He Calls the Diving Board a Bottleneck

"See, that's a bottleneck," he said, and pointed at the diving board.

I was standing on the hill at Barton Springs with water still running out of my ears, the specific kind of cold that makes your teeth feel like somebody else's. A kid was on the board. Then the kid jumped. Then another kid got on the board. This is how a diving board works, and has worked, as far as I can tell, since the board was invented.

The man who called it a bottleneck was holding his phone at arm's length, slowly panning it across the grass like he was filming a sunset for a wedding. He wore a dry swimsuit. I want that on the record before we go any further. Dry. In July.

I'm calling him Brecken, which is not his name, because he is not one person. He is a composite, a type, a weather pattern. You have seen him. He was the guy at the Thursday farmers market explaining "throughput" to a tomato.

The App

Brecken is building an app called Sixty8, after the water temperature, which he said with the reverence of a man naming a racehorse. The phone panning was "ground-truthing." Sixty8 rates the crowd at Barton Springs on a scale he calls the Density Index, and it updates, he told me, "near-real-time," which is a phrase that has never once meant real time.

So far, fine. Annoying, but fine. Everyone wants to know if the hill is packed before they fight Zilker for a parking spot. People have been solving that problem for decades with a technology called driving past and looking.

But a crowd meter doesn't raise a seed round. So there's a second feature.

Priority Swim Windows.

For a monthly fee, Sixty8 users get access to "curated low-density windows," which are, as best I could tell from four minutes of increasingly detailed questions, times of day when the pool is less crowded. Tuesday mornings. Late afternoons when a thunderhead parks itself over Bee Cave. The first hour after open on a weekday, when the only people in the water are the old-timers doing slow laps in sun hats and silence.

He is selling the schedule of the weather and the working week.

"So you reserve the window," I said.

"You unlock the window."

"Does the city know about the window?"

He did the thing where a man smiles at you like you are a charming but outdated appliance. "We're not in the reservation business. We're in the insight business."

Which is the correct answer, legally, because Barton Springs is a public pool run by the City of Austin, and you can't sell somebody a slot in a pool you don't own. What you can do is sell somebody the feeling of having a slot, plus a push notification that says "Your window is open 🌊," and then let them discover at the turnstile that it is open for everybody else too.

The Tiers

There are tiers. Of course there are tiers.

• Ripple. Crowd index and basic windows. Brecken called this "the free-side experience," which is, I should mention, also the name for the actual free part of the creek just downstream, where you can swim for nothing and nobody needs an app to tell you it's full of dogs.
• Current. Windows plus "Shade Intel," which flags which pecan tree shadows are unclaimed. The shade on that hill has been distributed for generations by a strict system of arriving early and putting a towel down. It works. It has always worked. It is the closest thing this city has to a functioning land trust.
• Source. The top tier. Includes everything above plus "Salamander Mode," a quiet-hours alert, which he described as "for when you want the Springs to feel like the Springs."

I asked him what the Springs feel like the rest of the time.

He said, "Crowded."

Reader, he is not wrong. On a Saturday in July the hill looks like somebody spilled a box of people and forgot to come back for it. Towels overlap like roof shingles. There's a bluetooth speaker every eleven feet, all of them playing different songs at the exact same volume, which creates a kind of ambient fog. Somebody's always unwrapping a breakfast taco at two in the afternoon. That's the place. That's what you're paying a few bucks to get into.

The crowd isn't a bug in the pool. The crowd is a third of the pool. The other two thirds are cold water and a slick algae ledge in the shallow end that has humbled every single ankle in Travis County.

What He's Actually Selling

Here's the part that keeps me up, or would, if the house were cool enough to sleep in.

Brecken isn't really selling crowd data. He's selling the idea that a public place should have a fast lane. Every good thing in this town that used to be shared now has a premium version stacked on top, a velvet rope somebody tied to a tree they didn't plant. Concerts got VIP decks. The airport got the pay-to-skip line. The lake got rental pontoons and wake-surf boats. Barton Springs has stayed stubbornly, almost embarrassingly flat. You pay at the gate, you get in, and the same cold water climbs your shins whether you run a hedge fund or a taco truck.

The water doesn't know who you are. That's not a slogan. That's physics and limestone.

And it drives a guy like Brecken crazy, because a flat thing can't be tiered. So he builds a ladder next to it out of push notifications and calls the bottom rung "Ripple."

I asked if he'd thought about what happens when ten thousand subscribers get the same Tuesday morning alert.

He had. "Dynamic window allocation," he said. Different users get different windows, so they don't all show up at once.

So the premium product, distilled, is the app telling paying customers to come at different times so they don't run into each other. Which is to say the app's main feature is crowd control for the app.

He also hadn't noticed that the pool closes for part of the day on Thursdays for cleaning. I mentioned it. He opened a notes file. Somewhere in that phone there is now a ticket titled "Thursday???"

The Old-Timer Window

I'll tell you the real priority swim window. It's free and it has been for a long time.

Get there right at opening on a weekday. Bring a towel that has been washed so many times it's mostly a concept. Walk down the steps, skip the ladder, lower yourself in by degrees like a coward, and then, the moment the cold hits your ribs, swear once, out loud. Everybody does it. The old women doing laps in sun hats will not look at you, but they will approve.

Swim to the far side. Turn over. Look up through the pecans at a sky that hasn't started cooking yet. The water smells like rock and the sunscreen hasn't arrived. Somewhere a grackle is complaining about the economy.

That's the window. You don't unlock it. You just show up before the rest of us do, and then you leave graciously when we arrive, because it's ours too.

Brecken was still panning his phone when I climbed back up the hill. He'd gotten maybe four feet closer to the water. His suit was still dry.

I hope he gets in someday. I hope it's a Saturday. I hope it's loud and packed and some kid cannonballs off the bottleneck right next to him, and the cold hits him all at once, and for one second he forgets to check the index.

Sixty-eight degrees. Everybody gets the same number.