone now.- Right and economic activity in general is proceeding on its slow, methodical march away from manufacturing of material goods to ones based on services. It's early days for that dynamic but it's happening.- So you had the rise of automobiles that for quite a while, while these were being developed, the streetcar took off, it was the heyday of public transit was really between about 1890 and 1920 in the US.- Interestingly, goods were still being moved around by horse drawn carriages a lot during this time but many of the horses were moved off of the street and you now had the rise of more office occupations and the city was growing significantly.- Huh? There's no traffic jams yet in this story. No cabs, no Uber. So when did the cars come in?- So then the automobile comes in and it conveys a lot of individual utility. Meaning that the street car and the horse car before it are shared mobility. They are the precursors of the public transit we have today but also shared things like Shared Ride, Lyft, and Uber and other things like that where you're essentially bike share. All of this is on this continuum of these kinds of services. The automobile, which is really a play thing of the rich at first allows people to get out to the countryside where the street cars can't take them and there's a lot of experimentation and development over time that go on where it's on the sideline. Then it starts to become more reliable, there's a breakthrough, Henry Ford and the Model T where we have this technology now it starts to filter down. And you see this a lot with technological breakthroughs.- Yeah, we have seen that pattern in the other histories we've looked at so far a thing is invented and maybe there's a really bad approach to the thing that's invented at first and we kind of cast about and feel around in the dark with various not very good ideas going in that direction until we hit on the workable solution that's economically viable, that's got, Rachel, as you said before,"Product market fit." In the case of cars, the internal combustion engine was the trick all along but they weren't really reliable or affordable until Henry Ford made them that way. They were more of a luxury good until you had the Model T.- And the advent of the modern assembly line.- Exactly as the means for driving the unit cost of that car down to where kind of ordinary people could afford it. I asked Brian how this leads to ride sharing.- Well, the origins of that are this.- Yes. Let the record show Professor Taylor holds up a hitchhiking thumb.- Hitchhiking and I have a colleague who's put this in a very thoughtful way. Think about this as an information problem. You are driving by and I'm hitchhiking, what motivates you to stop and pick me up and what motivates me to get in your car? Well, there's a lot of information problems going on. Are you going in the way that they're going? Am I going to be willing to help pay for your gas? Is it that you want company? Is it that you're an ex murderer? There's a lot of issues and things that have to be worked out. Where are you going? How long? Are we gonna be stopping for lunch? Are you willing to pay for gas? Are you going to give it to me upfront? There's a lot of negotiation that goes on. It's a risky behavior for people that don't usually have other alternatives, don't have much income or it's sort of as a last resort.- Well, it used to be that people told us, never to get in a car with strangers and to never talk to people that you met on the internet. And now we seem to do that, every time we do a ride share.- That's kind of the story we're telling here. So it's the thumb out along the side of the road there's something sort of 1970s about that, right? But the actual behavior extremely common.- Yeah, I really do feel like that's a 1970s, 1980s throwback.- And he's talking about information problems. I think it'd be worth drilling down into that a little bit more.- Yeah, so then you have the rise of cars and people say, hey, I know people wanna get around. So there was a rise of jitneys, they were called early on and so people would stop at bus stops and say,"Hey, I'll pick you up where are you going and it's gonna be this much." And people will put in where they're going along. The transit companies didn't like that because they pushed to get regulation and made them illegal in some places and then pushed what became a more formalized, regulated form of this as taxi cabs. So think about all the things to try and deal with the information problem. So first of all, you often have rules about livery, your bright yellow paint. And you know that somebody in the city has, in licensing the cab has inspected it to make sure that the tires aren't bald, that the driver doesn't have DUIs on his or her record. Then there's a schedule of payment. And because there could still be disagreements about that, ultimately meters that are sealed by a regulator.- And that equilibrium of those regulated cabs colored a special way so we knew they are with those approved meters all that stuff. That equilibrium persisted for decades. But as we do, let's back up a step and we're inching up on ride share, which started with Uber, but by the time it shows up, the US is an entirely car-afied country. This is obviously complex situation, lots of factors here, but how did we get there? How did we get to being so fundamentally dependent on cars?