“Had any one noticed,” Saw1988 asked, “all the shopping carts flipped over at the bus stops. This looks terrible. Can some sort of action be done?”
Scott Adkins indeed noticed. And he has a three-part plan to stanch the rogue cart menace.
Adkins is the city manager of Roseville, Michigan. He read the comment Saw1988 posted on that city’s SeeClickFix portal, from the New Haven-based citizen problem-solving web platform. Communities throughout the country have been wrestling with this cart menace.
Adkins.
Adkins agrees that way too many carts are being left in public in his Detroit suburb, especially at bus stops. It turns out his Detroit suburb has copious retail stores, and often shoppers without cars need the carts to schlep multiple bags to the bus.
Technically, it’s illegal to take a cart from a store into the street. “The problem becomes policing it,” Adkins noticed — cops have bigger crimes to concentrate on.
In response, Adkins said, his city is working with the transit district to locate more stops closer to major stores, reexamining where stores have moved. Meanwhile, city officials are asking storeowners to “educate” shoppers about the rules. The owners have a stake, Adkins noticed: Each cart can cost them $200-$300.
Finally, the city’s own crews have been responding to complaints like Saw1988’s and retrieving some of the abandoned carts while longer-term efforts take hold.
Paul Bass Photo
The SeeClickFix Radio crew at WNHH: Caroline Smith, Nadine Herring, Margaret Lee.
Adkins discussed Roseville’s approaches to that and other quality-of-life challenges on the latest edition of WNHH radio’s “SeeClickFix Radio.”
New Haveners will recognize some of those challenges, like filling potholes. Roseville has taken a regional “pothole pledge” to fill reported road craters within 24 hours.
He said his three-person crew has succeeded in cold-patching the biggest potholes, causing potential public danger, within two hours, then hitting the rest by 12 hours in most cases. A separate crew then makes the rounds to do the longer-term fix, cleaning out the holes first.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full episode, which also covers a response to a neighbor’s complaint that construction workers were keeping people awake after midnight. The story turned out to be a bit more complicated.
This episode of “SeeClickFix Radio” was made possible in parts thanks to financial support from Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Great. Now the homeless can use them with out the fear of Walmart, Stop & Shop, etc calling the cops.