Archive for June 3rd, 2008

At the end of this recent New York Times piece, (the place where one often finds the most interesting material), Google’s chief economist Hal Varian notes that Google traffic tends to surge, perhaps not surprisingly, during bad weather and strikes. “Bad weather is good for Google,” he said, “as long as it is not too bad.”

The corollary of this is that road traffic tends to dip during things like bad weather and strikes (and it would be interesting to compare the drop-off in one to the gain in another). So basically, the more people on Google, the more people who aren’t on the road, one traffic supplanted by another. But in a discussion last week with the good folks at Dash, the only “internet-connected” GPS and real-time traffic device, one of its executives pointed out to me that they tend to see increased usage of the device during peak driving hours, which is as you might expect (and I’d love to see the visualization data of all those Dash users, sort of a massive version of “cabspotting”). But as the device also features Internet searching (via Yahoo), the sort of dynamic described by Varian might not hold: Just because there’s a lot of people searching the net doesn’t mean they’re all at home. They might be on the road.

One interesting potential usage, down the road, for Dash’s device is that a company (say, BestBuy) might want to know not only how often drivers were searching for BestBuy stores, but then how often the searcher had physically driven to the parking lot of BestBuy. This is the road traffic version of the “click-through”: The Drive-To.

“Anger and frustration are emotions Edgardo Romero has learned to suppress when, on a bad day, it takes him two hours to drive to work, a trip he swears he can walk in half the time.”

This comes from a recent piece in the Financial Times about bad traffic in Caracas, Venezuela.

Traffic is legendarily bad in Caracas, but the subtle question raised by Mr. Romero’s quote is that, if he knew he could always make the trip on foot in half the time, why he would ever choose to drive? Let’s weigh pros and cons. One the one side, the car: Expensive, slow, tiring, stress-raising, no exercise. On the other, walking. Fast, cheap, and good for you.

Caracas traffic has one culprit: Oil. Venezuela is home to the world’s cheapest gas, a mere five cents a litre, according to The Economist. With gas that cheap, time is the only disincentive to driving (and as the above quote shows, people are inexact managers of time). But it’s not just the price of gas: The oil boom has also put loads of new cars into a city that was ill-prepared to handle them.

The FT article goes on to note that many blame President Hugo Chavez for the traffic woes, and it brings up one of the stranger trades I’ve heard of since that story about the minor league baseball pitcher who was traded for 10 bats: Venezuela has been sending cheap fuel to London to help subsidize bus trips for lower-income people, while London has reciprocated by sending planning experts to Caracas to sort out the mess.

The irony of Venezuela’s cheap and subsidized gas is that, according to one IMF study quoted in the aforementioned Economist piece, the richest 20% of households received 42% of fuel subsidies, while the lowest 20% received less than 10%. Given that the wealthier classes in Venezuela are among the most committed anti-Chavistas, his policy is benefiting most those who oppose him most. By raising gas prices and using the proceeds to build things like bus-rapid transport, he could ease traffic, and the people who he might upset with such a measure don’t much like him to begin with (and besides, what driver doesn’t complain about congestion?)