Three years after Tybee Island business owners objected to a proposed plastic bag ban and the Georgia Senate passed a bill prohibiting cities from adopting such bans, the nation’s largest grocer said it will eliminate plastic bags from all its stores.
This week, a global livability study says Atlanta fell in the rankings due to riots. Ah…okay. Also, as part of the ongoing Amazon charade, Atlanta will apparently offer the company $1 billion in incentives to locate their HQ2 campus in the downtown gulch. And Atlanta officials are finally treating public signs like works of art that actually try to inform people of rules.
Weekly Links: America dedicates 40% of its land to raising and feeding livestock, California’s Carr Fire may have produced an actual fire tornado with winds of 150 mph, and an intriguing map shows that the land that now comprises modern day Atlanta was a nexus point for three major Native American communities.
This week, New York wants to cap ridesharing vehicles to reduce traffic congestion, but Uber claims it’s immune from regulation because New York is bad at urban planning. If only that logic worked for the rest of us. Also, Los Angeles thinks it’s found a way to store excess solar and wind energy – by harnessing the power of the Hoover Dam. Plus, the story of the property in Manhattan that’s the size of a pizza slice and London could have had a futuristic pod system built on top of the Thames.
This week, Gwinnett County’s approval of rail expansion comes in the wake of a recent report highlighting the efforts of a conservative lobbying group to kill local transit projects throughout the country. This is reminiscent of General Motors’ effort decades ago to kill trolley ridership in favor of cars. Plus, we’ve introduced a new chart to put Atlanta’s temperatures into a historical context.
As the Economist recently showed, gentrification is about more than just the economics of shuffling people around housing units. Unfortunately, it was the magazine’s complete disinterest in addressing the complexities of the issue that proved the point.
This week, Atlanta holds a meeting on dockless scooters after posting a bizarre Facebook message. Also, the number of reported hate crimes continues to rise and a record number of Americans now believe that humans are influencing global warming. **Update, we now know the post was from a satirical account, but we’ve maintained the original article title for consistency.
The Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Florida v. Georgia shows why we shouldn’t ask the justices to create critical water policy.
