Frankly, there’s an entire generation (or two) of politicos who can’t wrap their heads around the fact that normal people no longer answer calls from unknown numbers and that polling is fundamentally broken.
And every major media org is littered with these folks.
A gigantic red flag 🚩 for Joe Biden in the AJC Poll is his support among young voters (18-29 yo) in Georgia.
Just 12% say they’ll vote for Biden, while 37% are for Trump, and 29% for RFK, Jr.
#gapol
In the past two months, Volvo’s Nova Bus unit has pulled out of the US market and Proterra has filed for bankruptcy.
Something is very wrong in the transit bus industry.
An absolute disaster for American competitiveness.
Industry evolved alongside the administrative state, and gutting the latter now will only lead to regulatory uncertainty, more litigation and paralysis, and reduced investment in critical sectors.
Xi Jinping is cheering.
🚨The Supreme Court overrules Chevron deference, wiping out 40 years of precedent that required federal courts to defer to expert opinions of federal agencies. All three liberals dissent. This is a HUGE decision.
gay person: i’m gay
straight person: i’m straight
bisexual person: i’m bisexual
Atlanta politician: I want to see another study done before we move this transportation project forward
So many American minds have been conditioned to see events like these through the lens of The Manchurian Candidate, when in reality they’re almost always best explained by Taxi Driver.
A huge announcement I’ve eagerly anticipated for months.
The Biden Administration today is awarding $1.7B to domestic manufacturers across the automotive supply chain to support conversion of ICE facilities to EVs.
Here are some of my highlights 🧵:
2023 study: “Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults."
One of the best possible workforce developments would be a collective realization among millennials who’ve spent the past 10-15 years toiling in AdTech that the halcyon days are donezo and they’ve created nothing meaningful.
And then move into sectors that build real things.
A long LinkedIn post on the “pervasive sense of nihilism” at Google
Good insight into the psychological impact of hiring too many people and then doing rolling layoffs over multiple years
$4.6 BILLION for this project.
It was postponed in 2021 after the lowest cost bid came in over the $1.7B budget.(I was told the lowest cost bid was just shy of $3B then)
GDOT is unrivaled at setting Georgia taxpayer money on fire.
BREAKING: The Georgia Department of Transportation has selected SR 400 Peach Partners to build and operate 16 miles of express lanes on Ga. 400, a decision that will allow the private company to collect tolls along the route for 50 years.
What’s happening is more than just a Proterra story, despite its commonalities with the other EV SPAC Cos.
The transit industry is strangling its own suppliers through arcane procurement rules and obscene agency-level customization.
Atlanta considers data center ban along Beltline, near transit stops
City Council members take aim at gigantic, power-hungry data storage farms along popular travel corridors.
If you want America to be competitive with China in basically any technology that will define this century, you need private capital to embrace a longer-range view & different return profiles.
And sorry, it’s not happening without a massive & long-term commitment from Uncle Sam.
THE US HAS AN EM-STYLE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
In today's
@markets
newsletter, I wrote about a line in
@delong
's (excellent) book Slouching Towards Utopia and how it resonates with a lot of the US econ discourse right now. Also with some thoughts from our chats with
@JigarShahDC
.
I know the people who made this video aren’t actually scientifically illiterate.
They’re just brazenly dishonest, and hope their viewers are scientifically illiterate.
Mayor Dickens has walked back on Beltline rail, now saying that analysis will decide if the path gets rail or "rubber tires," "small pods" or nothing at all. Similarly, Beltline chief Clyde Higgs says their "position on all things transit" is yet to come.
Congratulations on making it through another brutal election cycle, fellow Georgians. Only another few months until the next presidential cycle with us front and center once again...
When every agency demands its own custom specification on bus builds, it makes:
1. RFP responses a lengthy and costly process for the manufacturer
2. Automation of any manufacturing subprocess impossible, with lengthier and more costly builds
3. Supplier management a nightmare
Downtown ATL is headed to a bad place, as is Buckhead’s biz district. And both are whistling past the graveyard as they continue to prioritize suburban commuters over building livable neighborhoods.
Protected bike lanes & pedestrianization can help them.
