San Francisco is about to spend $25 million to answer a simple question: How much should a city charge for parking?

The price should be cheap enough that most of the metered spaces and city parking lots are always almost full.

But it shouldn't be so cheap that spaces are entirely full, leaving drivers frustrated and adding to congestion as cars circle endlessly looking for a place to park.

"It's the 'Goldilocks' principle of parking spaces," said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA who wrote a book called "The High Cost of Free Parking."

Shoup's work was the inspiration for a high-tech project San Francisco is launching today. Its aim: to set parking prices just right.

The system will use electronic sensors to measure real-time demand for parking spaces, and adjust prices accordingly. When there are lots of empty spaces, it will be cheap to park. When spaces are hard to find, rates will be higher.

"It's basic supply and demand," Shoup said.

The range in prices will be huge: from 25 cents an hour to a maximum of $6 an hour, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority.

Eventually, drivers will be able to find open parking spaces by going online, checking their mobile phones or reading for new electronic signs that will be posted throughout the city.

Will this work? I'm not sure. It seems like a great idea, and for $25 million, I sure hope it does work. But I'm not convinced that people will actually have access to accurate pricing information in a way that will allow them to make rationale decisions. How many electronic signs are they going to have? Will the price be the same all over the city? There are just too many questions. If you leave your house in the morning, how will you know what the cost of pricing will be when you get to where you're going? Are you supposed to check before you leave? Will people be holding up their iPhones and driving around looking for the cheaper spots?

If the current cost of pricing was somehow integrated into the dashboard on vehicle GPS, then you'd really have something. As it stands right now, it just seems like this new system is going to be a total disaster. People are risk averse. They don't like change. I have a feeling that most people will hear, "between 25¢/hr and $6/hr," and think, "I'm not paying $6/hr to park—that's too much."

Here's an idea: Let people purchase a small device they can stick on their dash that shows the expected price of parking, and lets them pay for said parking automatically, without having to go to the machine. Turn city parking into a completely seamless experience that provides individuals with perfect information at all times. Now you've got a mechanic that can allow basic supply and demand to function properly.

There are two ATM machines in Antarctica. They are located at McMurdo Station and operated by Wells Fargo. Here's an interview with a Wells Fargo VP about the unique challenges of operating those machines.

You know, the other thing too that you may find interesting -- I don't know how much you know about folks that need to go down to Antarctica -- it's a huge process to do it. So when we're preparing for the vendor visit, it's like a ten-month process. The reason being is, they obviously go in the off-season when it's obviously warmer because no planes fly onto the ice in their winter months. And so anybody that goes to Antarctica has to be cleared with a physical, a dental, and a psychological evaluation, because if for some reason the plane can't get out, you're trapped down there until the next season.

(via jimray)

By Jason Kottke  •  Jul 21, 2010 at 10:42 am  •  Antarctica   finance

This is just a cool article. Interesting how they recycle all the cash. I wonder why they even bother using money at all? It's not like you can spend it on anything other than food and beer. Seems like this might be the one place Earth where you wouldn't even need money.

That reliably blue-collar Milwaukee lager, later adopted by unbearable hipsters on the coasts, has turned up in China. And P.B.R., best known in the U.S. for being the cheapest beer on the grocery-store shelf, has—like so many expatriates before it—taken the move as an opportunity to change its image. For a beer, that appears to involve an elegant glass bottle and a fantastically ridiculous price tag. One bottle: forty-four dollars.

The foresight here is unbelievable, especially for a brand that almost went extinct. I think a lot of brands, and a lot of companies, look at China as this price sensitive market that they can't compete in, but fail to realize that the sheer size of China means there is now a market of nearly a million people with more than 10 million yuan. That number is just going to continue to grow, by factors really, and the same thing is happening in India. Sure, both countries have a disproportionate number of very poor people, but they are not markets that brands—both large and small—can afford to ignore. And the brands who establish themselves today are going to have tremendous amounts of power in the future.

"Starting on Thursday, Google is going to increase the salaries of gay and lesbian employees whose partners receive domestic partner health benefits, largely to compensate them for an extra tax they must pay that heterosexual married couples do not. Google is not the first company to make up for the extra tax. At least a few large employers already do. But benefits experts say Google's move could inspire its Silicon Valley competitors to follow suit, because they compete for the same talent."

Good on Google for helping to put an end to what I've been calling, "The gayest tax ever levied."

Honestly, I've always had the feeling that the only reason that conservatives object to same-sex marriage is because they like knowing that they are taxing others—a great irony for a party that often runs on a platform of tax cuts. It's not about the sanctity of marriage. It never has been. It's about money. It's always about money.

