MARTA

Tomorrow, March 24, MARTA is holding three public hearings   – two in Atlanta and one in Decatur – to gather input on bus route changes as well as tenative plans to revive the Braves Shuttle. The shuttle, which usually runs from Five Points Station to Turner Field on Atlanta Braves game days, was axed during last fall’s service cuts. Bus routes affected by the proposed changes are:

• Route 2 – Ponce de Leon Avenue/Moreland Avenue
• Route 87 – Roswell Road/Morgan Falls
• Route 99 – Boulevard/Monroe Drive
• Route 181 – Buffington Road/South Fulton Park & Ride

Here’s a map (PDF) detailing the proposed changes to routes 2 and 99. Here’s one for routes 87 and 181. The service changes, if they’re adopted will go into effect June 18.

GDOT

Next week, on March 30, the Georgia Department of Transportation is holding a hearing for public input regarding the Multi-Modal Passenger Terminal (PDF) project that’s planned for the downtown “gulch” area. GDOT announced last week that it had selected a development team led by Cousins Properties to build the potentially transformative transit project, but proposal summaries from all three of the short-listed development teams are still on the GDOT site.

If you can’t make it to the meeting, use the online comment form.

ARC

Still not enough civic engagement for you? The Atlanta Regional Commission is inviting metro Atlantans to an ”online public meeting” to offer opinions on draft transportation recommendations  for “Plan2040,” the agency’s plan to “accommodate economic and population growth sustainability over the next 30 years.”  The online meeting is open until April 30.

Photo by author

I just came across a USA Today story on a study that ranks Atlanta the fourth “most literate” among the country’s 75 largest cities. (The study’s author uses the term “literate” to refer to whether people do read, not just to whether they can read.)

Atlanta placed highest among cities in the Southeast. Raleigh, N.C. was the next-highest ranking Southeastern city at 13th.

2010 was the eighth year for the study, which was conducted by Central Connecticut State University. The city has seen a steady climb through the rankings for the past four years after falling from a tie with Washington, D.C. for third place in 2006 to eighth place in 2007.

The author formulated the results by comparing cities with a population of at least 250,000 based on six criteria:

• Internet resources to access books and newspapers
• The number of bookstores per 10,000 residents
• Education level
• Library staffing, holdings and rate of utilization relative to the population size
• Newspaper circulation
• Magazine and journal circulation numbers relative to the population size

“It’s a surprise to me, ” Chantal, a member of the staff at A Capella Books in Little Five Points, said of the study’s conclusions. Chantal declined to give her last name, but said that she’s lived in Raleigh and that she was surprised that it landed so much lower in the study’s rankings than Atlanta.

“Raleigh seems like a more literate city to me than Atlanta,” she said. Independent bookstores are more plentiful there and “People seem more into literary culture, ” she said.

Edward VanHorn, executive director of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, hesitated to render an opinion on the accuracy of the study results as he wasn’t familiar with the data the author used. SNPA concerns itself more with promoting literacy as it relates to the skill of reading, VanHorn said.

He did say that it was “fascinating” that Atlanta came out so near the top of the list, given that he doesn’t often see people reading books or walking around with a newspaper tucked under one arm.

If you’re interested in the study’s methodology that’s here. Data sources are here.

What do you think? Is Atlanta lower, higher, or just where it should be in the results? Or is this another one for the “grain of salt” file?

Is this thing on? I think we’re back up and running, so here goes.

Phoenix Flies logo by APC

The Atlanta Preservation Center’s seventh annual Phoenix Flies tours will run March 5 to March 20 this year.

Phoenix Flies, which APC describes as “city-wide celebration of Atlanta’s vibrant living landmarks,” features tours of historic landmark buildings and neighborhoods all over the city.

I’ve been meaning to go this “Unseen Underground” tour for years, and I’ll admit to not even being completely sure where Castleberry Hill is, so I probably ought to get to that one too.

Most appear to be walking tours, but there’s also a roughly three-hour bicycle tour of downtown historic districts on March 5. All the events are free, but some require reservations.

