The East Atlanta Strut is this Saturday, September 18, 2010, from 10 a.m. – 10 p.m. in the East Atlanta Village, natch. There is music all day, an artists’ market, an area for the kiddies and much more. It’s supposed to be a beautiful weekend so get out and enjoy the city. Parking will be scarce so take full advantage of public transport. However, if you must drive, check out their handy-dandy map for parking options, to avoid being ticketed or booted.

I, for one, will be in Athens cheering the Dawgs to victory over Arkansas, but I encourage everyone to check out the Strut because it is always a good time.

Ah, crap, I’m a little last-minute on this, but this one’s it’s worth ten minutes of your time!  As reported earlier, the transportation legislation this year has divided the state up into 12 regions, and each region will vote (yea or nay) on a list of transportation projects and their accompanying 1% sales tax. TODAY is the last day to submit your comments to the Atlanta Regional Commission, who has developed the first bit of the first bit of this list. See details here, and the criteria for the list here (PDF).

My concern, which is cited more eloquently and with more detail at the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition here and here, is that they’ve set aside a whopping 0-5% to use on non-motorized projects.

Record numbers of Atlantans are hopping on bikes.  25% of our trips are made within a mile of the home and 40% are made within two miles – these are distances that, barring extreme temperatures, we should almost always bike. Or at least they are distances for which we should have the option to safely and comfortably bike.  Each of the 25 or so bicycles locked up outside my office represents one less car, less wear and tear on the roads, less pollution, more vibrant communities, healthier citizens, and less sprawl. I cannot imagine not encouraging this sort of transportation.

The culture is changing, and we need our infrastructure to keep up! All this to say that a 0-5% allocation for bike and ped programs is not acceptable for the Atlanta region to do so. Other cities (with which we are competing for jobs and investment) are adding bike lanes, installing bike racks, and encouraging alternative means of getting to work, and I worry that Georgia is stuck in a paradigm of an unsustainable, auto-focused transportation network. I ask you to check out the criteria the ARC has posted, and consider sending off a quick email to let them know how you feel about the future of transportation in Atlanta.

(I recognize that this may be as simple as “Don’t tax us anymore!”, which is another correct opinion. Make your voice heard!)

Labor Day weekend in Atlanta – once again, too many things going on to enjoy them all! Definitely not the worst problem to have. We’ve got the Georgia Tech season opener, Dragon*Con all weekend (with the parade just before kickoff, I might add), Decatur Book Festival, Trailer Vic’s Beach Party at the EARL, and LSU and UNC at the Dome. Ah, one of the ubiquitous restaurant weeks is starting, too!

I plan to check out the Dragon Con parade, the GT game, and hopefully a bit of the book festival. All on bikes (parking downtown and in midtown, I assume, will be pretty miserable with two football games going on), and some neighborhood park-grilling may be in my near future, too. What am I missing? What will you guys be up to?

Most mornings I sit down in front of a computer screen and have an entirely unproductive 20 minutes while the coffee is steeping and getting cold. Then the day is peppered with emails and tweets and newsflashes and blog checkings, all of which are definitely 100% work-related. Still, though, I’m surely missing something – I’m just curious to see if there’s a good source of information for Atlanta culture and goings on.  What blogs should I be paying more attention to?  Is there a google calendar someone put together floating around out there? Does your friend have a hilarious weekly email that he sends to 30 people?  Where do you guys get your Atlanta-based intel? I’ll go first.

I love Scoutmob, like Thrillist (as a stingy female I’m not their primary demographic), and read Creative Loafing blogs and features pretty religiously for things to do/buy and cheap places to eat.  I read CL’s Omnivore blog (love Cliff) and actually go to the AJC for John Kessler’s food column.  For business news I turn to the Atlanta Business Chronicle and Global Atlanta, for Georgia politics I skim Peach Pundit, and I click through Paste Magazine for music and various culture (not Atlanta-specific but based here and such an awesome publication). For neighborhood news I’m on a listserv or two (I think most of the intown neighborhoods have these) and look to the EAV Buzz as well.

What say you guys?

The latest installment in the ongoing saga of our beltline funding is that we are grasping at federal money, as surely they have plenty to spare. The Atlanta Beltline is applying for the TIGER II grant and wants us to help demonstrate that the people of the city back the project with an online petition. They’re hoping that a swell of popular excitement and support will help convince federal officials in charge of handing out free money that the Beltline’s the place to invest. The petition, making the rounds on twitter and FB, has had more than 1400 signatures at the time of this writing, which was within a day of posting.

Over at CL, Thomas Wheatley points out that this is the same funding for which the Atlanta streetcar project is applying – see the Saporta Report on their proposal here. Interesting. Can I sign something supporting both?

Read about and sign the petition here. I may bitch about it, but I’m a fan of the Atlanta Beltline (see? So much a fan that I even call it the Atlanta Beltline like they want us to, instead of just the Beltline!), and think that its development will be a large part of our city growing into its city-ness. Paved paths and rail will make a difference in my daily commutes, entertainment and exercise, and hopefully would encourage more people to take advantage of alternative options. This grant would mean 11 miles of multi-use trails within 3 years – 2013 is a LONG ways away, but I think we ought to take progress wherever we can get it.

Traffic mess? Don't drive on the connector!

Stumbled across this article from last month’s Boston Globe. I know we don’t have our shit together in A LOT of ways, but it makes me happy to see someone from a “real city” point out some of the good things we’ve got working for us. You’ll find a few backhanded compliments in there, but I don’t mind – I thought southerners were the only ones who insult people with compliments, bless our hearts!