I think the United States can and should lead the way in finding new energy solutions, and I’m optimistic about our ability to innovate our way to a better future. But we need to get going. Developing new ways to generate enough clean, reliable, low-cost energy could take 10 or 20 years, and then it will take more time to build out a new energy infrastructure.

That’s why I joined The American Energy Innovation Council, a group of business leaders that also includes Jeff Immelt from GE, Ursula Burns from Xerox, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Bank of America’s Chad Holliday, Tim Solso from Cummins, and former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. The Council has come out with recommendations for U.S. policy initiatives that could help really jumpstart the process of discovering and commercializing new energy technologies.

Anyone else think that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are going to launch the world into a new era through private investment and philanthropy? It's amazing to see these two constantly looking for the best way to allocate their fortunes. It's almost as if they played the global markets like a game, won, and are now trying to figure out what to do at the end of it all. 

I have so much respect for Bill Gates that it can't really be expressed in words. 

It's also nice to see General Electric leading an initiative like this (and I don't say that just because I work for GE), even if they won't get any of the credit.

The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. We calculate that a reduction in incarceration rates just to the level we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards) would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year, with the large majority of these savings accruing to financially squeezed state and local governments. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.

Good to know the US is still #1 at something, right? China and India got nothing on us.

The real mark of a developed nation is how many minorities you keep in your prisons... right?

Patrick McGeehan at the New York Times recently wrote about a New York Fed study finding that studying economics makes you a Republican. The headline conclusion is that the more economics classes you take, the more likely you are to be a Republican. Majoring in economics or business is also more likely to make you a Republican. (See Table 2 in the original paper.) The study is based on thousands of observations of undergraduates at four large universities over three decades, so it is focused on undergraduate-level economics.

How peculiar. If anything, economics has made me more liberal. It gave me a perspective I didn't really have before. I'd never really sat down and thought about things like income inequality before. 

Economics also taught me that free market theory and reality are completely different. It seems to me like most Republicans like to talk about economic solutions based on theory, despite the fact that most of the implicit assumptions that make that theory valid have been violated.

Recently there has been a public outcry against astronomical executive salaries. The basic public sentiment is that it seems unfair that people make so much money for mismanaging our money, especially when it is so difficult to see how bankers’ talents and abilities justify their compensation. Naturally, it’s particularly offensive when executives receive high bonuses after disastrous performances, or, worse, when the bonuses come from taxpayers’ money courtesy of government bailouts.

Not surprisingly, bankers have fought back, claiming that the high salaries are required to attract the best and brightest to crucial, high-stress, high-skill positions, and that the most talented and valuable bankers would go elsewhere if salaries were capped. It is your basic free market argument: if they can’t recruit and retain the best minds in business, these minds will simply go elsewhere, leaving us with less qualified people in charge of the economy—and that, in the end, would send us all down the tube.

Rather than seeing this as an ideological debate between self-serving bankers on one side and morally outraged taxpayers on the other, it is more useful to ask what we really know about the relationships between very large bonuses and job performance.

Maybe the "most talented and valuable bankers" should go elsewhere. Most of the value they are creating is for themselves.

This is a great read though. I'm definitely going to pick up the book when it lands tomorrow. I love reading about studies in economics that produce completely unexpected results.

The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

Really great article about the basic economics of automobiles. It's short and worth a quick read. I really love this kind of practical economic analysis. It's the kind of thinking more product teams need to do (and more agencies need to think about when positioning products for brands). Most consumer understand trade offs, but they don't usually consider the intricacies and how they play out over time. Why not make it explicit in the creative?

First, there are profound public interests in having more energy options. Our national security, economic health and environment are at issue. These are not primary motivations for private-sector investments, but they merit a public commitment.

Second, the nature of the energy business requires a public commitment. A new generation of television technology might cost $10 million to develop. Because those TVs can be built on existing assembly lines, that risk-reward calculus makes business sense. But a new electric power source can cost several billion dollars to develop and still carry the risk of failure. That investment does not compute for most companies.

Third, the turnover in our power system is very slow. Power plants last 50 years or more, and they are very cheap to run once built, meaning there is little market for new models.

It is understandable, then, why private-sector investments in clean energy technology are so small. Yet, while it may make sense for individual companies to make these choices, accepting the status quo would condemn our country to very bad options.

Gates has been talking a lot about reshaping energy policy. I find that pretty refreshing. I wonder if he intends on backing any particular initiatives himself. He definitely has the funds.

I find his argument for why companies haven't embraced R&D for new energy technologies rather convincing. A lot of those same arguments applied, at one time, to the current technologies behind modern computers and the Internet itself. Without government intervention we might not have the transistor (much less the iPad) or the Internet. Perhaps we need an energy policy similar to the telecommunications policy that put a telephone line in every home.