Have you taken any of these tours? How was it?

Krog tunnel news source hasn’t been updated since November 27. Not sure if they’re scared of Rodney again or what, but I don’t know what to do with my weekend! What’s going on with you?

It’s the time of year when people start to organize and cull their stuff (again). The time of year when they finally acknowledge that they’re not going to spend “twenty minutes a day, three days a week” on that exercise gadget and put it in the box to go to Goodwill. Out go the fondue pots, the graphing calculator from college, the too-small shorts and the “What is that thing, anyway?”

So, what are we going to do with this?

It’s not rare to hear the opinion that Underground Atlanta has outlived its usefulness, but we can’t just put it on a truck, drive it up Marietta Street and leave it at the Salvation Army across from Georgia Tech. Besides, it’s not as if it’s not serving any purpose at all. The streets right around Five Points and Underground are very active during the day and the stores and restaurants there are managing to stay afloat because people do go there.

The problem is that not many of those people are downtown residents (who would keep the streets active at night) or tourists or business travelers (who tend to spend a lot of money). By about 6 p.m. the students, office workers and shoppers are gone and the place is mostly dead, left for a variety of unofficial uses.

The attempt to turn Underground into a nightlife destination to replace Buckhead Village was less than a blazing success and the leaseholders’ proposal to create a hotel and casino complex there isn’t likely to rise from the dead. Maybe what’s needed there isn’t necessarily something unique, but just something that will work. By “work” I mean it will get people of varying ages and backgrounds down there at least 12 hours per day and that it will be appealing to people who live, work and go to school downtown, and to people who are just passing through. If it attracts people from other parts of the city and even outside the city, so much the better, but that might be expecting too much.

If you had unlimited money but only about two years to do it, how would you turn Underground around?

Atlanta Progressive news reported Monday that newsweekly The Sunday Paper is no more – at least in its current form.

The Sunday Paper’s site has been taken down and in its place is this message:

“SundayPaper.com will re-launch

SP will be back on January 7, 2011 as the complete source for coupons, deals, fun and culture in Atlanta.”

Sounds a bit like another Access Atlanta or Atlanta Insite. Does anyone really think we’re short on sources of “fun” around here? I’ve heard that some people think that knowing what’s going on in our city is fun. Could be just a rumor, though.

APN quoted an email from former editor Stephanie Ramage that read, in part  ”Patrick Best, our publisher, informed me that The Sunday Paper would no longer be doing news.  Patrick was as nice as he could be; the decision, he explained, was merely the product of today’s business environment.”

Talk about bad news.

Maybe one of us will win the lottery and we can start another paper. Or maybe just buy a mall.

On Tuesday the first numbers from the census were released, outlining which states are gaining congressional seats and which lose them. No big surprise, Georgia gained a seat. We saw an 18% increase in population over the last 10 years, and though the state hasn’t quite broken the 10 million mark, we’re close. Check the complete state stats here, but for our fair state and city:

Previous districting, blue and red, spread out over population segments of ~630k (thanks, Washington Post)

Georgia

8,186,453: population, 2000

9,687,653: population, 2010

18.3% increase

Atlanta

416,474: population, 2000

540,922: population, 2009 (details of the 2010 census will be released in the next few months)

23% increase

So Georgia (Atlanta, really) earned a 14^th congressional seat based on population gains, which will probably be in the northern suburbs, which will most likely mean another republican congressperson. In the summer Governor Deal will call a special session to redraw districts for state House, state Senate, and the new congressional seats based on population changes. I’m sure based solely on the population changes. Surely gerrymandering was just a vocab word from middle school. I assume everyone will behave like gentlemen and women.

Just for some more fun with numbers, congressmen in the 113th Congress will be representing an additional 63,520 citizens (going from 631,306 citizens per congressman in 2000 to 694,826 citizens per congressman in 2010).

The Peach Pundit update has more discussion than I care to follow, much less recap, but has information worth sharing…

An environmental group that tested drinking water in the city of Atlanta found it contains hexavalent chromium, a chemical that the National Institutes of Health has described as a “probable carcinogen.”

