You have probably heard about Toyota having some problems with some of its most popular cars. Well one of those cars is the Matrix and currently the downtown Ann Arbor Zipcar fleet has 2 Toyota Matrix’s. As of now, the be safe, Zipcar is removing those vehicles from the fleet. No word yet about when they might return or what they will be replaced with.
if you find yourself biking, busing or walking in the wintertime, congratulations! You, my friend, are a Winter Warrior.
Come celebrate your Winter Warrior-ness with other like-minded folks during Downtown Ann Arbor’s Winter Warrior event!
Winter Warrior will be happening on Saturday, Feb 6th from 12-6pm.
Restaurants and cafes will have outdoor seating and there will be discounts to downtown stores. Restaurants and cafes will be bringing out their sidewalk furniture, and those guests who sit outside will enjoy specials such as $2 draught beers and $1 hot drinks (tea, coffee, soda, etc.). Restaurants and cafes will be bringing out their sidewalk furniture, and those guests who sit outside will enjoy specials such as $2 draught beers and $1 hot drinks (tea, coffee, soda, etc.). All you have to do is grab a drink, get your receipt stickered and then visit one of the following stores for your discount. These stores should have balloons outside them to let you know they are participating.
Winter Warrior Discounts:
Here is a list of our participating retailers and the discounts they are offering:
Salon XL – 20% off products
Moosejaw – 20% off any one, regular priced item
Salon Vox – 20% off products
Schakolad – discounts on hot drinks and prebooked Valentine’s orders
Sole Sisters – an additional 10% off sale items, 15% off regularly priced items.
Cupcake Station – free regular coffee with a $2 purchase
Crazy Wisdom – 15% off one item
Acme Mercantile – 20% off regularly priced merchandise (Saturday Only)
Elmo’s T-Shirts – a FREE Michigan bumper sticker($4.95 value) with the purchase of any t-shirt at regular price (not already on sale) and a FREE tin lunch box ($9.95 value) with the purchase of a second t-shirt. 1 shirt, 1 sticker . 2 shirts, sticker and lunch box, a $14.90 value. Saturday and Sunday, Feb.6,7
Carillon Chocolates – BOGO ice cream cones or BOGO coffee (Saturday & Sunday)
Ann Arbor Art Center – 10% off in gift shop, 20% off for members
Also, there will be on-street bike parking in front of Mighty Good Coffee and Schakolad!
In the olden days, if you had a suggestion for bike parking in downtown Ann Arbor, it wasn’t very easy to figure out how to get that request considered. Starting today, the DDA is making is easier for anyone to request bike parking downtown. The DDA now has an online bicycle parking request form.
According to the DDA, you can use this form for the following reasons:
If you know of a downtown location that could benefit from additional bicycle parking, you have noticed a hoop in need of repair, or an abandoned bicycle – we want to hear from you. Please use the following form to make requests related to bicycle parking in the DDA area.
So consider yourself empowered to request more downtown bike parking.
As long as it’s cold outside, we might as well enjoy it, right? That’s the thinking behind downtown’s first Winter Warrior event, happening on Saturday, Feb6th from noon-6pm. There will be special discounts on food and drinks, some special retail deals, plus we’ll be bringing out some of the on-street bike racks!
So if you bike or walk to work during the winter, reward yourself during the Winter Warrior event. More info is below:
Saturday, February 6, 2010 Noon to 6pm
Become a Winter Warrior! This community event is all about encouraging the community to get outside and enjoy downtown Ann Arbor at a time of year during which coming outside is not quite so inviting. Restaurants and cafes will be bringing out their sidewalk furniture, and those guests who sit outside will enjoy specials such as $2 draught beers and $1 hot drinks (tea, coffee, soda, etc.). Some businesses may also be offering food specials. Guests will receive a stamp on their receipt redeemable at participating downtown retailers for special warrior discounts. This is our way of saying, “Thank you for coming out and supporting our downtown businesses and community!”
Click here to view all of the Winter Warrior discounts.
Participating Downtown Businesses and Organizations Include:
Salon XL
Moosejaw
Jolly Pumpkin
Arbor Brewing Company
Cafe Felix
Salon Vox
Schakolad
Sole Sisters
Cupcake Station
BD’s Mongolian BBQ
Crazy Wisdom
The Blue Tractor
Grizzly Peak
Mighty Good Coffee
Acme Mercantile
Elmo’s T-Shirts
Carillon Chocolates
Ann Arbor Art Center
What if you are a manager of a busy downtown restaurant? You have a team of great employees, and you want to provide additional benefits to them, but that doesn’t mean you have to give each of them a bonus.
Providing go!passes is one way to do this but you already know about the unlimited bus rides the go!pass gives your employees. Maybe you’ve told your employees about the discounts you can get with a go!pass (10% off your coffee at Sweetwater’s or 20% off of an item at Ten Thousand Villages), but have you shared with them the discounted rate for the Night Ride ($1 with a go!pass)?
Do your employees know?
