Day: December 6, 2016

Even if you don’t hate your commute—even on the days free of gridlock, packed buses, and sweaty uphill bike rides—it’s probably tinged by a least a little drudgery. Not your favorite part of day, perhaps?

Maybe, though, you’ll feel better knowing you’re taking part in a powerful economic movement. Like, literally. “The best way to measure functional economic geography is through commutes,” says Alasdair Rae, an urban and regional analyst with the University of Sheffield. Commutes, for all their crumminess, double as a measure of local health and wealth.

That’s why Rae and Dartmouth College geographer Garrett Dash Nelson zoomed in on commutes in their newest study of American megaregions, published this week in PLoS ONE. Complete with colorful and compelling maps, their research shows that Americans’ commutes aren’t defined by city and state lines. Rather, commuters move within megaregions—massive blobs that center on major metropolitan areas, paying no mind to political borders.

Sidebar, for math: The researchers started with an American Community Survey dataset of more than four million commuter flows, marking the travel patterns of 130 million Americans. Laying this data (which comes from 2006 to 2010) on a map creates the kind of visual you see above. That’s the Twin Cities—aka Minneapolis and St. Paul, in Minnesota—in the middle of that explosion. Yellow represents the high volume, short commutes, reds the longer routes less taken. The map depicts daily schleps of 50 miles or less.

This Spirograph-esque blob doesn’t help planners all that much, because it doesn’t reveal the contours of the megaregion, or which routes are the most vital to keeping the area’s workers on the move.

Rae and Nelson solved that problem using algorithmic community portioning software that isolates the connections between each of the country’s 74,000-odd census tracts. The result is a little more specific—as you see with the Twin Cities on the below map, what looks like one big commuting explosion is actually made up of many smaller commuting explosions. A planner might look at this and think: Hmm, there aren’t enough commutes (aka economic links) to justify building that light rail from Minneapolis to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, after all. 

A word of warning: As with cakes, smoothies, and Facebook, maps are only as good as the stuff that goes into them. Algorithms, Rae says, carry the biases of their creators. “Maps and other forms of spatial data visualizations are of course not value neutral,” he and Nelson write in their paper. “They work cognitively in complex ways.” The researchers acknowledge there’s plenty of room for map tweaks. That said, their algorithmic method should have produced a “pretty good match for the country’s economic geography,” says Rae.

So there’s reason to think about the country as divided into megaregions, rather than cities or states (though it’s worth noting that this study finds a lot of commuting activity within state lines). Too bad the the country ain’t always so great at planning regionally.

The places that do have robust regional planning organizations can get hamstrung by crazy complex legal and bureaucratic rules, so the decisions they make don’t have a lot of practical oomph. If they did, megaregions might be able more effectively pool their political capital and funds to create transportation solutions—a multi-city high-speed rail system, perhaps—that make it easier for people to get to work. Because as Rae and Nelson’s work shows, the nation’s most important economic centers feed from many communities.

The researchers hope these maps will give people—and the officials who make decisions for them—a better idea of how their region functions, and the impetus they need to reach across state, county, and metropolitan lines to come up with mobility solutions that work for everyone who hits the road in the morning. Because there is nobility and purpose in your commute. There is even nobility and purpose in the commute of the dude who cut in front of you on the highway.

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Amazon has a new service that makes Google Fiber seem slow. And it rides on 18 wheels.

Yes, today’s speediest internet connections make it faster to download movies than to go to the store and buy them. But downloading or uploading truly large amounts of data can still take days, months, or even years—think a film studio’s entire video archives or the satellite imagery collections of government agencies. That lag is a problem for Amazon, which wants companies to store their information in its lucrative cloud. But it’s also a natural one for Amazon—a logistics company at heart—to solve. So this week the company announced one of its strangest ideas yet: a tractor trailer that will transport your data to Amazon’s own data centers. (Insert information superhighway joke here.)

Amazon announced the new service, confusingly named Snowmobile, at its Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week. It’s designed to shuttle as many as 100 petabytes–around 100,000 terabytes–per truck. That’s enough storage to hold five copies of the Internet Archive (a comprehensive backup of the web both present and past), which contains “only” about 18.5 petabytes of unique data.

Amazon has long let businesses ship hard disks full of data to Amazon for uploading into the retail giant’s cloud. But copying 100 petabytes to individual hard drives isn’t practical. Snowmobile acts like a giant hard drive that comes to you.

Using multiple semis to shuttle data around might seem like overkill. But for such massive amounts of data, hitting the open road is still the most efficient way to go. Even with a one gigabit per-second connection such as Google Fiber, uploading 100 petabytes over the internet would take more than 28 years. At an average speed of 65 mph, on the other hand, you could drive a Snowmobile from San Francisco to New York City in about 45 hours—about 4,970 gigabits per second. That doesn’t count the time it takes to actually transfer the data onto Snowmobile–which Amazon estimates will take less than 10 days–or from the Snowmobile onto Amazon’s servers. But all told, that still makes the truck much, much faster. And because Amazon has data centers throughout the country, your data probably won’t need to travel cross-country anyway.

“On the security side, Snowmobile incorporates multiple layers of logical and physical protection, including chain-of-custody tracking and video surveillance,” Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post announcing the service. In other words, Amazon is keeping a close eye on your data while it’s on the road. Each truck is weather-proofed and tamper-resistant and all data is encrypted, Barr says.

The big question is whether there are many businesses out there who need or want such as service. Snowmobile is an outgrowth of an existing Amazon service called Snowball, in which Amazon sends customers an appliance that can hold 80 terabytes of data. Customers fill this up and ship it back to Amazon, which uploads it directly into its cloud.

Apparently Snowball wasn’t quite enough for some customers. In fact, Amazon seems to believe that some companies will need multiple Snowmobiles. The site advertises itself as capable of handling data at the exabytes scale—or by Amazon’s new measurement, ten truckloads.

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