Decatur, GA (pic courtesy of David)

UPDATE: City Manager Peggy Merriss tells DM that no Decatur fire trucks will actually be relocated to the Roly Poly site, but instead will all be located at Fire Station #2 in Oakhurst.

Roly Poly will house four staff members, along with the “first responder Expedition truck (2 people) and the air and light truck (2 people)”, as Scott mentioned in the comments.

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The new Decatur-Avondale Estates Patch site reports that while renovations are being made to Decatur’s Fire Station #1 along Trinity Place, two of the city’s fire trucks and some of its firefighters will relocate to the old site of Roly Poly sandwich shop along Church Street to service the northside of the city.

I guess if we can temporarily run city hall out of a meat locker, we can operate a fire department out of a sandwich shop, right?!

The city purchased the Roly Poly site back in October 2008 as part of the Decatur Cemetery master plan to widen the Church Street entrance.

Looks like the little ol’ Roly Poly building will serve one final function before it’s ultimately torn down.

After seven decades of growth, the U.S. has now seen four consecutive years of declines in gasoline consumption and various experts believe the trend will continue for decades to come.

An article from the AP details how the recent decline gasoline consumption is not just about the global recession, but is due to many other factors, including more fuel-efficient cars, people driving less, ethanol mandates, and more expensive gasoline.  And the decline is expected to accelerate, even though projections put 17 million more cars on the road 10 years from now.  Why?

Starting with the 2012 model year, cars will have to hit a higher fuel economy target for the first time since 1990. Each carmaker’s fleet must average 30.1 mpg, up from 27.5. By the 2016 model year, that number must rise to 35.5 mpg. And, starting next year, SUVs and minivans, once classified as trucks, will count toward passenger vehicle targets.

…Gasoline prices are forecast to stay high as developing economies in Asia and the Middle East use more oil.

There are demographic factors at work, too. Baby boomers will drive less as they age. The surge of women entering the work force and commuting has leveled off in recent decades. And the era of Americans commuting ever farther distances appears to be over. One measure of this, vehicle miles traveled per licensed driver, began to flatten in the middle of the last decade after years of sharp growth.

h/t: Otis White

Closed since last Saturday night due to a water main break, The Decatur Minute reports that the “railroad crossing located at E. College Avenue and E. Trinity Place is now open for vehicular and pedestrian traffic.”

A couple different thoughts/stories invoked this question recently.

First, walking by Starbucks on Decatur Square last weekend, I got to thinking about the unique quality of that national chain.  As I ambled by, watching a few customers sip their hot, caffeinated beverages at the outdoor tables on a chilly pre-Winter day, I thought to myself, you know people chide Starbucks for being on every street corner and in every mall, but that very flexibility to set up shop in any reasonably stable economic environment is a real rarity in the retail marketplace these days.  In short, there aren’t really that many brands found in both malls and downtowns.  While other chain restaurants are also found in both locations, Starbucks is certainly the most extreme exception to that rule.

The second event that revived this train of thought a couple days later was an AJC article that documents the decline of many malls in the Atlanta area.  This again got me thinking.  Do the lower occupancy rates of many Atlanta-area malls (chief among them North DeKalb) and recent bankruptcy filings of mall owners signal a new, less dominant retail role for malls in the second decade of the 21st century?

And if so, what does the urban retail future look like?

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