I spoke with Lisa Schramm of the Fleetwood Diner, as well as Carole Woods of Zingerman’s, and they both told me that the Night Ride has been a useful service for their employees. Each of them took the extra step to publicize the Night Ride discount to your employees. Lisa said that she made a poster with the information on it, and Carole gave the information to a creative employee who made a clever, eye-catching poster and hung it on the inside of the employee’s bathroom stalls – where it was sure to get a little undivided attention.
A little creativity and an extra step, and let your employees know about all of the benefits that the go!pass has to offer.
I don’t have a lot of time to comment on these survey results right now, but I wanted folks to be able to check out the results from this survey (conducted late last year) that assess the interest of Washtenaw County voters countywide transit.
You can download the Executive Summary here.
To get a taste of some of the results, here’s the final conclusion of the report:
At the time of the survey (October, 2009) support for a transit tax issue, though nominally at a majority of 51%, was insufficient for it to pass. Too much of the support was half-hearted, and opposition, though in the minority, was firm. However, exposure to various arguments for and against a transit tax during the survey resulted in a gain of 10% for the issue, a fact that indicates the ability of a campaign to motivate a positive vote, not by trying to change the minds of those clearly opposed to a levy, but primarily by strengthening the interest and support of those who at the present time are only weakly committed to a positive vote on the issue.
Although households with at least one transit user are heavily in favor of a transit tax issue, and are an important constituency, they are insufficient in number to pass a transit issue. Thus the issue will turn on the broader community benefit to all, transit users and non-users alike.
The promise of improvements to existing services such as extended weekend hours and more frequent service, while probably appealing to riders, and perhaps important, do not attract voters in general. On the other hand service which broaden the usefulness of transit throughout the county have some appeal. The prospects, however, of WALLY receives a very mixed response and is not advantageous to a transit tax issue. Ann Arbor – Detroit service receives better response, but neither rail issue is, at present, a significant new plus for a transit issue, and funding for WALLY may pose a serious risk for a transit issue.
The fate of the transit tax vote will depend not on a promise of any specific service or service package, but rather on the ability of a campaign and its allies to move and solidify the positive and positive-leaning voters by informing them of AATA’s existing accomplishments, its careful and productive use of public money, the county-wide nature of its future services, the need for public transit to attract jobs, and the need to expand services for seniors and those with disabilities.
Wondering what’s up with the Ann Arbor to Detroit Rail Project? SEMCOG just posted an updated report on their website (thanks to Mark Maynard for tipping me off to this).
You can read the Jan 2010 update here (PDF).
Some of the highlights:
In the race for energy efficiency between mass transit and single occupancy vehicles, who’s currently on the winning side? The Straight Dope tackles this question in characteristically logical style.
The only thing I regret about this article is that he doesn’t look at bikes and traveling by foot as viable transportation option (although he does mention them in passing at the end of the article).
FYI from the AATA:
AATA to open new Park & Ride Lot
Commuters will soon have yet another option for accessing popular Ann Arbor destinations. On January 25, 2010, Ann Arbor Transportation Authority, AATA will begin service to the new Plymouth Road Park & Ride Lot. Located within the US-23/Plymouth Road interchange in Northeast Ann Arbor, the lot is ideally located for commuters using the heavily traveled M-14/US-23 corridor.
Commuters can enter the lot directly from Plymouth Rd. In addition to 260 free, paved parking spaces, the lot features a number of amenities: passenger shelters, lighting, security cameras to provide digital video recording, a signalized entrance/exit, enhanced storm water detention and designated areas for passenger drop-off and carpool/vanpool parking. Bike-and-bus commuters will find a covered parking area for 20 bicycles.
With the opening of the lot, AATA will implement transit service improvements in northeast Ann Arbor. AATA’s Route 2 Plymouth will serve the Plymouth Road Park & Ride lot on weekdays. Buses will operate throughout the day, with trips as frequent as every 10 minutes during peak times.
The Plymouth Road Park & Ride Lot joins four other facilities as part of AATA’s growing network of Park & Ride lots.
The lot represents AATA’s first independently constructed park and ride facility and is located on the public right of way owned by the Michigan Department of Transportation. The lot was developed in cooperation with Michigan Department of Transportation, City of Ann Arbor and the Federal Highway Administration.
In coordinating the project, AATA involved numerous Michigan-based companies. The primary contractors include D&R Earthmoving of Howell, OHM Engineering of Livonia, Beckett & Raeder of Ann Arbor, Nagle Paving Company of Novi, Rauhorn Electric of Macomb, Goretski Construction Company, Inc. of Milford, Cut-N-Care, Inc. of Wixom, Huron Sign Company of Ypsilanti.
Construction of the lot is funded entirely through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The total estimated cost will be $1.56 million. Substantial completion of the lot allows AATA to open it to the public, as scheduled, on January 25, 2010. This spring final pavement and striping as well as landscaping will complete the project.
A grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Park & Ride lot will take place in May during the annual Commuter Challenge. The Commuter Challenge is a month-long competition during the month of May between Ann Arbor Area organizations that encourages individuals to use sustainable transportation options to get to work.