These are great projects, but have completed 0 planning work to date.
That puts them 7-10 years and $1B-$1.5B out.
The money isn’t there unless they’re gutting BeltLine rail altogether. In which case, this would be yet another instance in which ATL’ politics sabotaged MARTA.
Every Atlanta suburb should be thinking about how it can get more people into golf carts and e-bikes for neighborhood trips.
It’s the best congestion mitigation strategy available.
What happens when an entire town putters around on golf carts?
To find out, I visited Peachtree City, GA, an Atlanta suburb where most families own one.
TLDR: It’s pretty awesome.
A 🧵 about my deep dive in
@business
/
@CityLab
UPS settled because it gets years of labor tranquility while its chief competitors now face a massively underpaid workforce heading into holiday season.
But given the track records of VCs investing in automation over the past decade I’m not surprised Jason believes this.
Panasonic has turned down a second multi-million dollar deal to open a battery plant in Oklahoma. This marks the third company to stray away from the state, as lawmakers work to figure out why Oklahoma can’t land these large deals.
Per Ward’s, April was a disaster for Tesla in the US.
Model 3 from 19,800 to 12,933 YoY. Model Y from 34,500 to 26,005 YoY.
They’re dragging down growth for the entire sector.
From
#Tesla
: "Get 0.99% APR financing when you order any new Model Y by May 31, 2024."
"Model Y starts at $31,490** after the Federal Tax Credit + estimated gas savings."
So it's got low-interest offers to juice sales. And back to the BS
#EV
"gas savings" price "reduction".
Atlanta politics may now revolve around the BeltLine...
But Georgia statewide elections, for the foreseeable future, will be won or lost around our Battery Belt.
Cleveland is adopting a 15-minute city framework. Here’s what that means:
➡️ Putting people over cars
➡️ All basic needs are within a 15 minute transit ride, walk or bike ride from your home
➡️ Investment in transit and sustainability
Read more👇🏾(1/4)
In a future where GPT[x] actually does begin to make junior roles obsolete, a number of industries will need to completely rethink talent development. You’re not just eliminating menial work, you’re removing a ramp for junior employees to develop crucial experience.
Peeps, I’m not ‘debating’ and I’m not ‘predicting’. I am observing, close up and in my own business, that GPT4 makes junior knowledge workers completely obsolete.
I want to riff on this great piece from Nat on the "green workforce" opportunity ahead of us, thanks to the massive 2020s manufacturing renaissance we're now witnessing.
🧵
It’s actually deeply ironic that the city is forcing an expensive audit of MARTA, asking where all the More MARTA $ is going…after BL rail was pushed by a previous mayor, MARTA spent millions on planning & engineering, and now the current mayor is demanding different priorities.
MARTA is already at the final design stage on this project and set to break ground next year. If
@andreforatlanta
tries to kill the project at the behest of his wealthy friends, he will have wasted tens of millions of dollars
The Dickens record on transit thus far:
1. Forced MARTA to convert a great ROI $200M Campbellton BRT project into a $400M boondoggle.
2. Forced MARTA to cut BL rail in favor of infill stations with no planning done
3. Now demanding MARTA stop a long-planned station renovation
Atlanta Mayor
@andreforatlanta
is asking
@MARTAtransit
to pause the $230 million Five Points renovation until an audit of the More MARTA program is complete. So roughly late July, around the same time MARTA planned to close street access to the station.
If Atlanta had won HQ2, Centennial Yards would have accelerated at least a year with potentially another couple million sqft of office locked in.
Instead, things moved slower, the world changed, and CIM pivoted heavily toward residential development. Atlanta is better for it.
Amazon HQ2 was thought up pre-pandemic. But the world is hybrid now: “I don’t think it’s going to get much busier than this [sidewalk empty save for some workers pouring concrete & planting shrubs]. Why build more offices if people aren’t going to come?”
Without fail, every time someone decries an apartment developer as “greedy,” they live in a neighborhood with average property values well north of $1 million
The developer tells us recent work spotted here on 14th Street in Midtown is to maintain the site—not to necessarily build this tower yet. FYI, for those who've asked.
