Empty trains due to lack of secure parking at 22nd Street Station

I live in San Francisco and drive a couple of miles to the 22nd Street train station to ride to Redwood City. It's the first stop going south out of SF. The train is great but really underused. Sometimes there are only a couple of other people in the front car.

Parking at the downtown station costs about $10 a day. Parking here is free.

Some of the people at work tell me they decided to take the train but drive by and can't find a parking space so they just hop on 280 and drive the 30 miles to work.


Actually there are always parking spaces but unless you get there really early then they are often sketchy. The station is built underneath 280 which is great in the rain but makes the area seem scarier after dark. My car has never been broken into but you can occasionally see the broken glass created by other break-ins.

What we need is some secure parking. I think many would be willing to pay for it. There are three people in my company of 30 who say they would take the train from here if there were secure parking. Lots of youngish people do get on the train here, lots of laptops, Yahoo! backpacks. My brother-in-law at eBay boards here a couple of times a week. I'm pretty sure that the popularity of this station started with the rise of Silicion Valley and it's easy to imagine that the same people who moved into the Mission, Potrero, and Noe Valley because it was the Valley side of SF are the same people taking the train from here.

I think that the authorities who are in charge of such things as parking and security and cleaning out around stations haven't really noticed how popular the station is. It could be much more popular.

One of the guys at work who boards here suggests that a multi-level lot be built over the bus depot next door. There is also a huge nearly vacant parking lot nearby at a company called Trayer that would work well.

Anyway, my sense is there are hundreds of people driving to the Valley who would switch to the train if we could figure out how to provide the parking for them. That translates into a quite a few tons of carbon that doesn't go into the air.

Bush asks for bigger army

Bush announced he wants to increase the number of troops in the army and marines over the long term. This is a smart move on his part and clearly paves the way for his surge proposal.

I think it's a very bad idea because more troops allow the president to get us into more situations like Iraq when we should at least be relying on UN actions. It does somewhat address the problem of troops having to extend their stay in Iraq so it will have public support.

The bright side is that this gives the Democrats a way to prove they are in support of the troops if they should decide to cut funding for Iraq. In that case I think the trade off would be worth it and the "more troops in the long term" decision will backfire on Bush.

Exiting Iraq - My Vietnam experience - 35 years ago

I was visiting my parents in my home town of Ada, Oklahoma last summer and ran across this clipping from the Stanford Daily, November 1971.

What I find interesting about this photo:

1. Where are the women? I don't remember it that way and certainly when things heated up in spring of 1972 that had shifted.

2. It's also strange how these two police trusted us enough to mix in with our little crowd. We even lent one of them our bullhorn according to the caption.

I was part of the group in the photo, a freshman, protesting the war in Vietnam. I'm in the upper left. The year before I played on the state champion football team. But by 1971, even a football player from Ada, Oklahoma knew that we should be out of Vietnam. I got a bad (low) draft lottery number in the summer of 1971 but luckily the draft was winding down and I barely missed that experience. I had no idea of what I would have done.

Iraq makes me very anxious. I protested before we went in, and when we went in. But I haven't done much since. At first it wasn't totally clear that that getting out immediately was the best thing. After all, we brought the war to them and we should stick around to make it right.

Now it's clear that we are just digging a deeper hole. It feels very much like Vietnam where there was a very strong argument that we had to stay to prevent more bloodshed. It's an awful situation but prolonging won't help.

I even remember that we introduced more troops into Vietnam even after the policy of slowly reducing our involvment was announced. As today the justification was that we have to improve the situation to make it possible to withdraw.

I was so glad when the Democrats won the House and Senate. The recent report also lowered my anxiety about the war, feeling that there's no way Bush is going to stay the course when so many are against him. I even imagined Bush asking the Iraqis to vote on whether or not we should stay, and justifying the pull out in that way.

But now the news suggests that Bush is considering a surge of more troops. Even as public opinion surges against having any there at all. I've read some Democrat say that they won't cut funding, that they will wait until the next presidential election. That's too long to wait.

My memory of the end of the Vietnam war came when Congress cut funding. This is confirmed by Wikipedia -

"In December 1974, the Democratic majority in Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which cut off all military funding to the South Vietnamese government and made unenforceable the peace terms negotiated by Nixon. Nixon, threatened with impeachment because of Watergate, had resigned his office. Gerald R. Ford, Nixon's vice-president stepped in to finish his term. The new president vetoed the Foreign Assistance Act, but his veto was overridden by Congress."