- So you have at a macro level, people coming from the countryside into cities, but cities also spreading out so that most people in the United States, for example, live in suburbs. They don't live in the central city, they don't live in a countryside most live in suburbs and most people work in suburbs and suburbs really don't function without private vehicles. They're sort of designed to fit with people having cars. If you don't have a car and you live in the suburb, you're doing a lot of walking, you're waiting for a long time at bus stops, you're maybe biking around but the suburbs and cars are designed together. And an effort to reduce our dependence on automobiles to address congestion, climate change, things like that runs into difficulties because much of the metropolitan area is designed to be congruent with automobile travel. That's not just owning and driving cars, it also means things like Uber and Lyft and other ways that you can get around in a vehicle. And most goods now move around in trucks that are delivered and everything from one factory to another, to a warehouse, and then also to people's doorstep with things like Amazon Prime and UPS delivering packages. So there's this incredibly complex network of moving things around.- Well, thank you Brian for mentioning Uber and Lyft because that's exactly where we want to go. So Uber or Uber cab at its founding wasn't actually founded until March of 2009 and didn't offer its first ride until the following summer of 2010.- And it's not like there was a major city that didn't have cabs. You could always get a cab at the airport, maybe bigger hotels downtown, you could always call for a cab. But did you know the number?- In some cities like London and New York or maybe even Chicago cabs were enough of a thing that most people could reliably expect to hail one. You just walk outside, put your hand up, be able to find one in a few minutes. But that could be a pain during periods of heavy demand, like when it’s raining and there's definitely some equity issues.- Yeah, so two things had to be present for Uber to work, smartphones and some way to tell where you were. After a short break, we'll find our way to GPS.(upbeat music)- I’m Rachel Pedreschi.- I'm Tim Berglund.- This is Keyboard and Quill. We're gonna keep going with our show about the origins of ride sharing with the invention of GPS.- Now GPS, the global positioning system, that constellation of satellites became active in 1993. And right away there are companies like Garmin and TomTom, they start releasing consumer navigation devices using this new system. You could tell where you were within a few yards anywhere on the planet.- Yeah, it was pretty cool.- It really was. Now, back then, '93 mobile devices were proliferating. You know, we're really seeing some growth there but this was still 2G days. There wasn't a lot of data going on just digital voice calls.- So those GPS units, those navigation units were actually like built into the car, right? They weren't on your phone.- They weren't on your phone or you could have a handheld GPS thing. And my first experience with the in-car one, it was in Orlando in I think 1996, maybe '97, opted for this little extra cost feature, it was amazing. But the mapping data was solid which if you think about it, if you're gonna build out mapping data the early days that Orlando's probably a place you're gonna cover. Well, and it just seemed like the future. It's giving me turn by turn directions, blown away.- But I think this is about the same time that MapQuest was coming out, right? 1996.- Absolutely. So even before the MapQuest days, if you were a person with a car you pretty much learned how to drive to the places you needed to go, the store, the mall, your friend's houses, work, school, whatever it was that you did. If you wanted to go to some specialty store in a part of town that you didn't know or a new friend's house, you either looked at a printed map and plotted a course or you "Got directions."- Ah, yes.- Or in my case, I used the Thomas Guide that my dad kept in the back of our 1978 Dodge Cornet.- What's the Thomas Guide Rachel?- It's a book in my case of Los Angeles that had a section of the city on each individual page and then on the margins it told you which was the page that was north, south, east, or west?- Yes, okay. So just a city road Atlas book.- Yeah, it was a MapQuest book.- Rand McNally is the publisher name that always comes to mind that had those covered. So a Thomas Guide in the case of LA, awesome. Yeah, that was a way that you would figure out places you didn't know in a city that was a thing.- So with the advent of MapQuest, you could get turn by turn directions to anywhere you wanted to go then you printed them out and you go along your way. It was great, you didn't need to ask for directions anymore. It really did change the way people got around. Printed maps started to seem antiquated. We had the internet now, so GPS devices and cars could do that same kind of turn by turn thing in real-time but you probably didn't have one of those in your car. Mostly they were for rentals where you didn't know where you were going. In your hometown hopefully you knew how to get to the places and you used MapQuest for the rest.