Creative Loafing’s Omnivore reports…

Twain’s Billiards and Tap has announced that local brewer David Stein will be taking up the position of Head Brewer on Dec. 5. An avid home brewer since 2005, Stein has spent the last 4 years entrenched in the local craft beer community, initially taking a job at Brick Store Pub and eventually landing at Ale Yeah! Craft Beer Market in Decatur. “I went to work at Brick Store to learn everything I could about beer,” Stein says, “to build my palate and try virtually every beer I could get my hands on.”

Stein has lots of interesting and innovative ideas for Twain’s brewing.  Check out the CL link above for more!

h/t: Sharron in FFAF

You may have noticed that I’ve very quickly fallen in love with this new Atlantic Cities blog.  Here’s another one.  In discussing the correlation between the rise in gas prices and bus/train ridership levels, the Atlantic uses Atlanta to demonstrate the larger trend of a “lagged effect” in adopting a new mode of transportation after a gas price spike…

Take, for instance, the case of bus ridership in Atlanta. There Lane discovered three significant behavioral elasticities at three distinct temporal lags. The first, which occurred at 0 months (or roughly the same time as the fuel hike), saw a roughly 20 percent jump in bus ridership. The second, coming at 6 months, saw a 32 percent transit rise, and the third, at 11 months, a 12 percent spike. Over the course of about a year, then, one major rise in fuel cost in Atlanta led to about a 64 percent rise in bus ridership.

Of course, the other side of this particular coin is the quality of your public transportation system itself, though Lane found some examples where particularly paltry systems in car-centric cities that saw large jumps in usage (though if he’s using %s to determine the size of his circles, it’s a lot easier for a city to double or triple usage when no one rides your buses/trains to begin with).  So take it for what it’s worth.

But what all of this seemingly obvious info reemphasizes to me is that while some will eschew the car voluntarily to enjoy some of the less tangible, finer things in a more walkable world, many others won’t without a tightening of choices.

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