Are you guys “car-free” today?  I thought I saw a few more bikes than usual on the way in this morning!

If you agree to give your car the day off one day this week, Clark Howard will give you a free Chick-fil-A sammich. Just don’t make an extra trip and drive there.

Apparently Atlantans spend an average of nearly $500 a month driving back and forth to work. That is completely nuts when you add in the value of lost time spent in the car, too. And the cumulative stress it generates– it raises the hairs on the back of my neck thinking about sitting in the parking lot of the connector every day. I picture a big black ball of Angry sparking and hovering over Spaghetti Junction.

A good resource for anyone even considering carpooling, MARTA, biking, or other transportation options is the Clean Air Campaign. I “log my commute” with them every week and occasionally win an Amazon gift card, plus get pretty annoyingly smug when I use their online calculators to see how much money I save by biking to work instead of driving. They can pair you up with carpool partners, and you get up to $100 or more just for starting an alternative commute.

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.