It was a quiet weekend here in Ann Arbor, as long as you had the doors and windows closed tightly shut and the windows drawn and the air conditioning on full blast. If you didn't have all of these, it was one of the busiest in recent memory, with a full house at the Big House and traffic that backed up for miles.

Today's links are inspired by the streets of Ann Arbor, complete with traffic, noise and litter—all hallmarks of a seasonally prosperous local economy fueled in part by football partying.

Noise

A stadium full of fans gets noisy, no matter who is winning.

A town full of students and beer also gets noisy. I was listening to the scanner on the evening after the game, and Ann Arbor police were getting called to multiple locations with noise complaints from loud parties that had spilled over onto the street.

Links

• Washtenaw County scanner live feed from Radio Reference. On a typically busy night with no emergencies there will be 15 to 20 people listening to the Internet feed.
• The City of Ann Arbor Noise ordinance at 9:364 (Maximum permissible sound levels) specifies a residential daytime maximum of 61 dB and a night time maximum of 55 dB.
• How noisy is your neighborhood stadium? Measure it yourself with this sound meter application for the iPhone from Studio Six Digital in Boulder, Colo.

Traffic

I wasn't in the middle of it, but there were multiple reports that traffic was backed up north and south on Main Street and clogged up in the center of town, long after the game ended. Game day traffic is generally bad enough, and the construction in the middle of Ann Arbor probably didn't help.

Ann Arbor can be hard to get to and hard to leave if it's a busy day, since the freeway ring around the city cuts off a number of surface entry and exit paths. If you're making a mental note about your personal escape plan from the bubble, you should be familiar with some of the less well-travelled highway crossings (Pontiac Trail, Nixon Road, Earhart Road, Packard Road and Stone School Road come to mind) which avoid interchanges and which lead through to the nearby countryside.

Links

• Google Maps has traffic congestion information in its displays for desktop and mobile phones. There is some amount of time delay, so if there's an accident you won't necessarily find out that the highway ahead is stopped until you stop.
• The WALLY commuter rail project is designed to carry traffic off of congested US-23 to bring commuters—and perhaps also football fans—from Livingston County.
• Football special trains carried passengers along the Toledo-to-Ann Arbor line until the early 1960s. This account by Jim Sinclair on Michigan Railroads lists the nine trains carrying 117 passenger cars full of fans along the line for the Nov. 21, 1959 game against Ohio State.

Trash

After every large gathering there is bound to be a lot of trash. In Michigan, it's distinctive that the debris on the street does not generally include beer cans. A 1976 bottle bill turned these into currency, with a $0.10 deposit ensuring that if there enough of them in any area that someone will be willing to pick them up and haul them back to be redeemed.

Cardboard, alas, doesn't have a deposit, and though the city recycles it there can still be commercial cardboard piled up on the street waiting for the next truck. The heap of flattened boxes on William Street near the Delta Kappa Epsilon house is a testament to the positive impact of visitors to town, and every empty box reflects a dozen transactions with local merchants.

Links

• Michigan bottle bill complete text from the Container Recycling Institute.
• Can you recycle red plastic cups? In Ann Arbor, yes, as long as they are clean. Put them in your new recycle bin. Single stream recycling in Ann Arbor accepts most varieties of plastic, including the #6 plastic these are made of.

Edward Vielmetti returns his bottles on Tuesday, not Saturday, for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.