
The Commute of the Future? Ford Is Working on It - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/business/the-commute-of-the-future-ford-is-working-on-it.html?ref=business
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rdl
This failed as submarine PR; it made me think badly of both Ford and IDEO, for
being behind the times.

Google Maps already does all of this. A wordy NYT article describing a
meandering and expensive process to build a very obvious piece of software
isn't a realistic portrayal of the capabilities of the developers, but makes
me feel like they're idiots, out of touch, and incapable/incompetent.

If you're going to do submarine PR, at least make it make you look good.

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na85
Ford hasn't done anything good since the original Mustang, if you ask me.

An outmoded company that loses money on all its cars save the F-150? Rather
than being bailed out, it should have been left to rot on the vine.

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rdl
I thought Ford was the only one which didn't need a bailout.

~~~
vorotato
They didn't take a bailout, I don't know what they're talking about.

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burkemw3
I'm a tree hugging city-dweller. The article's beginning of bashing my regular
transit really turned me off.

I don't think $10 is representative. A 30-day CTA pass is $100 and a 1-year
Divvy pass is $99. For people that use these transit options regularly, this
trip sound like it would have been easy. The train was really so hot and rank
on a brisk October day?

I agree that subways, bikes, and buses are not ideal. They are what we have in
mass quantities right now. I do want better transit in the future. Tell me the
story about that grand future. I don't want to bash the present non-car
transit, when there are no alternatives yet.

Once I pushed through, I did appreciate the categorization of 3 commuters:
Time Trumpers, Everyday Improvers, and Experience Seekers.

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imglorp
The article's public transit bashing felt like the beginning of an
informercial: an inept, clueless, and frustrated person failing at some common
task a six year old can do.

Plenty of pubic transit systems are clean, punctual, and well mapped to the
point that plenty of citydwellers don't own cars. I've even toured DC and
Boston without a car, first time visitor both times.

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kijin
The commute of the future is drastically less commuting in general. Either
because more people will telecommute, or because more people will live closer
to work (urban revitalization), or perhaps because fewer people will need to
work at all (basic income).

I'm also somewhat worried about what the decline of individual car ownership
will mean for the ever increasing power of surveillance that governments and
corporations have on our lives. Rideshare apps will probably track every
single ride whether you like it or not, a hundred times more accurately and
comprehensively than cameras on streets. More and more public transportation
networks are also transitioning to electronic payment systems that can record
all of your trips and mine that data; gone are the days of anonymous paper
tickets. And I wouldn't be surprised if bicycle renting services of the future
equipped all their bikes with always-on trackers.

Sure, we already carry iTrackers all over the place with us, but this is a
whole new level of virtually unavoidable surveillance. My parents' old car
might have been expensive to maintain and massively harmful to the
environment, but at least it was too dumb to report your every movement to Big
Brother (especially on cameraless rural roads).

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work-on-828
> more people will live closer to work

Only if cities relax height restrictions on residential construction.

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ilaksh
We should not be commuting 45 minutes. In the future, you telecommute or live
in communities designed to minimize commutes. Traveling long distance should
basically be an edge-case and might involve something totally different from
short-distance transport like an evacuated tube train e.g. "HyperLoop".

[http://tinyvillages.org](http://tinyvillages.org)

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barney54
It is very difficult to minimize commutes because of all of the things you are
simultaneously minimizing and maximizing. In two income families, you have two
different job locations, with kids you have school considerations (as well as
distance to grandma's), you have housing considerations (size of house, lot,
urban, suburban, ex-urban) and more. But just the issue with minimizing two
commutes is difficult.

I hate commuting, but I love riding my bike to work. But because I need to
drop off or pick up the kids, it means I have to drive on some days.

My wife and I choose our house for a number of factors and due to the fact
that DC has some of the worst traffic in the country is commute is about 50
minutes to and hour each way.

~~~
dilemma
SkyCity One.

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SilasX
You mean, a Ford PR agent is submarining an article for the NYT to parrot
without disclosure.

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sandworm101
Commuting isn't an evil. Commuting is part of separating work and life. It's
about living where you want regardless of where your job requires you to be.
Once upon a time working people stayed with a single employer for many years.
Chances were that their home moved many times. Commuting allowed that to
happen. Today, the situation is flipped. We bounce between jobs but our home
remains. Commuting now allows that too.

If you want to live close to work then fine, that's your choice. But some
people want different things. An hour-long commute each day is for many an
acceptable price to live where and how they like. From a sustainability and
productive angle it would probably be best if we all slept in the room above
the shop. That was the 18th century and we got rid of it for good reason. So
give Ford credit for seeking to improve the commute when so many today seem
bent on its eliminating.

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lucaspiller
> But some people want different things. An hour-long commute each day is for
> many an acceptable price to live where and how they like.

I think most people being vocal against commuting and working in offices will
agree that's it's up to you, but at the moment the issue is society is very
much optimised for people who like commuting. Poor public transport, remote
office parks with nothing around, offices in the city centre where even tiny
apartments are unaffordable, etc.

If you like commuting then that's great, but the idea of commuting an hour+
each day is my idea of hell :D

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maxxxxx
I really hope commuting will go away. It's such a waste of life to sit in a
car hours per day.

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yogthos
Exactly, the vast majority of people who work in cities use computers to do
their job. The whole idea of offices is a holdover from the last generation.
You don't need to have people come to the same physical space to work together
nowadays.

The other argument that gets thrown around is that managers want to make sure
people are working. First, this is hugely insulting, as it implies that the
company doesn't trust people to be capable of managing their time. Second,
it's completely ineffective as people are perfectly capable of finding ways to
waste time at the office. There are far better ways of doing performance
metrics than making people sit in the same room together.

~~~
maxxxxx
Regarding making sure people are working: In my sh.tty open office layout it's
pretty much guaranteed that nothing of any complexity will get done. The only
thing that can be measured is pure attendance.

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YZF
You heard it here first. :) Virtual Reality is the commute of the future.

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EC1
Hahaha those perfect post-its. Wonder how much that ran them.