- But mobile phones were getting better. The first mobile phone with GPS was an ungainly device called and I'm sure you remember this, the Benefon ESC.- Nope.- Nope. July 31st, 2001 it did not catch on. Samsung launched a Symbian based mobile phone.- I do remember that one.- The Symbian OS with GPS called the i550. Again, there's this new thing happening, people are feeling around in the dark trying to figure out the right way to do it. These are kind of failed branches on the evolutionary tree. The iPhone didn't even have GPS until the 3G in July, 2008. It had launched a year earlier in 2007.- Really?- Yeah. Weird, huh? Why so late? Like why did they not do that with the first version'cause as we'll discuss in a minute you did have a mapping feature on that original iPhone. Well, technically you don't absolutely need GPS to navigate. It's an important part of the puzzle but your phone knows which cell towers it's talking to and the cell network knows exactly where those towers are cited, where they're positioned. You get precise latitude and longitude for each tower. So by measuring the difference in the propagation delay the latency between you and each tower that you can see you can do a little bit of math and get a pretty good idea where you are. So yeah, the first iPhone didn't even use GPS, it used cell phone triangulation.- Wow.- Yeah, built into the network 'cause of 911.- Well, that totally makes sense.- So it might seem obvious now how smartphones and GPS come together but to tell the story, we do need to rewind just a little bit.- So we go back to the early 2000s when MapQuest was the undisputed answer on how to get around. The web was still in a bit of funk since the dot-com crash of March of 2000 but things were moving forward here and there but the energy of the boom had not come back yet. Google had solidified as the king of search and was starting to play with other services like Gmail, which came out in 2004. Then in 2005 they showed us something we couldn't believe, Google Maps- We're gonna hear from Darren Delaye who was a product designer on the Google Maps team a few years after this in 2011. But he's got some great stories to tell us.- Google Maps was adapted from an acquisition, a company that was starting to do some maps by the Rasmussen brothers. They joined Google and the intent was to make a map app. But at the time that meant a web app, right? A website for Google Maps. The big innovation when Google Maps came out was that you could grab the map and pan it around. Up until then you had to click up, up and zoom out, zoom in, paging very slowly. Sometimes a whole page refresh on that website and both Google Maps and Gmail were some of the first big apps that requested data from the server while you were looking at the webpage already mostly loaded and that's how they could load more and more off the screen map tiles and show 'em to you right away as if it was magically there all along. So it sits right there in the middle of Google's mission, which we all knew to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. It's a good mission. And Google didn't want people to have to go somewhere else for these lookups of data, information, things they need in their daily lives having to do with where is that business in the real world, how do I get its phone number, and how do I get there? And that's been true the whole time. It's just to Google's benefit for you to not start to rely on somebody else for that critical time sensitive information in your daily life.- Local social search was a buzzword back then and you can see how the search giant would want to know about bricks and mortar businesses too. Google Maps made its browser based Splash good and hard in 2005. It was clear MapQuest was being leapfrogged and I think that's really the judgment of history at this point.- And it's not that it did anything fundamentally different from MapQuest, right? The innovation of putting maps and driving directions on the web was theirs but the liveness of being able to click and drag a map to explore an area was a material usability advantage. Not to mention to me at the time, technically fascinating it was just cool, right? But it really was easier to use plus they had this wizardry of you just typed your whole address into one line you didn't have to put address and city state zip code into different boxes. How do they parse all that? That's actually not easy to do.- Not easy to do at all but this is another example of earlier technologies that were innovative being superseded by competitors that just kind of figured it out better.- Yeah, they did a better job. I mean MapQuest was hugely successful but Google came along and did it better. After a short break, we'll explore how Google Maps changed the traveling game. But first, let's map out our next paycheck.- At the tone, please record your message.