The Washington-based Environmental Working Group said in a study released Monday that the level of the chemical in Atlanta’s water ranks 13th-highest among water systems it tested last spring in 35 U.S cities.

But water officials in Atlanta and metro Atlanta said Monday that the level of the chemical found in the city’s drinking water, .20 parts per billion, is well below the 100 parts per billion of “total chromium” in the water that the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe to drink.

Read mo’ from the AJC

—–

No worries. Just drink Coke instead! This is Atlanta, after all.

Dear Loyal Metblog Readers,

Some friends at StubHub (who knew we had friends at StubHub?) have graciously agreed to donate a pair of Hawks tickets for tonight’s game against the Charlotte Bobcats. Seats are in section 108, tipoff is at 7:30 PM.

This appears to be a member of the Hawks basketball team. Photo by Scott Cunningham

As a reward to our long-time readers and quick searchbar users, the tickets will go to the first person to name the player previous author james (successfully) petitioned to stay here in Atlanta. Well, at least the guy signed a four-year contract after james posted an open letter to him here on metblogs, so you draw your own conclusions.

Be the first to leave your comment (make sure to include your email address when you login – it won’t show, but I’ll get it) and I’ll send you the electronic tickets for tonight!

These are probably NOT the kinds of drinks they were making at the shot house. I wonder if it had a name.

After receiving reports from neighbors about a line of cars in front of the home on Sundays, police “conducted surveillance, made traffic stops as customers left, and sent in an officer with a hidden camera. They then returned with a warrant and the SWAT team.” Okay, I get it. Something illegal was going on. And it’s the police department’s job to stop it. I understand that the problem here isn’t just selling alcohol on Sundays. Someone was selling out of a home in a residential neighborhood, operating without a license and in a place with children and families. Obviously, the potential exists for some sort of misconduct or violence to spill over. This is all bad. I’m glad the police intervened. 

 BUT. But. The fact that all of this happened – the bar’s existence, the police raid, the arrests, the coming prosecutions – happened because our state allows for the sale of alcohol Mondays through Saturdays. But not Sundays – unless you drink at a bar. On Sunday, it’s illegal. From a policy standpoint, it seems like a problem to require law enforcement to commit precious time, manpower, and resources to shut down shot houses while potential robberies, rapes, and homicides are taking place elsewhere. Can we just allow the sale of alcohol on Sundays already? Is it really too much to ask?

Atlanta has a pretty serious history of street name-changing ridiculousness. A certain street on the west side of the city has gone through four names (based on some serious Wikipedia-ing, it looks like it went from Bellwood Ave to Bankhead Ave in the 1920s to Bankhead Highway to, most recently, Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway. You can’t bounce on DLH. But I guess you don’t get robbed on DLH?).

Other egregious offenses that come to mind are the Lakewood Freeway -> Langford Parkway switch, Stewart -> Metropolitan, our Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and, most ridiculous of all, a  stretch of Memorial Drive has already been switched back to Memorial after a brief stint as Cynthia McKinney Parkway.

The latest round of street name changes is up for a vote this week.  City Council is proposing to change Harris St. downtown to John Portman (the architect behind downtown’s gorgeous atrium hotels who is often partially blamed for the neighborhood’s dearth of welcoming street life), and to change Cone to recognize Xernona Clayton, a well-known civil rights activist and close friend to Coretta Scott King.  Both people are living, both people have made significant contributions to the city, and, I strongly believe, neither street name change is warranted. Creative Loafing has a thoughtful editorial about the issue here – “A surefire way not to be remembered: Note to City Council: Street signs are not chalkboards.” Read more

Flickr photo by Intrepidation

Every now and then, maybe once every three months, I think about having a burger.  But I don’t. After one disappointing encounter too many, I pretty well gave up.

Too dry or too greasy. Too much glop on it. Too big, too charred, too much bread. Some have the the heft of a brick and taste of absolutely nothing. With so many other things to eat, it didn’t seem worthwhile to keep searching for a passable version of one food. So, I probably haven’t had a hamburger in about five years.