One of my pet peeves is brought up here, though. I really wish everyone could chill with the car-centric-ness. Yes, you need a vehicle to get around the greater Atlanta area, which covers what, the northern half of the state now? But intown we are the littlest big city I’ve ever seen – you can get a lot done in a pretty small radius. Contrary to popular belief, some people even walk outside here to get from one place to another. Ridership is substantial on MARTA (1.3 million trips in a work week, made by students and employed people, at that!). Real-life people that wear suits to work commute on bikes. Even this swampy July I’m happily pedaling the 4 miles to work and haven’t had any coworker complaints about stinkiness.

At least with the Ox out of the Governor’s race runoff we won’t have our own version of the Big Dig running through the east side.

So Edgewood is the new Ponce. I mean this in the best possible way. It’s become one of my favorite streets in the city – delicious food, only the occasional whiff of fecal matter, a bar where they know my name, barber shops where they blast funk out the front door at 8am. You’ve got modern and retro with Circa and Rolling Bones. There’s high-minded good food and low-minded good food – Dynamic Dish and King Slice. New and old, with Sound Table and the Jamaican place, and, well, the neighborhood itself, a cornerstone of Atlanta history. It’s also one of the more racially integrated places in the city, in that black people and white people are there in roughly equal numbers (I’ve said it before: that’s a whole new post. Maybe more like a series of discussions. Decades-long series of discussions). But basically, it’s a good place to be at most hours, it’s bike and pedestrian friendly, and it’s about a 2 minute ride from home.

Image from the Atlanta Time Machine, Edgewood and Hillard, no date listed

Overall I was pretty happy to see some of the coverage for the city council’s proposal to designate Edgewood and Auburn Avenues a special “Entertainment District,” which would mean later closing hours for the bars there. Businesses would pay an extra fee to cover extra security and clean-up. Since it worked so well in Underground, why not, right?

Underground issues aside, we all know the story – old-money Buckhead Betties on their morning strolls didn’t like walking across the remains of late-night thugs shooting each other, so they voted to drop back the hours of bars throughout the whole city, because there aren’t any stabbings before 2am. Oh, and then, of course, they razed the Buckhead Village, which, though I couldn’t give you directions there (um, go north on Peachtree a ways?), still affects all of us in the message it sends.

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I admit, I have expressed extreme frustration with transit, transportation, and connectivity in Atlanta. Apparently the Beltline concept was conceived when I was finishing up high school, which was A PRETTY FRIGGING LONG TIME AGO, frankly. I remember seeing a Beltline advocacy booth at an outdoors event 5 years ago, and getting excited to talk to someone about it. I asked what, specifically, we could do to help, and at the time, all they had was “well, you can go to our website and register to get email updates.” A little disappointing.

But lately I’ve been getting excited about the Beltline. We’ve finally started seeing progress – there are actual trails you can walk (or mountainbike, but after my first experience with those stupid little rocks on a bike I’m going to wait for some pavement), there are gorgeous parks and a skatepark underway, there’s a mile paved in the Northwest bit, the art is making people talk, and this weekend Mayor Reed accepted some major checks from Kaiser Permanente and the PATH Foundation to create a bike trail from Dekalb Ave to Piedmont Park.

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Not just talking about chicken bones. The push for food carts on Peachtree, launched earlier this year, is still on – Atlanta is home to a movement clamoring for clean, delicious, LEGAL street food in the city.

The conflict is a silly set of conflicting laws – basically, Atlanta thinks people need to be protected from the guys selling purses and sunglasses in Five Points, and thus has a vending ordinance that mandates “No vehicle shall stop or stand [on public property] and do business for more than 30 minutes.” On the other hand, the state is responsible for keeping dangerous or poorly prepared food out of our bellies, so Georgia law dictates that mobile food units can only have a permit for one or two locations (so that health inspectors can easily locate them). So Atlanta says “keep moving,” Georgia says “don’t go anywhere,” and we miss out on taco trucks and falafel vans. Bummer.

Events have special permits for food carts – that’s why we can get greek sammiches at the Sweet Auburn Festival and funnel cake at Dogwood and Cameli’s pizza at Soccerfest this past weekend in the Cabbagetown Park.  It’s also how they are holding monthly Urban Picnics at the Sweet Auburn Market – they took a hiatus due to a permitting issue, but will be back on the 25^th and every last Friday of the month thereafter.

Westside Creamery's Maggie

I haven’t made it to a picnic yet, but I sure ate the hell out of some Korean BBQ from a truck at Atlanta Streets Alive and have overindulged on some of Westside Creamery’s ice cream.

I’m a fan of street food. I’m a fan of anything that gets people outside. I LOVE playing outside, and even I’ll find myself sitting at a desk for 9 or so hours without budging. Buying and eating food on the sidewalk is one more little hack at car culture and one more little lift-up to people culture that I love to see sprouting in Atlanta.

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As I’ve been packing and preparing all week to leave for the Outer Banks on Sunday, I began to wonder if more people really are taking staycations this year. A week doesn’t go by when I don’t see something referring to “taking a staycation” (a word I hate by the way), promoting the advent of being a tourist in your own town. While I admit there are places and things I’ve never seen in Atlanta (and I’m a native), I never once thought about taking the week off and staying here. To me, a week off from work without going anywhere is a waste of time unless you have family in town or a special occasion to occupy your time. In my world, vacation = long drive or flight. I want to spend that day traveling. It’s part of the vacation.

So, what does everyone else think? Has anyone done the staycation thing? Do you have ideas you can share? Or do you all prefer real vacations? Just some things to discuss while I’m on the beach with an adult beverage in my hand.