- Hi, this is Vivy from California. Keyboard and Quill is made possible by StarTree host of Real-Time Analytics Summit, an annual conference that brings together professionals in the data space to discuss harnessing actionable insights from real-time data. Join us to learn, teach, connect, and have amazing time with the best community in the user facing real-time analytics world.- Register now at rtasummit.com.- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- I'm Tim Berglund.- This is Keyboard and Quill. We're gonna keep going with our show about the origins of ride sharing with Google Maps coming online.- But you know, the way we actually navigate cities, you did the thing where you printed the map to go to the friend's house you didn't know how to get, but the way you get around, the way you think about getting around wasn't gonna change until this came to the smartphone. Let's talk to Darren about when that happened.- When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, I'm gonna reference the iPhone keynote just like everybody else. It's one of the only times I ever heard him say something from Google was great or fantastic when he said,"We've got Google Maps on this thing." And they really did they made a really good mobile app that used Google Maps data to get directions and do local search and pan the map with your fingers and pinch to zoom this time and it felt just as magical as that first time that Google Maps came out on the web.- And that was actually the original iPhone launch in 2007. Remember the one where it didn't even have GPS yet wouldn't until the next year. And another cool thing is happening here. Once that moves into a service that you're using from your phone in real-time, the company providing the service all of a sudden has access to a lot of interesting data and you can start to do some fantastic things with it if you are able to process it in real-time, for instance.- The interesting thing to me was how the Ubers and Wazes of the world were like the only people who had anywhere near the possibility of catching up to Google on the number of people who were actively sending them high quality, high frequency information about what's going on out there in the city, where are people stopped, where was there an accident, which lane should you avoid on the freeway was something Waze could get you from their crowdsourced reports. Where can you not take a left anymore because of construction or something. You need a lot of cars reporting a lot of data before you realize there's something weird because nobody's taken that left today. And so companies like Uber and Waze were actually like running so many real-time navigation sessions from drivers that were having those apps open that they were generating tons of their own high quality data that they went on to make some great things out of too.- And that tension between navigating with your phone or without. On a personal note, at the time of this recording, eight months ago, I moved to the Bay Area. Denver had been home for almost my whole adult life and so I'm kind of new and learning my way around a new city and smartphone navigation is huge for me obviously. But I find that when I'm starting to learn a route, I wanna shut my phone I wanna not use my phone.- Yeah, it's a smart idea.- Test myself because otherwise my head is in the map and not the terrain.- And then what's gonna happen when your cell phone's dead?- Right. You do kind of have to learn how to get places if it's every day. Darren's got some more on this.- There's a pretty interesting thing about becoming an expert on your route or in your city and it is mediated by the guidance that your phone can give you and so there's some stages that you go through in terms of a person living in an area or navigating an area it's always true especially if you have guidance driving navigation given to you. At first, you just blindly do whatever it tells you'cause that's the way you're gonna get where you're going. It doesn't matter you're gonna get to the destination as well or better than all the locals because the guidance is so good these days. Are you learning the layout of how you would get there by the third or fourth time that you get directions to the same spot? And of course you do. Nobody needs driving navigation on their commute for the turn by turn guidance. You use it on your commute only for the traffic and the rerouting and then you'd think that maybe you would just never use it but there are those great reasons, especially around the things that you couldn't have predicted would go wrong. You don't know that there was gonna be an accident and if you weren't using driving navigation you might not have gotten any information and then you'll go the slowest way possible'cause you're stuck behind an accident. There's a something about trust at the same time which is that when you know a city really well and you've gone through down most of those routes, including the side streets, you have to decide at every point whether you think that you might have a better way of getting to the destination than the navigation system that you're using. Or oh, it says it's red traffic, but I bet I can get around it.