I keep asking my friends what they think will happen in Iraq. I haven't heard anything that makes me feel confident about a good solution.While I haven't actively pushed against our involvement since we went in, this feels like a historic moment that offers possibilities.

I'm hoping very much that Congress will cut funding and I'll be trying to figure out what the best way to encourage them to do that.

An interesting coincidence is that my son is 18 and a freshman in college - the color photo below. I know Bush is resisting starting the draft but if another war starts before we get out of Iraq then he might do it. There is nothing that gets me more angry than the thought of him getting drafted into a war like this.

Perla Ni at the Online Community Summit

Thomas Kriese and I were at the Online Community Summit on Oct 5 and 6 where about 75 professionals gather in very cute Sonoma to swap stories of online communities .

I was very lucky to have Perla Ni riding shotgun on the rainy trip up. Perla was founder and former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review among many other famous things. She was also one of the presenters at the non-profit pre-conference Thursday morning.

She feels that most non-profit websites aren’t emotionally engaging – offering stock photos and cold information and a “donate here” button. She offers a cure: make it possible for the people that the group serves to put up content on the site – either text, video or podcasts. She showed a very cool Canadian site - homelessnation.org - that puts up new videos portraits of homeless made by volunteers. It turns out that most homeless people have very interesting stories to tell. New videos appear each week and Perla returns regularly to see what's new.

Of course nonprofits might fear losing control of the message. But direct communication gives the site an authenticity that should more than make up for any uneasiness. And it makes it possible for visitors to feel like they are in contact with the real people who they would like to help.

Perla has also software that allows non-profits transform their websites via the collection and display of user created content. She passed on the chance to toot her own horn in her presentation.

She is also the CEO of a nonprofit called GreatNonprofits – taking advantage of the grassroots democratization of the web to aggregate and share information about nonprofits.

Here's a pic from the summit: Perla on the left and Gail Ann Williams is the Director of Communities at Salon.com.

Being a refugee

This post presumes familiarity with the 3D online world Second Life. Disclosures: I work at Omidyar Network which is an investor in Linden Lab the company that runs Second Life. I used to work at Linden Lab and have stock options in the company.

Years ago, a friend of mine returned from a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and described a very powerful interactive exhibit. Visitors are issued an ID card for a real person who suffered in the Holocaust and was the same sex and age as the visitor in 1940. Here’s a description I found via Google.

"I entered the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I received Identification Card #2855. For the next four hours I became Malvin Katz Fried, a real Hungarian Jewish woman about my own age during the Holocaust.The industrial steel elevator I took to start my tour on the fourth floor immediately seemed as confining as the railroad boxcars that carried so many Jews to their deaths. Then as I threaded my way inexorably downward, through the history the displays recount, I lived Malvin's times and her personal story."


Two years ago, a group of Second Life residents created “Neverland,” which recreated Londonin 1900. A wonderful part of the environment was the fact that free avatars were available to visitors. You could choose not just a costume but also a set of body characteristics that turned you into a pirate, policeman, or various Victorian characters. So you were essentially transformed and the sense of belonging, of being immersed in the environment, was much richer. Eventually Neverland made the New World Notes, was Slashdotted and written up in the New York Times.

Consider if these ideas were combined in Second Life as a way to encourage people to empathize with refugees in Darfur .We could take the stories of real life refugees, combine elements into ten different lives and create ten avatars to represent them. Visitors could select a character that reflects their own sex and age and transform their regular avatar into that of the refugee.

After the visitor assumes their appearance, he or she can be directed on a journey through the camp to learn about the refugees’ history – why they came to the camp, their family, and even their personality. At the same time the visitor can learn about the issues camp-dwellers face over the course of a day: food, water, shelter, hygiene, etc. as well as information about what needs to be done to improve the situation.

The key to Neverland’s success was attracting the volunteer efforts of the best avatar creators, builders and coders in Second Life. I think this is the sort of idea that would excite them and it would be easy to recruit them to our cause.

I feel like if the idea succeeds like I think it can, it will be extremely popular inside Second Life. It also has the potential to create a much wider impact through publicity, attract more people to omidyar.net and spark more activism.