How cars have shaped modern society…

vwgarage
A good friend, developer, proffesor and author friend of mine, Chris Lienberger, wrote a fabulous book titled “Option of Urbanism” a couple of years ago. One of the items I was stunned to learn is that GM designed and presented their vision of a future metropolis – centered around cars.

Some sixty years later, many of our cities resemble that comment.

It is interesting to see how some communities are dealing with this issue by designing parking structures that don’t resemble parking lots…

Thanks to Gizmodo.com for sharing with us this lot from VW and this automated lot in Russia complete with a photo gallery.

garagecar

Those of you interested in Chris’s book can purchase it here:

A great graphic example of competitive advantage

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Many of us know the story of how Southwest Airlines has remained so profitable against bigger airlines – it focuses on its competitive advantages – they fly one model plane, they cross-train their staff, they turn (term for time plane lands til it takes off) planes twice as fast as the industry standard, they cut costs on things that don’t matter and they offer exceptional customer service.

This graphic does a great job detailing how competitive advantage works – thanks to

Gizmodo.com for finding the article (click the Gizmodo link for the full size image).

APS’s dismal graduation rate

In a copyright story by the Albuquerque Journal, the headline read “State: Almost Half of Class of 2008 Didn’t Graduate” and was followed by “Roughly half the students who should have graduated with the class of 2008 failed to do so, prompting a call to action by the state’s education secretary.”

While the headline is alarming, the data underneath it is suspicious.

How do I know? I worked as a consultant a couple of years ago on an education study for a developer to understand what was gonig on with APS enrollment.

In meeting wiht APS staff demographers, it came out that they didn’t track APS students once they left the system. So if you move to Los Lunas, you didn’t graduate, if you change schools to St. Pius, you didn’t graduate, if you move to Boston, attended and graduate from M.I.T., negotiate world peace, and win the Nobel Peace Prize, yes, you guessed it, APS believes you “didn’t graduate”.

Assuming 5% of all American’s move in any given year, and a four year high school attendance, fully 20% of the APS students could have “not graduated”.

Maybe its time for APS to spend some time and money and track its most precious resource, its students…

Albuquerque loses a stately historic apartment community

abqjournal-castleapartments-080520091

Fire last night destroyed one of Albuquerque’s best loved medium sized apartment communities- the Castle Apartments. Located between downtown and old town at 1410 Central SW, the 20 unit apartment community caught fire around 8pm and continued to burn in the Wednesday morning.

Castle Apartments
Built in 1922, the 15,150 square foot apartments featured amazing built-ins and was considered by many of its former residents, some of the nicest apartments in the Duke City.
built ins at the Castle

Located just east of former mayor, Franz Huning’s estate, affectionally known as Huning Castle. The old Huning Castle estate was replaced in the a few years ago with the

As smoke blanketed downtown Albuquerque, News reports last night mistakenly indicated the newwer Huning Castle apartments were on fire, but later corrections indicated that residents from the Huning Castle apartments called in to the fire department about the fire at the Castle apartments.

Fortunatley no lives were lost, and our condolences go out to the families that own this historic gem and the residents who called it home.

Updated 8/6/2009

Channel 4 interviews the owner.