Was literally a foot from getting hit in the middle of a crosswalk at Peachtree and 7th by a woman in a massive SUV just now.
She wasn’t paying attention while turning left. It took my yelling at her (thankfully she had her windows down) to stop her.
But “freedom” or something.
Big news out of LPO this morning, with another huge Biden Administration investment in the battery supply chain.
This time it’s $1.2B to Entek for battery separators…a critical component for which China has built a stranglehold globally.
With BYD basically frozen out of the market due to the 2019 NDAA ban on use of federal funding to procure Chinese rolling stock…
That leaves New Flyer and Gillig as the only other major OEMs of transit buses in the US. ENC and a few other smaller players are in the mix too.
Back when I was in high school, we weren’t allowed to march through the halls chanting in support of ethnic cleansing, but maybe things are different now.
To make matters worse, industry advocates have fought for increased federal $$$ without any accountability on agencies or forcing them to reform byzantine procurement processes.
So we have more federal support than ever for new rolling stock, and at best it’s not helping.
Glad to see GDOT’s middle finger to Atlanta getting more attention. Their plans are an abomination and the mayor, along with every city council-member, should be doing what they can to fight it.
There's a lot I'm looking forward to in 2023, from Atlanta's continued urban densification...to Georgia finally delivering America's first new nuclear power in nearly a decade...to a lot more vehicle electrification.
But above all else...my next career adventure.
The truth is the majority of suburbanites will demand cities continue to cater to their wants over urban resident needs, irrespective of how their suburbs evolve.
Freeloaders and crybabies who will revolt at the slightest inconvenience.
The two big urbanism trends of the 2020's are suburbs building everyday amenities to reduce their dependence on cities, and cities building infrastructure for locals to create a model less dependent on suburban commuting...Hochul is really botching this.
Just remember when this site fully collapses that I was more right about Georgia elections than the other election Nates and their fancy models. You can't ever take that away from me.
Two men meet who have met the moment, and whose leadership has made it possible that 2022 will be an inflection point in the struggle for liberty, democracy, and human dignity.
Now that the Mayor of Atlanta is committed to an infill station at Armour Yard, a project that will require *at minimum* 8 years to develop and execute, now is the time to begin planning work on an adjacent multimodal passenger terminal to support intercity rail.
The truth is Lakewood is in a terrible location with poor transit access, and feels badly outdated.
It’s long past time for its owner, the City of Atlanta, to start planning the future of that site.
(Mixed-use, anchored by a scaled down amphitheater)
I made a secret bet with the Dutch government that if they beat us tomorrow we have to adopt all of their infrastructure practices.
I'm sorry, it's a done deal.
Atlantans deserve to know what consultants the city hired to throw spaghetti against the wall, and what their credentials are to put a price tag on a non-existent system ostensibly capable of delivering high capacity transit service on the BeltLine.
This program will do more for congestion mitigation in Atlanta on a per-dollar basis…than any road capacity project funded by ARC or GDOT in the past decade.
Absolutely incredible response to
@CityofAtlanta
and
@AtlantaRegional
E-Bike Rebate program.
Since the portal opened at 12:01am on 6/16, we have received…
4,867 applications ‼️
Open till 11:59p on 6/23 ()
We’re gonna need a bigger $$$ bucket…🥳
If I were among the white residents of Baton Rouge, I would probably try to figure out why my region has been stagnant for forty years and fixing those structural issues instead of pushing the “segregation now” button.
BREAKING: Louisiana Supreme Court has voted to allow residents to secede from Democrat-run Baton Rouge and create their own city.
The new city, St. George, will have nearly 100,000 people, making it one of the state’s largest cities in population.
“This is the culmination of
I would feel safer about teenagers driving e-bikes if Mike’s employer wasn’t churning out more than half a million oversized F150s every year with grilles designed to maim anyone outside the vehicle
Now that Iowa and Florida are no longer swing states we can drop dumb, counterproductive corn-based ethanol and LATAM policies, and instead pivot to promoting mass timber multifamily housing construction in support of Georgia's forestry industry.
Because agencies typically pay for buses only upon receipt and acceptance testing, you can see the obvious cash flow issues this dynamic creates.
