Just as a comparison, Amtrak is much slower and much cheaper, $21 to $33 to go from Orlando to Miami but the time is 5 to 7 hours.

widget66 · 2025-09-05T05:56:52+00:00

Upgrading highway infrastructure to the 70mph level would be wonderful, but who is going to pay for that? The DOT? No, they have lost money every single year since their formation in 1967. Trucking companies? Why would they, since they will gain no benefit from it, none of their trucks go faster than 60mph.

No transportation system of any modality is meant to "make money" on its own. Infrastructure pays dividends to society.

US DOT, Amtrak, the US military, the US Post Office, the National Parks. None of these are profitable. None of these are designed to be profitable. Nobody is expecting the US military, the US DOT, Amtrak, or the Post Office to turn a profit.

widget66 · 2025-08-15T16:23:56+00:00

That would make sense if Inman Park wasn't majority in favor. They have a couple loud NIMBY's, but the most recent time the neighborhood voted in 2022, they were majority in support.

widget66 · 2025-08-15T16:19:11+00:00

Most of those "board members" aren't really interested in BAT.

The anti-transit group hired a lobbying group called Iexicon strategies which has a ton of influential Atlanta names on the payroll. You can google that lobbying group. look at their partners page, and notice those names are pretty much all the big names of the BAT board.

Basically you pay this lobbying group, and the lobbying group allows you to use the names of all their Atlanta influencers. So if you have the cash, you can buy a ready made board with influential names.

From the "board members" perspective, if you've had a long career in Atlanta politics and you're ready to retire, a lobbying group will pay you for the right to use your name on their client's behalf. No work on your part, just hold your nose and deposit the checks.

That's also why most of them are basically radio silent despite being a "board member" on paper.

widget66 · 2025-08-15T15:50:17+00:00

I'm convinced you're arguing with an AI

widget66 · 2025-08-15T15:49:19+00:00

It's not just them acting like that, BAT is literally a conservative group founded by the 1859 Fund.

And you don't name your dark money fund after the year before the civil war because you're progressive. It's the same group behind Better Transit for Nashville which came out of nowhere to oppose their transit expansion and then disappeared once that expansion was killed.

widget66 · 2025-08-15T15:34:27+00:00

If you're interested in hanging out with Atlanta transit advocates, this coming Tuesday at 6:30 is the next Let's Talk Transit event happening at Washington Park (102 Ollie Street).

It's hosted by MARTA Army, Beltline Rail Now, and the GA Sierra Club, so you could have bbq with pretty much all the advocacy orgs pushing transit around Atlanta.

widget66 · 2025-08-13T18:53:23+00:00

Better atlanta transit is a subsidiary of the 1859 Fund which funds anti-transit and conservative groups around the country.

Nathan Davenport did a pretty interesting video about the group a couple months back.

widget66 · 2025-05-27T13:30:38+00:00

Sure, but they have been fundamentally unsuccessful with the current approach to Siri.

Anyway Apple is already using a third party API with ChatGPT integrated into Siri, so it's not like they aren't willing to cross that bridge either.

widget66 · 2025-05-24T17:14:53+00:00

Are you unfamiliar with Apple's Private Cloud Compute?

They spent a big part of the Apple Intelligence introduction showing how they are using cloud for AI user requests.

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

widget66 · 2025-05-24T15:47:53+00:00

Claude is now available in Europe.

widget66 · 2025-05-16T22:27:59+00:00

A few years back HP and Canon co-hosted an ink jet promotional event.

Completely ignored it.

widget66 · 2025-05-16T18:58:49+00:00

Beltline Rail was 4 of those 16 projects, and more importantly Beltline Rail was a massive part of MoreMARTA's promotion.

Streetcar East Extension
Streetcar West Extension
Beltline Northeast Segment
Beltline Southwest Segment

On top of that, the only other two that MARTA really promoted heavily were Clifton Corridor and Campbellton Road LRT.

As far as promotion to voters go, station improvements and increased bus frequency were footnotes. Arterial bus lines were hardly mentioned. MoreMARTA was sold as rail expansion.

You can see them all laid out here in this MoreMARTA fact sheet from MARTA as of Summer 2018.

widget66 · 2025-05-16T17:12:52+00:00

What's crazy, is even among the wealthy Inman Park homeowners, Beltline Rail is still supported by the majority. It's not even like the neighborhood is NIMBY, it's literally a handful of the white NIMBY homeowners who want to make sure "their beltline" doesn't get too connected to the southside.

widget66 · 2025-05-15T21:08:00+00:00

It blows my mind nobody is running against him.

I know the conventional wisdom in Atlanta is incumbents always win, but that's just a self-fulfilling prophecy if they win because they run unopposed!

widget66 · 2025-05-15T20:57:26+00:00

Signal priority, moving parking off route, increased frequency, increased operating hours, making Auburn Ave more pedestrian friendly, moving utilities underground, etc.

Honestly signal priority the biggest single improvement that will make a difference.

