Category Archives: Technology

Admiring San Francisco’s Cable Car

In San Francisco for a conference. Every time I’m in the Bay Area, I am amazed about how different San Francisco is when compared to L.A. It feels a lot more like a European city.

I am fascinated by San Francisco’s cable car and every time I am in town, I have to make it a point to ride all four lines from beginning to end. I find it amazing that a system which by today’s standards would be considered completely unreliable, inefficient and slow was once a much admired marvel of innovation, and a great relief for the traffic challenges of its period. Cable cars are an example of centralized engineering. The problem: Steam engines, the power plants of the time, were too heavy and otherwise ill suited to be placed on small, urban vehicles. The solution: Make the engines stationary and place them in a central location. At this location, the steam engines drive long loops of steel cables, which run over a complex system of wheels and gearing and through shafts dug underneath San Francisco’s streets.

The cars have no motors or power source of their own. Instead, they passively latch on to the moving cable, which keeps moving along at a steady speed of 15 mph. A primitive friction clutch mechanism allows drivers to regulate the car’s speed. Thus, the engines at the central station drive all the cars around the city — a concept which reminds of the days of mainframe computing, before the PC revolution.

Such an engineering solution might seem antiquated and peculiar, but trust me: The cable car is a whole lot of fun and still the best way to move around the areas it serves.

Should you want to learn more about how cable cars work, I highly recommend a visit to San Francisco’s cable car museum, which is where the central gearing stations and the motors are located. (Sadly, the old steam engines have been replaced by electric motors, but otherwise, things still work as they always have.)

Another place worth a visit is the Wells Fargo Museum in the Financial District. The exhibition is well maintained and provides good insight into California’s pioneer era and the Gold Rush, a time in which what is now Wells Fargo Bank has its origin. Back then, Wells Fargo wasn’t really a bank. The company provided postal service, transportation by coach, gold trading services and access to the civilized world in what became known as the “Wild West”.

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Natural Disasters: Prosperity, Technology Save Lives

Only a few days after Hurricane Katrina had washed away New Orleans, its evil sister Rita sent 2.8 million people running from the Houston area. But in the end, Rita turned out to be a dud. The storm refugees (including some personal friends of mine) are already returning.

The nation’s response to Katrina and Rita has been much debated and will be scrutinized for a long time. One wonders how a nation which prides itself on its wealth, technological expertise and power may be reduced to chaos and incompetence in the face of disaster. On the other hand, to put things in perspective, one needs to look at the havoc caused by tropical storms in other parts of the world. In 1942, a hurricane in Bengal, India caused 40,000 deaths. In 1991, a cyclone in Bangladesh killed 139,000. The same country was hit by a cyclone in 1970, which cost 300,000 lives.

While the economic loss from “Katrita” will be gigantic, the loss of human life will be relatively small for storms of this size. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved by the communication system, the traffic infrastructure and above all, space technology which allows the remote tracking and forecasting of storms and makes timely evacuations possible.

Lives saved means survivors who need to be supplied with shelter, security, medicine and food in the short term, and jobs and housing in the long term. These are problems Bangladesh didn’t even need to deal with. There, 300,000 deaths also meant 300,000 fewer people to feed and clothe.

In the case of Katrina and Rita, science and technology have not been able to completely prevent the loss of life. But at least it was minimized dramatically.

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Dog Poop Returns

When I was a student in Vienna, I was often annoyed with the massive amount of dog excrement littering the streets. It’s really a stinking mess. Vienna’s famously feared old ladies, who seemed to own the majority of the city’s dogs and represented a sizable political lobby, never dreamed of cleaning up after their beloved little pets. Dogs are allowed in parks, and since there are few landscaped areas along the old streets and sidewalks, their leftovers are usually deposited on the sidewalk or between cars parked along the streets. Being somewhat radical and angry young men, we had all sorts of wild ideas about how to sanitize the problem — most of which are unsuitable for reciting here.

One idea we would never have dreamed of in these days: To take samples of the feces and match the DNA against a database, then fine the dog owner. The idea has recently been circulating in Europe, and I got to write a short blurb about it for the American magazine, Popular Science. (It’s here: A Pooper Scooper Law with Bite).

In L.A.’s wealthy neighborhoods, such problems seem rather strange. Not only are there plenty of landscaped areas, but the folks here conveniently have (mostly) Latino gardeners who get stuck with the unpleasant task of cleaning up. (In all fairness, some dog owners are actually responsible enough to do it themselves).

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