christophe thinks out loud

On the Future of Aviation

My wife and I just got back from a trip to Kansas City, on Midwest Airlines. The previous times we had to go to KC, we flew America West, and the experience was truly horrible: late departures, equipment problems in Phoenix, etc., etc. Midwest was great: On-time departure, early arrival, comfortable seats (two by two in an MD-80), and pleasant service. They make you buy your meals, but that’s fine with me: I can bring my own food; I can't bring my own seats.

I was even willing to forgive them the detail that their web site doesn’t work with Safari.

The days of the huge hub-and-spoke airlines are coming to an end. The supposed economies of scale in large airlines are proving to be an illusion. We’re moving towards a model in which smaller airlines serve a relatively limited of routes with point-to-point service, and it can’t come a moment too soon.

Public Transit: The Good, The Bad

Nextbus is cool. It’s a service that provides real-time arrival information for selected lines on a variety of public transportation systems, including San Francisco’s. Very straight-forward design, and very handy for deciding if you have time to continue to find that book you wanted to take to work.

To quibble, it should support more bus lines than it does. It focuses on high-frequency lines, but it’s the low-frequency lines where you really need this information . . . if a bus only comes once every 20 minutes during the day, you want to be sure you’re on it. Technology is not perfect, and sometimes a bus will appear that wasn’t on the schedule. But it’s still very useful.

Before I moved to London in 2000, I lived on TransitInfo. The information was cleanly presented and easy to find. The clickable BART schedule map was particularly nifty. No flashy graphics or designer-ego-enhancements, just straight-forward transit information.

By the time I moved back in 2001, it sucked. Layers upon layers of clicks, gratuitous hierarchical menus, pull-downs, and typing. No clickable maps. Lots of dead-end navigation (“this section is under construction” . . . it couldn’t be more 1997 if it had that little yellow men-working sign). This is what happens when a bloated, moribund government institution with turf issues gets ahold of a valuable resource.

And you can always just wind up the key on the back

When we lived in the UK, the Smart Car was just starting to catch on. Smart had a dealership in the Green Park Underground station, which shows you just how compact those things are . . . but I was able to fit into one just fine, all 6' of me.

I’d buy one in a heartbeat, especially living in San Francisco. If they made one as a hybrid, it would be darn near the perfect city car. Sadly, DaimlerChrysler has said that they aren’t planning to sell them in the US until 2006.

It’s just a myth that SUVs are somehow safer than other cars, even though we still have idiots here in America who seem to view the road as a Monster Truck Pull. Being able to park in a microscopic space is something every city-dweller can relate to. And now that gasoline prices are finally getting high enough that people have to think about how much they’re burning, the fuel economy matters, too. It’s time. And I think one would look great with a foam-rubber key glued to the back.