Morning Metro: Halloween Contest, HOV Lanes Madden Drivers, and More No-English Equivalents
Decatur Metro | October 7, 2011
- Decatur Holding 2nd Annual Halloween Decorating Contest [COD]
- New I-85 HOV lanes annoying, the Governor had to step in and do something [AJC]
- DeKalb Commish Jeff Rader is disappointed about the smoking ban’s demise [CHCA]
- Job Opening: Georgia Poet Laureate [AJC]
- Ansley Park Named “Great Neighborhood” by American Planning Assoc. [APA]
- 15 More Words with no English Equivalent [mental floss]
Photo courtesy of the Decatur Minute
Latest from Decaturish
DM, please pick a top topic (HOT topic?) for Morning Metro.
picked for Streetsblog daily:
Mass Transit Languishes. What’s New?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/us/mass-transit-languishes-whats-new.html
The C.T.A.’s own capital needs are estimated at $10 billion, including money to fix problems caused by “boatloads of deferred maintenance in the 1970s and 1980s,” said Peter Skosey, a vice president with the Metropolitan Planning Council.
That H.O.T. (vs. H.O.V.) reference was a miss.
DM, I like your Morning Metro sampling, it’s a good mix. (Don’t need you to tell me what’s in the NYT, i read it myself every day. Do appreciate your pointing out items of interest in other places that I’d otherwise miss.)
Yeah, I worry about that a bit. Do you have a subscription? One of the recent NYT ones did pretty well – I think it was the Mark Bittman article about home-cooked meals being cheaper than fast food.
That said, I’m excited to see that there’s an appetite for some things that I share that have little to do with “local news”.
I’ve got a couple other topic areas I’ve considered adding. The great thing is the direct feedback you get with these types of things.
Actually, if you could provide a link to EVERY Times article each day, that would be super. I have so far resisted paying their monthly fee and if you access the articles from another site rather than from the NYT directly, it doesn’t count against your monthly allotment of free access
The NYT runs specials all the time on home delivery, and they now (finally) offer Sunday-only delivery here. (For years, they forced you to buy Saturday, too.) As a home delivery customer, you have full online access to everything (including the crossword and the full archive and all the associated blogs).
Or, for a small consideration, I’ll send you links.
I’ve got the Sunday only subscription too. The fact that’s cheaper than digital only and provides the full digital subscription sorta blows my mind.
Thanks for the info guys. The introductory rate, at least, is a pretty great deal. It’s like getting the Sunday paper delivered for 1/2 what I’d spend on it, assuming I could even find one around here (Damn you, Bagel Palace, for discontinuing newspaper sales!) with the digital access thrown in (without having to clean my cache and cookies every 2 days). Signing up for Sunday delivery right now!
When you hit your limit of free articles, clean your cache and cookies and it’s like you never read any. Or, sign up for their official tweets and they send the links so your total doesn’t accumulate. The latter is their suggestion as a work around, the first is mine. They have purposely built in ways to avoid their pay wall, but whether ethical or not for the other, is a whole debate by itself.
Oh, I didn’t mean you should never include links to NYT items. I was disagreeing with Bobby that you should go for “hot” topics or “hov” topics. I like the mix you’ve been generating.
Alhtough in retrospect, I may have misunderstood Bobby’s post and/or may have been projecting my own feeling of having had enough mass transit for this week. (I’d already read the NYT piece about Chicago’s situation, and it just made me tired to know that transit is such a mess everywhere.)
I concur that a mix is good. My comment was absurdly opaque. As for the HOT piece of it, some hairpin trigger could have dropped if I called out the HOV “error” (typo?).
… though there is one recurring element of Morning Metro that is so. Irrelevant. Compared to, say, news. I can check on the adventures of our inexplicably important fashionistas through the handy link on the right.
It’s too bad the level of click-thrus (300+) – and I – don’t agree with you.
Some Halloween displays are too gruesome for me and my family no matter how grown we get.
Different gross for different folks.
Jeff Rader’s comments on the failure of the DeKalb County smoking ban proposal is a good read. Thanks for posting that link.
I’m disappointed in Rader for hiking my taxes by 22%, so I’m having a hard time mustering up any sympathy for him.
Man, the local news stations are all over those hot lanes. I knew they would increase traffic elsewhere, but is it really as bad as they are making out to be? Were there that many couples in the HOV lanes before who can’t use them now? On a related note, has anyone noted a drop-off in MARTA ridership since the fares went up? Maybe that is one reason the traffic on I-85 has supposedly been so bad this week.
I had the pleasure of traveling 285 to 85S today at 4:30. 85 in both directions was absolutely insane. It seemed more nuts than usual, traffic was backed up for miles 85N (from downtown) and S. It gets nasty sometimes but it wasn’t even crawling, it was practically stopped. I don’t know if it was the lanes, but I can’t remember the last time I saw it backed up like that without any major incident as the culprit.
MARTA- I have the luxury of avoiding it and that’s what I have been doing. I’m house sitting for a friend just up 75. Last time I did it, I took MARTA, and hopped off on my bike for the last 5 miles. I’m not doing that this time. I can’t justify $5.00 to go a short distance everyday for 11 days. I actually biked the entire trip yesterday, and vehicled it today (which was extremely stupid at 4:30!). If I need to go to the airport, MARTA is the obvious choice, but other than that, I’m not using it. I sincerely feel for those who have no other transportation options.
I just spent a year and a half of commuting between Marietta and Lawrenceville. That top end traffic you experienced yesterday at 4:30 has a name. It’s called “Friday”. Seriously. There’s often no rhyme nor reason to the 75/285/85 traffic patterns but one thing is constant and predictable and that’s Friday afternoon clusterf**ks!
Yikes. I would tear my hair out if I had to sit in that even once a week. I honestly don’t know how people do it.
Can we nominate other people’s houses for the Hallowe’en decorating contest? I like the house on Ponce de Leon across from Saint Thomas More. He’s got the graveyard set up already, and he usually sets up that giant pumpkin.
I hope we can do that, Parker. I love the giant pumpkin on Ponce, it’s definitely one of my favorites.
Regarding the Poet Laureate gig, they didn’t ask for nominations but I emailed anyway with a vote for Natasha Tretheway.
my husband calculated that it was now cheaper for him to drive to work and pay parking etc than take Marta since the fees went up…. He’s been taking Marta to work for years…. He’s decided to cycle to work in midtown now….