And by all accounts, we’ve gone from 6-8 months for a bus build pre-pandemic to 2-3 years(!).
3. FTA can step in and compel agencies to procure a standard build offered by each OEM for eligibility to use federal funding. Make it a condition of the LowNo grants.
Agencies will be unhappy and APTA will kick and scream, so it’s no “Easy Button”…but doable.
That means realistically the I-285 Top End project will end up north of $20B.
Complete insanity and the least fiscally-responsible way to improve mobility for Atlantans.
Banner day for the Atlanta activists opposing the Public Safety Training Center.
Most are openly celebrating the mass murder of Israeli civilians. At best they’re condoning Islamist terrorism.
I don't think folks appreciate just how transformative adding a few thousand permanent residents (i.e. not students) will be for Downtown Atlanta over the next 5-6 years.
I’m sticking to this. But also my gut says:
1. Warnock is likelier to win by 5+ than lose.
2. Fayette County is going to flip blue in a federal election for the first time since Jimmy Carter’s POTUS win.
There is one prospective VP candidate who is:
-A US Navy fighter pilot
-An astronaut
-Already a proven victor against Thiel-bought weirdos
-Bald
-Well-liked across the aisle
-From a swing state
-Married to a survivor of gun violence
We simply shouldn’t waste limited transit resources, including time, money, labor, and political capital, trying to serve these areas. Until county & city leaders invest in significantly denser land use, they should not be allowed to draw resources from more deserving projects.
Also worth noting much of this corridor includes cheap, depopulating, flat land that is about as favorable for greenfield HSR as anywhere in the country.
In 2019, there were 18,142 flights and 2,836,474 passengers that flew between Atlanta and Orlando (400 miles). If a French TGV train connected both cities, it would take about 3 hours. If the train ran hourly, it would have the capacity to move 8.5 million ppl a year (300% more).
Management consultants, keep a close eye on AI.
As an experiment, I fed GPT-4 the official practice McKinsey cases, including the math. It nails it, often better than the official answer. (As far as I can tell, these launched after the training data window for GPT-4 concluded)
It took Midtown…what? A few days to throw up a dozen of these parking space conversions to bike parking?
Probably the best ROI transportation project delivered in Atlanta in the past five years.
Marietta should lose access to all federal funds. GDOT shouldn’t be allowed to spend a penny of federal formula money in Marietta until it again allows multifamily development.
The Marietta City Council imposed a six-month moratorium on new apartment construction for the entire city on Wednesday, citing a need to reevaluate zoning guidelines in the wake of several requests for multi-family housing developments.
I don't think folks in Atlanta appreciate how much low-hanging fruit there is in improving our transportation & land use policies, and the extent to which a few motivated city councilors can make a difference.
Would love to see these policies expanded, but this is a great start.
1 I've just introduced three zoning papers at today's City Council meeting which all modify the zoning for the BeltLine. Collectively, these papers will 1) ban new gas stations, 2) ban new drive-thrus, and 3) remove the city's requirement for developers to build on-site parking.
Bus manufacturing was already a bad business…low margin, low volume, and only made worthwhile in the US by Buy America and generous federal support for agencies to purchase uncompetitively-priced buses complying with those domestic content/assembly rules.
When you have 100s of parts up for customization, OEMs find themselves unable to get economies of scale on bulk orders and repeatable installation. It also exposes them to additional supply chain risk (Supplier 563 doesn’t have [x] in stock for 45 days), delaying the whole build.
There is a 3b. that involves a similar but less drastic measure in which FTA only awards grant funding off a base list price provided by each OEM, and agencies are entirely on the hook for any costs above that.
It won’t sway everyone, but should move the needle.
So they went out and spent $1M to rent a couple of these Navya slow-rolling toasters-on-wheels for a year.
Navya went broke earlier this year and its technology assets were so poor, they were ultimately acquired for ~$1.5M.
Shame on everyone who encouraged Cobb to pursue this.
Today, I rode on the Cumberland Hopper: a new, self-driving shuttle!
For the next 8 months, people can hop on the shuttle for free near the Cobb Galleria and the Battery as part of the Cumberland CID’s pilot program.
Read more here:
#CobbCounty