…and Four More Automotive Observations — 2018 US automotive sales data reveals significant trends and changes in the American market: Crossovers are King, Sedans are Dead A Few Models Deliver Most Sales for Many Brands American Brands Own Trucks Tesla Did Better than You Might Think Strong Brands Had a Great Year Crossovers are King, Sedans are Dead The rise of crossovers…

Twenty-first-century prospects for twentieth-century vehicles — Although large, private cars dominated mobility in the twentieth century, cars didn’t win the contest completely. Here and there, especially when resources were scarce after the Second World War, designers, engineers, and companies experimented with smaller, lighter, and more focused vehicles to help move people and goods. Today, there’s a…

Predicting the market for privately-owned cars in 2038 — 2018 has been an exciting year for the future of transportation. How will we get around in twenty years, after all? Will autonomous vehicles take over our streets with hundreds of millions of robots roaming our cities and land without human intervention? Maybe all our cars will be replaced by…

All you have to do is move to Tulsa (Part 2 of 19,351) — Tulsa, Oklahoma, has invested in an innovative tactic to encourage people to move to the city: pay them $10,000. The program, called Tulsa Remote, seeks to relocate 20–25 individuals with location-flexible jobs to the Tulsa area. If you make it through the selection process (which includes an application, an interview…

Finding tomorrow’s favored cities with today’s data — The year is 2038. President Ocasio-Cortez is two years into her first term. Hurricanes regularly strafe the Eastern Seaboard while fires and droughts ravage the West. You’re ready to move somewhere safe and new, one of those popular cities that everyone’s moving to: Joliet, Newburgh, Eugene, or maybe even Iowa…

On the recent GM plant closures — While Ford CEO Jim Hackett waffles on his “mysterious ‘fitness’ plan”, GM CEO Mary Barra showed him how to do layoffs: with no prologue, 15,000 jobs gone, six models axed, and five factories closed. These closures may seem odd given GM’s recent financial successes — strong sales of crossovers have…

Part 1 of a 19,351-Part Series — In 1942, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra (“the most popular and commercially successful dance orchestra of the Swing era”) recorded the number one song “(I’ve Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo”—the best selling single in the US that year. This post isn’t about Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. Kalamazoo is a…

What 1,841 bookstores tell us about the character of 896 cities — You can’t judge a book by its cover. You might, however, be able to judge a city by its bookstores. I recently wrote about the increasing need to escape from New York and San Francisco to other cities in America. Of the thousands of ways to search for substitute cities…

Is It Time to Move On? — Some people will never leave New York and San Francisco. These two cultural capitals will always attract the attention of investors, entrepreneurs, newcomers, tourists, and storytellers, across the country and around the world. I wish them all the best, truly. However, plenty of us are thinking of leaving and going…