CAT is great. But really there is not enough of it to make it convenient for regular use by more people. We need a real transportation solution that is not only green but incredibly practical. A lot of folks cringe at the thought of using public transportation. But the fact is, it’s a lot less stressful to sit in a subway car or train for an hour or so than it is to navigate I-285 traffic hell for the same amount of time. In fact, having public transportation makes your morning commute a time you can prepare yourself for a good day’s work instead of the time you spend contemplating the consequences of road rage and feeling beat before your day even starts.

If we don’t do something now in Savannah, we are going to be just like Atlanta, that is, if we want to sustain any kind of growth. Savannians are understandably hesitant to fully embrace sprawl-style mass destruction of its aesthetic.  We love our city. We want to grow but we sure as hell don’t want to grow up to be just another nowhere sprawl town (not that we think less of people in those towns. You play the cards you get and if you’re in a sprawl town, I’d suggest you play your cards to find ways to make it better).

We are one of the greenest cities in the U.S. Civic architects come to downtown and to drive under our tree canopies to learn from our example and to contemplate potential for a better way to grow cities. Of course we are far from perfect but the great thing about Savannah is that we are like a history book of civic development — good and bad and everything in between going back almost 300 years.

At this time, we can’t justify something like an elevated monorail system or a mag-lev train (although what do you think a 200 MPH train from here to Atlanta to Jacksonville, Charleston and Charlotte would do for our growth?) and we sure can’t justify a subway system.

BUT WE CAN JUSTIFY PERSONAL RAPID TRANSPORT!!

The cost per mile of track is only about $6 million to $16 million + about $100K to $300k per station. Compare this to the PRESENT cost of building a highway — $19 million to $1 BILLION per mile!

Rather than spend the next 2 pages writing about it, here is a brief video about a PRT for London Heathrow.

A long-running proof of concept came from the West Virginia University, where PRT has been going since the 70’s. Sooo.. keep in mind that the ones in this video are old.

The cost for building a PRT line that runs the length of Abercorn is LESS than expanding it or building some kind of perimeter. Please let us know what you think by posting comments on this article. We will add more links and info to this page later.

kaht Emerging Tech, Green Industry

I am a big fan of free software and what the FSF is trying to do.  But the legendary founder of the FSF, Richard Stallman’s recent remarks on cloud computing should be addressed, specifically since we work with cloud computing here at Huytech.

Clearly it is a risk VS benefits issue. We believe that the benefits of cloud computing, when it comes to business applications far outweigh the risks that he mentions.  It is not true that we have always been able to do what cloud systems do today. We have never had the level of access and convenience we have today. We have never had the sheer power of massive pipes and servers hosted in secure facilities at the price we get today.  We have never had the versatility of scaling resources on command or on demand. The only way to have this kind of power in the past was to host your own secure, Tier 4 facility with millions of dollars of equipment and staff.

Much of cloud computing is accessible today in terms of pricing because of software that the FSF has brought into production.  Packages like Apache or Linux and PHP all have components that would not have reached their level of sophistication and reliability without the help of the FSF community and GNU licensing.

True — products like Google Docs and Gmail are not “free software” in the same sense that Open Office is free software. And products like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 could all of a sudden meet a spike in pricing at the whim of the company that runs it. But there are others who provide similar services who will keep the prices in check. Although many of these products are not free, the equivalent “Free Software” configuration on hardware with equivalent performance and reliability specifications would cost much, much more to own and maintain.

So Dr. Stallman, with all due respect, we disagree that the cloud is the wrong direction. You helped bring it to us and although it may cost some freedoms, the sacrifice is not without its rewards in considerable benefits for businesses and individuals.

kaht Emerging Tech, Web Technology