March 28, 2024

Car Sharing Grows With Fewer Strings Attached

Once he gets to his destination, Mr. Clemens parks the car on the street and forgets about it.

He relies exclusively on two car-sharing services, DriveNow and Car2Go. “I use this three to four times a day,” he said, as he dropped off a colleague in front of a wine bar in the German capital’s Mitte district on a recent Sunday evening. “To get to work, for business meetings, going out to a bar. I like it because it’s one-way.”

Car sharing has been around for decades in Europe and has caught on in the United States with Zipcar. These station-based car-sharing services require members to pick up vehicles from a particular place, which may or may not be convenient. Users usually need to reserve cars in advance for prearranged, prepaid blocks of time and, when they are done with the car, they have to return it to the same place — all factors that have limited car sharing’s attractiveness.

Berlin, though, has become the largest one-way, car-sharing city in the world. One-way or free-floating services, which recently started in the United States, use GPS and smartphone apps for far more flexible car sharing. Cars are parked on city streets, and users pick up cars parked nearest to them. Instead of bringing the car back to a lot, users leave it wherever they find parking near their destination. They are charged for the amount of time they spend driving.

These new systems have been making an impression. Since the first commercial one-way car-sharing systems started in Germany two years ago, 183,000 people have signed up, according to Bundesverband CarSharing — a large number, considering that long-established car-sharing systems in Germany have 262,000 members. Car2Go has started service in 11 North American cities including Austin, Tex., Seattle and Washington. DriveNow is in San Francisco, but it uses the older station-based model.

“It’s going to alter what car sharing is,” said Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “We didn’t have the technology to do this in the ’90s.”

Two of Germany’s biggest automakers are squarely behind the idea. DriveNow is a joint venture of BMW and the car rental company Sixt, and Car2Go is a subsidiary of Daimler. (In the United States, DriveNow is solely BMW’s venture.)

“We grew up having everything; maybe our parents had two cars. And now, with the current generation, there’s a trend toward shared economies,” said Michael Fischer, a spokesman for DriveNow in Germany. “As a car manufacturer, do you want to lose this group? Or offer them something? Because, apparently, you cannot sell to them.”

Car2Go, which uses fleets of Daimler’s Smart cars, pioneered the one-way model with a pilot project in Ulm, Germany, in 2009. “More and more, people in cities don’t want their own cars. But in many ways, car sharing was unattractive,” said Andreas Leo, a spokesman for Car2Go in Europe. “It was hard to reach, you had to book in advance, you had to pay a monthly fee whether you used the car or not. We looked at the technology and decided to develop car sharing without these restrictions.”

Now in 21 cities, Car2Go puts its worldwide membership at 400,000. Berlin, with 1,200 cars, has the company’s largest fleet. DriveNow, whose fleet is made up of Minis and other BMWs, is active in four German cities with 700 cars in Berlin.

It doesn’t cost much to join; the idea is that a short trip should cost less than a taxi. DriveNow costs about $39 to register and 32 to 46 cents a minute to drive. The Car2Go registration fee is about $27 and 39 cents a minute to drive.

One-way car sharers tend to be about 30 years old, male and technophiles. Both Car2Go and DriveNow, however, report that the longer they are in a city, the more women and older people join. “It is a new kind of mobility, a new stage of mobility, especially for young people,” said Christoph Menzel, a professor with the Institute for Traffic Management at the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/business/global/one-way-car-sharing-gains-momentum.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Link by Link: Dealing With an Identity Hijacked on the Online Highway

For those not in on the joke, Mr. Santorum’s torment is that when you look up his last name on Google, and the Bing search engine as well, you encounter a made-up definition of “Santorum” meant to ridicule him in a way that isn’t remotely fit to be described in a family newspaper.

And Mr. Santorum has responded in a way that only holds himself up to more ridicule. He has taken aim at Google, telling the Web site Politico last week: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their Web site or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle, but I suspect that’s not true.”

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The immediate reaction to Mr. Santorum’s statement has largely been, “How quaint. He thinks he can get Google to fix the Internet for him if he asks?” Mr. Santorum could have hurt his cause more only if he had told the company’s officials to roll up their sleeves and put a plug in the tubes carrying the offensive material.

Google had its own response to Mr. Santorum: “Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Web,” the company explained helpfully, concluding with a summation of its philosophy: “We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”

Its advice? “Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly,” the company wrote. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the Web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”

That advice is particularly unhelpful in Mr. Santorum’s case, however, since the new definition of “Santorum” was explicitly created by Dan Savage — the editorial director of the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger and inspiration for the anti-gay bullying campaign “It Gets Better” — to punish him for his comments in 2003 on gay marriage.

In an interview with The A.P., Mr. Santorum, who was then a senator from Pennsylvania, listed other types of relationships that likewise should not be recognized by the government: “That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

Mr. Savage did not respond to an e-mail asking how he would react if Mr. Santorum were to ask him to remove the mocking definition, but on his paper’s blog he has shown no sign of relenting. In August, he took note of criticisms of him from the right and wrote they “can say whatever they like about us,” adding, “but we’re not allowed to challenge or mock them because that wouldn’t be civil.”

But Mr. Savage’s thoughts should be beside the point. The question is best directed at the search engines. And Google’s defense — that the behavior of its ever-improving algorithm should be considered independent of the results it produces in a particular controversial case — has a particularly patronizing air, especially when it comes to hurting living, breathing people.

That’s not to say that Google’s beliefs aren’t consistent. In 2004, according to a history of Google, “In the Plex,” by Steven Levy, Sergey Brin was tempted to be subjective after receiving complaints that a search for “Jew” gave an anti-Semitic Web site as its first result.

He was angered by the results, but as Mr. Levy tells it: “The algorithms had spoken, and Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. ‘I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,’ he said. ‘It is a bad technology practice.’ ”

But there was a case similar to Mr. Santorum’s where an offensive image of Michelle Obama was dropped from the top results. A search for “Michelle Obama” led viewers to a grotesquely racist photo much reported in 2009. Google placed its own ad above those results, saying: “We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google. Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet.”

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Again, it was the algorithm that took the hit, and washed away accountability.

That the offensive Michelle Obama photo no longer shows up today is not because of specific filtering, Google said at the time the change was detected, but rather a reflection of a better algorithm.

The blog Search Engine Land, which has followed the many twists and turns in offensive search results, explained the change in an August post as follows: “If you’re wondering why the offensive image doesn’t show up anymore on searches for ‘michelle obama,’ Google says it’s because of algorithmic improvements, not any specific filtering on her name. The spokesperson said that the company’s internal metrics show that they’re doing a much better job of identifying the authoritativeness of individual images — and the offensive image is not authoritative for Michelle Obama’s name.”

By those lights, it is hard to understand how the current rankings for a search of Santorum are authoritative — who exactly would type in that word genuinely curious to learn about a made-up term as opposed to a controversial candidate for president?

Douglas Bowman, Google’s first outside designer, wrote on his personal blog in 2009 after leaving the company of his experience trying to instill an aesthetic vision there, recounting the now legendary story of Google’s testing 41 shades of blue to see which was the best.

“When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems,” he wrote candidly. “Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data.”

To say that Google is losing something by neglecting the human touch isn’t to mean that the algorithm isn’t reflecting humanity — after all, a motivated person created the page that tops the results for “Santorum.” But it is putting the opportunistic and sensationalistic ahead of a rare human quality: discretion.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=dbc68e03726b26fe12faf2b012eede27