Last week, this view of Periwinkle Creek in Albany was spoiled by the presence of a bunch of abandoned shopping carts half submerged in the stream. On Tuesday, as you can see, the carts were gone.
A wooden bridge across Albany’s Periwinkle Creek leads from a dead-end stub of 12th Avenue to the northern end of the Periwinkle Bikepath. The bridge needs work, and so does the creek below.
It was 13 years ago that Albany passed a law to get rid of abandoned shopping carts. It hasn’t worked. And now the city council is poised to try again.
What are we looking at here? A legacy of lazy shoppers? A symptom of impatience brought on by Covid-19? Or a sign that the collapse of civilization is closer than we thought?
Wish I knew who got the shopping carts out of a section of Periwinkle Creek in the last few weeks. I don’t. All I know is that the debris I noticed there a couple of months ago has been removed.
In 2008, the Albany City Council passed a law intended to help return stolen shopping carts to the stores that own them. Almost 11 years later, we can see it hasn’t worked well, if at all.
Abandoned carts: Albany may try again
Trying to get a handle on the problem of stolen and abandoned shopping carts, Albany passed a law in 2008. The law was amended in 2021 and then, in a reorganization of the city code, passed again in 2022. What has been the result?
Tags: abandoned carts, Albany code, enforcement, Shopping carts