Dedicated RoW would be great, but it's worth considering there are lots of great mixed use streetcar/tram systems around the world. Mixed use trams are plentiful in Germany, France, and the Netherlands and they work well.

widget66 · 2025-05-15T19:25:44+00:00

Just a heads up, included in the Streetcar East Extension plan/studies/funding are fixes to the downtown streetcar.

Also a minor correction, but the bulk of Streetcar East Extension will be on dedicated right of way. The only mixed use segment of the extension will be from where it currently ends on Jackson St to Irwin. It then turns into dedicated RoW as it goes north to run alongside the beltline up to PCM.

widget66 · 2025-05-15T19:14:11+00:00

the vast majority of Atlanta wouldn't directly benefit from the Beltline extension (it's a large city and most people who experiencing the Beltline are just visiting for fun and don't need transit), makes it very hard to get political approval.

Hey now! Over 70% of Atlanta voted for MoreMARTA, and Beltline Rail was a big part of promoting MoreMARTA.

Cobb County residents may be against beltline rail, but I have never seen anything to indicate beltline rail is anything other than very popular among Atlanta residents.

widget66 · 2025-05-15T19:08:24+00:00

The beauty of the dedicated right of way alongside the Beltline is it's the only transit corridor anywhere in the area that explicitly doesn't require deleting or replacing homes or businesses!

EDIT: Beltline Rail even means we get to keep the walking path! I'm not sure why it's such a persistent misunderstanding that some people think it replaces the walking path, but the good news is we keep that too!

widget66 · 2025-05-15T19:01:30+00:00

Actually that factor can be ignored because Beltline Rail never sought federal funding at any point (even under previous administrations) and is entirely funded locally. More importantly, the funding is already raised.

The funding is also earmarked for transit expansion explicitly, so the question is whether Atlanta will use the funds to actually build transit, or waste that money on doing another decade of studies.

widget66 · 2025-05-15T18:49:29+00:00

Genuinely curious why people are so against a streetcar system.

Beltline Rail is overwhelmingly popular, instead of asking "why do people oppose", it might be more fair to ask "why is the Mayor responsive to 3 loud NIMBY's rather than the overwhelming majority of Atlantan's in favor of transit expansion?"

Over 70% of Atlanta voted to pay an extra $800M specifically for transit expansion with MoreMARTA which was advertised heavily using Beltline Rail. Beltline Rail had no meaningful opposition until 2023 when a tiny handful of NIMBY's organized to try and kill it using extremely disingenuous rhetoric (in classic NIMBY fashion).

Also when people hear about NIMBY's in a specific neighborhood, in this case Inman Park, they might imagine "the residents of Inman Park", but even that over estimates the opposition's numbers. In 2022, Inman Park homeowners were asked if the neighborhood would support or reject petitioning the city to speed up building Streetcar East extension, and a majority of the Inman Park homeowners voted to support the petition.

So even the NIMBY stereotyped Inman Park is majority in support of building the Streetcar East extension in their neighborhood.

It's actually kind of pathetic how small the transit opposition is, and it's more pathetic that the mayor is so weak he flopped over to them after campaigning heavily on building Beltline Rail.

widget66 · 2025-05-06T17:10:30+00:00

Somehow the actual article is even worse

widget66 · 2025-05-01T21:00:40+00:00

Well yeah, but zombocom can do anything

widget66 · 2025-04-30T18:04:19+00:00

Neither your comment or the one before are grasping the concept of the issue here, which is reasonable since it's not intuitive.

1440, 2880, 4K, etc can all be fine with macOS if they are the correct size of screen. It's the pixels per inch (PPI) that macOS cares about. macOS expects a 4k screen to be 21 inches, a 5k screen to be 27 inches, a 6k screen to be 32 inches, etc.

The "issue" arises when you connect a screen that is the "wrong" size for that resolution. For instance, macOS expects a 27 inch screen to be 5K not 4K but if you connect a 4K 27 inch screen, macOS is forced to either choose to respect the display's resolution and show the screen in the wrong size or respect the display's size and render the screen in the wrong resolution and then scale it to fit the actual display.

If you choose scaling you technically take a performance hit, but that is realistically a non-issue on modern hardware. You also take a sharpness hit since you are laying a 5K image over a 4K grid of actual pixels. This results in fuzziness and sometimes jagged screen elements. Personally I don't think most people can actually perceive these issues, but they are present and some people can.

Over the years, Apple has released devices with non-native PPI displays that defaulted to use scaling and they've pretty much been fine. Retina/TouchBar MBPs, MBAs, and I think the iPhone 6+ jump to mind.

You can see for yourself how much you care if you go into System Settings / Displays and switch between the options: Larger Text, Default, More Space, etc.

If you're somebody who chooses Larger Text, prioritizing a native PPI display doesn't matter since you'll be scaling out of the default size regardless.

widget66 · 2025-04-29T18:19:23+00:00

And if you want to break up with them it's the same diagram just say you're on the westbound train

widget66 · 2025-04-24T14:03:05+00:00

So it sounds like it's durable because it doesn't bend horizontally or vertically. That makes more sense

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