I thought Atlanta’s two-year-old gourmet burger epidemic would have burned itself out by now, but I would have lost money on that bet. Maybe now, when the choices are about as good as they’re likely to get, is the time to give it another try. I live close enough to Grindhouse to walk (not today, lest I freeze my face or who-knows-what else off in the process). I can get to Wonderful World pretty easily (Hmm, their site is down. Anyone know what’s going on with them?) and it wouldn’t be too much trouble to MARTA my way over to Flip or Yeah! Burger. But, once there, would it be worth the time and, more importantly, the money?

Is anyone a new burger convert? Is there really something to all this or is everyone just going because everyone else is going?

Whether the downtown streetcar project has you saying “Yay!” or “#$%&!” or just “Huh?” you’ll want to get to the second public hearing  that the Federal Transit Administration, the City of Atlanta and MARTA are holding Monday evening.

If you’re in the “Huh?” crowd, have a look at the Atlanta Streetcar Environmental Assessment (big PDF) before you go. It’s long, but pretty much every speck of information in the streetcar project is there, all in one package. Just <Ctrl+F> to search for a term if you don’t have time to pore over every one of the 345 pages between now and Monday afternoon.

Time and place:

December 13, 2010
5:00 p.m to 7:00 p.m.
Auburn Avenue Research Library
4th Floor Auditorium
101 Auburn Avenue NE
Atlanta, Ga. 30303

H/T to Creative Loafing.

An indicator map illustrating population growth among American cities since from 2000 to 2009

Well, it’s almost Christmas and that means new toys. My current favorite actually came out in May, but somehow escaped my attention then. Let’s pull it out of the box and see what it does.

When The Brookings Institution’s “State of Metropolitan America” report was released this summer it drew attention locally because of its revelation that the city of Atlanta’s population - unlike that of most other major cities – is slowly becoming more white.

But, spend a bit of time fiddling with the dozens of levers and switches on the report’s interactive map and data exploration page , and you’ll find plenty more about how the city is changing (and staying the same).

Some examples:

Singles

Choose the “Cities” tab, “Households and families” on the “Subject” drop-down menu, and “Living alone households” on the drop-down labeled “Indicator.”.

Looks like there might be something to all the talk about Atlanta being a great place for single people. According to Broookings’ data, nearly 46 percent of Atlanta residents lived in single-person households in 2009, the second-highest percentage of the 95 cities listed and highest in the Southeast.

Now, change the indicator drop-down to “Change in living alone households since 2000.”

The report indicates that between 2000 and 2009, the number of single-person households in the city increased by nearly 47 percent, ranking it third amontg the 95 listed. One-person households increased by about 39 percent in the Atlanta metro area in the same period, which placed at number seven of 100. So, if you’re looking to meet someone, the odds are not only in your favor,  they seem to be getting better and better.

By the way, does anyone know what’s going on in McAllen, Texas? A 113 percent increase in less than ten years – what’s that about?

Read more

Atlanta has always struck me as a place that eschews tradition. We have a young, mobile population, we tear down old buildings when they get old (or just abandon them to the point where it’s not a stretch to picture them as post-zombie-apocalypse), and generally tend to get excited about the next big thing, improving and tweaking and changing and leaving behind last year’s big thing.

Which doesn’t lend itself to a lot of tradition – even the Rich’s Macy’s tree has moved from downtown to Underground to Lenox, and the Pink Pig downgraded from mythical flying monorail

Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!

Earth-bound. Might as well be one of those trains at Northpoint Mall.

that soared through the toy department to a flat track on the ground that chugs through Christmas decorations. Bummer.

In an effort to combat this crappiness and embrace the season, my friends and I have set upon a different tradition – going to the annual Santaland Diaries performance at the Horizon Theater in L5P. This year is their twelfth production of David Sedaris’s story, a completely bitter and sardonic one of an out-of-work writer who takes a job as a Macy’s Elf. Harold Leaver plays Crumpet the elf, and guys, the man make me laugh. Pretty hard.

Read more