I came across a YouTube video, and like most stories that end with me hunched over a YouTube video, this begins with some banter on Twitter.
As you may already know, Twitter is one of my favorite online destinations. I was crowdsourcing a research project on professional planning.
I asked the Twitterverse to name some rules that have had negative outcomes on the built and or natural environment either by design or by accident. I was getting some really good engagement, and then someone pointed me to a story in Los Angeles about tracking people’s movements when they rent a scooter or a bike.
It seems the brains behind the tracking program was a man named John Ellis, and his specialty is Big Data. He gave a TEDx Talk called “The Zero Dollar Car: How Big Data will transform the transportation industry.”
Big data is one of those abstract terms professional planners and engineers haven’t come to grips with yet. It’s about as vague as the phrase context-sensitive design was 20 years ago. Big data means different things to different people.
Cities and counties want to make data-driven decisions with their infrastructure. In other words, they want to know where you live, where you shop, where you work, and all the streets and sidewalks and Alleyways you used to get there.
It comes from a good place. They want to know which streets need more bike lanes, curb and gutter, or whatever other improvements.
Now just to be clear, I don’t know the details of the Los Angeles tracking program. But this talk that John Ellis gave is an important one. He talks about things that are obvious to the private sector (advertisers and digital marketers), but not so obvious to the public sector (government agencies like public works and planning).
So here’s why the Zero Dollar Car idea is so important…
Modern cars have tons of sensors in them that relate to road surfaces, the weather, the wear and tear of wheels and engine parts, and of course, the location of the vehicle.
This data has enormous value for a bunch of different groups that would pay handsomely for access.
Imagine you have two price points for the car you’re about to purchase:
- pay $40,000 for the new car, and they don’t track or sell any of your data
- pay zero dollars for the new car and they track and sell all your data.
Within those bookends are all sorts of price levels depending on the amount of data you want to sell off.
Anyone who uses a standard smartphone in the year 2020 gave up on personal privacy. Even if you don’t use a smartphone, if you use Google products or Facebook products, you signed away your personal data.
There’s a business model here for transport and it’s worth exploring.