Austin at Large: SXSW, in Four Dimensions

I'm actually on a long-needed vacation as you read this, but since we last visited in this here space, there was this thing called South by Southwest that happened, and I was there, wearing multiple hats along with my badge. Here's a wrap-up!

On the Train With Pete

As a working journalist from the paper whose nameplate graced every session and stage, I was on the Pete beat: U.S. secretary of transportation, former mayor of South Bend, co-winner of the snakebit 2020 Iowa caucus, and close personal friend of our own mayor. I blogged about Buttigieg in our Conference coverage, but from this vantage point the most important thing he did in town was take the 10-minute train ride from MLK to Saltillo, with a carefully curated crew of Capital Metro and city leaders and, crucially, the justice and equity advocates who are pushing for a greater role in the Project Connect process. That's who Buttigieg wanted to hear from, I am told, and he did, perhaps more so than the organizers of this experience wanted or expected. (Special props to Workers Defense Project emissary David Chincanchan for point-guarding this conversation.)

Their message was clear: Project Con­nect's commitments to mobility justice and equity are still evolving, even with the most-in-the-nation $300 million investment to prevent displacement of the very people who most need useful and affordable transit. We are at the beginning, not the end, of this process, and there will always, always be pressure to do more with the entire $7.2 billion being spent on this puppy. Since more than half of that money is in Buttigieg's hands, the advocates may have done the city and Cap Metro a favor by speaking up.

Onstage With EV Nation

The SXSW transportation track, of which Buttigieg's town hall at the Convention Center was the midpoint, came after most conferees had switched their brains into film and music mode, and the panel I moderated on Friday, March 18, was at the very end of a five-day slog. So my three panelists and I (two entrepreneurs, one U.S. Dept. of Transportation expert) expected an audience in the low double digits but were pleasantly surprised at how many people wanted to hear about the rapid evolution of charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, and what we need to do now to make sure people have enough confidence in chargeability to overcome "range anxiety" and buy a plug-in car.

This used to be a niche topic but all of a sudden, we're in another energy shock and gas is $4 per gallon and people look at the Tesla and Bolt drivers with envy. (Until we stop driving internal-combustion vehicles, we will never achieve "energy independence." Sorry, Ted Cruz!) But did you ever stop to think of the gas station ecosystem as infrastructure? It reflects a lot of choices made over 100 years, which led to it becoming a unique retail-trade subsector, which EV charging does not need to be, at all. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which everyone still calls the "bipartisan infrastructure deal," includes about $7 billion (ironically, the same price tag for the all-electric Project Connect) for 500,000 EV charging stations, both along the highways and in community mobility hubs that could look like just about anything. A lot of choices need to be made now, and in the next five years, to make sure people have juice for their juicebox cars.

Getcha-Get Ur Badge On

Since my work duties were all nearer to the end of SXSW than the beginning, I got to spend the first few days as a normal Conference attendee, dropping in on media and civic-engagement panels that were alternately inspiring and frightening. One featured the secretaries of state of Michigan and Arizona (Jocelyn Benson and Katie Hobbs, respectively), who are familiar names if you had to cover the bizarritude of the weeks after Election Day 2020. Their message was pretty clear: The wave of "election integrity" maneuvering is designed to keep valid votes from being counted. Stay awake. (I got some face time with Benson, who is amazing, to run through the Travis County Commissioner Pct. 4 primary scenario and how one would determine if the new Texas rules, which are about as "arbitrary and capricious" as you can get, changed the outcome of that very close race. Stay tuned.)

That wasn't nearly as frightening as the one-on-one with Nicole Perlroth, The New York Times cyber-warfare expert and now advisor to the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security. Her book from 2021, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, dives into Russia's previous cyberattacks in Ukraine over the last several years, before the tanks showed up (including knocking out the power grid), as test cases for what Vladimir Putin or another bad actor could do to our American lives right now, as our nation is incredibly vulnerable to cyberwar attacks because we do everything online. We could do the same to Putin, which interviewer Jonathan Reiber (who covered the cyber desk at the Pentagon under Obama) described as "mutually assured digital destruction." Yikes! Use strong passwords, people.

Yeah, I Live Right Over There

I can walk from my house to the Con­ven­tion Center, and just being on foot and around town confirmed that yes, this was the scale of SXSW that makes it most accessible to locals. If it were as big as it had gotten pre-COVID, I would have joined the masses who ignore and avoid the whole thing whenever possible. At this size, it was fun again to drop in on the weird activations and listen to random acts and watch movies I'd otherwise never see, and also to see how Downtown has changed during the pandemic (the workers in the towers stayed home but the construction continued apace).

The unhoused who would normally be quite visible on Trinity and Red River instead found themselves a safe space on an alley in between the two. The weather cooperated up until the very last minute. There was, once again, a shooting on Sixth Street, which is not good news but should put some extra juice into the moves being made to make Dirty Sixth safer, which both public and private entities now realize is going to require some of those shot bars to be replaced to diversify the monoculture of the strip. By the time I'm back from vacation, there may also be news on that front.