Alright, so DM isn’t technically a message board, but our comments section sure comes close!  (As any half-decent hyper-local blog should.)

So I thought you might all get a kick out of this recent list from Atlantic Cities detailing “The 20 Characters You’ll Meet on Every Neighborhood Message Board”.  Not every single one applies – e.g. we don’t have any #18s (Reply All Guys) or #20s (Accidental Reply All Ladies), since there’s no reply all function on DM.   But I’m sure you’ll notice as you go down the list, there will be more than one…or five…occasions when you’ll say to yourself…”That’s totally…so-and-so.”

So which are you?

I’ll post the 20 names for the characters below, but you’ll have to click over to Atlantic Cities to read the excellent and often hilarious descriptions.  (Sorry, I still like to show my fellow blogs some link love.)

• 1. The moderator.
• 2. The comic.
• 3. The loose cannon.
• 4. The longtime resident.
• 5. The doubter.
• 6. The local business owner who is tasteful with his advertising.
• 7. The local-ish business owner who is not.

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The Atlantic Cities blog has a really interesting post this morning based on the successful rain garden programs in Portland, Oregon (“the dream of the 90’s is alive…”) and around Washington D.C.  The post has a rather emphatic title “Why Every City Should be Planting Rain Gardens” and after reading it, it’s hard to disagree.

Rain gardens seem like they have the potential to please every type of city dweller as well as perform a necessary function of reducing rain runoff by allowing storm-water to soak into the ground.  The finance hawks can take comfort in the fact that each strategically placed rain garden can reduce the burden on an increasingly expensive sewer system.  Eco-nauts can love the fact that the gardens incorporate native plant species, and reduces damaging run-off.  Draught-fearfuls will appreciate that the gardens send more rainwater back into the earth during the summer months of Lanier-induced panic.

What’s not to love?

And it’s not just something the city can tuck into small parcels of land around the city, but it’s also an idea that can benefit our commercial properties AND countless negative-revenue single family homeowers!  Want to install a few rain gardens yourself?  The Oakhurst Community Garden and the city are hosting a rain garden event at the Decatur Library in April.  Can’t wait ’til then?  You can also watch this 12 minute video put together by the city of Portland on the where and how of installing rain gardens around your home, do some more Googling and then get started (or hire someone to do it for you).

At the broader city level, it seems like if city staff could just determine where to put these rain gardens, you could find countless volunteers to spend the weekends digging the ditches, shoveling the dirt, and planting the low-maintenance plants.  What parent hasn’t dreamed of sending their tweenager out to dig a few ditches on a Saturday morning??  And they’d be digging “for the environment”.  What child of the new millennium wouldn’t love that?

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

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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