- So let's take a step back and look at this whole story holistically. How does a service like Uber become successful in this modern age? We have drivers and previously a driver might be a professional driver, like a cabbie, who knows their way around a city really well. They can navigate, like Darren was saying, intuitively. Of course, even a London cabbie with the knowledge doesn't have the knowledge of where accidents have happened. So that brings in real-time mapping, which is going to help quite a bit. But also on the other side, what about the person who's new to being an Uber driver just gigging for a few hours a week new to town, they don't know how to get to your neighborhood in the maze of your suburban streets to pick you up, to take you to the airport. And this is to say nothing of the process of calling an Uber. Did that happen with phone calls? Sure. Could you do that on a 2G phone? Probably. But now it's all through an app. Your location, your account, your reputation. You know, solving for the information problem Brian was talking about and even settling payment. I think that was the most revolutionary part for me. Just getting up and getting outta the vehicle with a payment happening automatically.- Absolutely, absolutely. And with all of this happening electronically and with real-time processing of the data on the backend, it enabled new things like surge pricing where the provider can simulate something like a market for drivers in response to rapidly changing consumer demand. Now cabbies can and do learn when surges happen and when they should be driving but again, those are the predictable surges. The unpredictable stuff comes only from a real-time finger on the pulse of what's actually going on in a certain geographical area. Now let's just remember how we got here.- Cities led to roads.- People had to get around inside of cities- And we started to build simple vehicles like the travois and the sled.- Wheels emerged.- And we figured out how to make roads that would last for a really long time.- That led to making maps.- And more and more maps.- In London somebody had the idea of taking a carriage and renting it out ride by ride.- And a while later, we made steam powered trains on tracks.- A few big cities started building little trains called trams pulled by horses, and then driven by electricity.- And then we started building cars powered by gasoline engines. These made for great cabs.- And that's how cabs were for a long time.- And then we made a satellite navigation system called GPS.- We brought city maps and directions online with MapQuest.- Mobile phones started to get really powerful and really useful.- Location finding and smartphones came together.- Then conditions were ripe for ride sharing to emerge in the form we know it today.- So where do we go from here? Well, when it comes to ride sharing, governments still aren't done deciding what they think of it and the gig economy and all these things. Some countries and cities don't allow Uber, Lyft is an entirely domestic phenomenon in the United States and jurisdictions continue to wrestle with whether drivers are entitled to the protections of employees or if they're independent contractors. It goes on and I'm sure we'll get this worked out in various ways.- And if and when we have ubiquitous and safe self-driving cars, so much about cities would change. The way we use urban space for parking would change, the economics of even owning a car might change. If you could always reliably call one that got you where you needed to go, would you even want one? Or would you just subscribe to a self-driving car service and one that would come to you when you summoned it and take you where you wanted to go?- Until we get there, right now as of this recording, 57% of the world's population lives in cities and that's growing all the time. And people in cities are always busy moving around. Moving around to see each other, run errands, engage in trade, or go shopping as normal people would say. The way we find our way around cities is changing, but the reasons we move around the ordinary details of our daily lives will go on as they always have. Many thanks to Dr. Brian Taylor from UCLA and Darren Delaye of DoorDash. You can find links to their work in the show notes. Also, thank you to Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude. It's available on Spotify and Apple Music.- Our show is produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund. It was written by Tim Berglund.- And Rachel Pedreschi. It was edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia and our amazing original music and sound design were created by Jeff Kite of the Voids.- Keyboard and Quill is made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit. Register now at rtasummit.com.- You can subscribe to Keyboard and Quill for free wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Please leave us a comment and a rating if you have a minute. And if you're a data professional, you should check out the Real-Time Analytics podcast, which we launched in early 2023. New episodes every Monday, link in the show notes.- I'm Tim Bergland.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- See you next time.(lighthearted music)