Travel
Improving Mass Transportation Efficiency using Credit Cards
In these last weeks I have taken multiple subway, trains and busses, all across the US. For each of them, before boarding, I had to purchase some sort of ticket/pass with enough credits to go from my departure point to the destination.
On the California’s BART, for example, one is required to purchase a single-use ticket with enough credit before boarding. The system is a bit cumbersome for everyone. There is a list of destinations reachable from the current station attached to each tickets selling machine. Each station is marked with a price. Once you have figured out your cost of transportation you have to put money in the machine, or swipe your debit card, and then add/remove money until you reach the desired amount. When that is done, click “print the ticket”. NJ Transit has similar vending machines, but at least they ask you first where you want to go, and then require you to insert enough credits.
Since all those tickets contain a magnetic stripe, which is read by a reader at the gates somewhere before boarding and after leaving the train/subway, what about we skip the tickets all together for who wants to pay with credit card?
At boarding time you swipe the credit card at the gate, instead of the ticket. The system remembers time, place and credit card numbers. Once arrived, swipe again the card at the exit gate, and the system calculates the amount due and bills it on the card.
No ticket necessary, lots of time saved, and trees spared.
As an additional benefit, there will be a good amount of data on how people move between stations and at which times. These datapoints will be a goldmine for who organizes the routes and schedules since will allow a great deal of optimizations which will reduce costs, inverse efficency and ultimately also make passengers happier.
And for all of you who are still freaked out by “big brother theories”, there will still be a way to pay cash, but trust me, it’s not going to help you stay “under the radar”.
The Boulder Creek Inspires People..even to Pee!
Today, walking by the Boulder Creek, I saw some people doing a photo shoot. It happens often around here, especially when young couples take their engagement pictures. It was inspiring.
Apparently, I was not the only one inspired by it.
The man in the orange coat decided to pee in the river next to the couple’s photo shoot in full daylight!
Does British Airways train its New Jersey Attendants?
This year for my Christmas trip I will have the pleasure to fly oversea with British Airways. Although I have taken many of their planes in the past, it was always for short trips, and I never tested first-hand if their in-flight experience really justifies the usually higher prices.
Their reservation website definitively got better in the last years. It is faster and shows you the very convenient 3-days-around-your-dates tabled view first introduced by Orbitz. However, I do not appreciate that they make you pay $15 or $30 to pick your seat more than 24 hours before departure.
Today I received their reminder-email which suggested me to fill out an immigration form online (I am sure I will have to do it again at the airport but I am hopeful) and pick my seat (for the $15~$30 mentioned above). The most hilarious part was the flight details. Apparently, as you can see from the image attached, I will have “Responsive, highly trained cabin crew” on all my flights besides the one which leaves from New Jersey.
I guess the folks at MTV had their reasons when they recently decided to launch the reality series Jersey Shore.
Twitter ADs, SSD Disks and Bad Italian Behaviors
Since FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook, Twitter started reducing their access to the tweet stream with the clear intent of penalizing the company. It is obviously a good move from Twitter, and although the authors of TechCrunch complains about it, I can not really see why they should not be doing it.
Apparently the first tier of Last.fm’s servers uses SSD disks to increase throughput of the data. They use those servers as cache, pushing on there the songs that people are likely to listen the most for the day. Not a bad idea, considering that the prices are going down (e.g., about $280 for 160Gb).
IZEA is pushing for its sponsored tweets model. We all knew this moment would have arrived and that is not the first attempt to monetize the stream. People already complain about it but there are already millions of blogs out there created with the sole purpose of making money so what is the difference?
I spent a lot of good summers in a Club Med village in Caprera, an enchanted island of Sardegna. Next to our residence there was a cool-looking US Navy base. In the past few years both sites have been closed with the promise of improvements but everything has yet to happen. Some lights have been on for years by now!
A 25 years old guy in a small town of Italy faked to be sick at work to be visited by the nearby doctor (a female). Once in her clinic he sexually harassed her. How can people think to be able to get away with these things?
