December 2010
14 posts
1 tag
Walkable Neighborhoods Make People Happier →
Photo: Till Westermayer under a Creative Commons license.
The Treehugger site reports that walkability in urban neighborhoods provides yet another plus: in addition to the green benefits (“dense cities consume less energy per capita than any other kind of environment”), people in walkable urban neighborhoods live happier lives.
Those living in more walkable neighborhoods trusted...
2 tags
Complete streets in Michigan
Some good urbanism happening in Michigan:
New Michigan law gives walkers, bikers a share of streets
Here’s great quote from the article:
Michigan is now on the record acknowledging that it is a mistake to build roadways just to move high volumes of vehicle traffic as fast as possible. Designing healthy cities means considering all potential users of a street, regardless of their age or...
3 tags
Return of the Son of Atlanta Beltline Funding,...
Thomas Wheatley reports in the Fresh Loaf blog that people of Gwinnett County are not keen on transportation tax if Beltline gets slice of funding.
The Beltline will do great things for the intown neighborhoods, but I kinda sympathize with anyone who doesn’t see the it as a project that would be appropriately funded with general transportation money for the metro.
My initial reaction to...
4 tags
The Train Blame Game
A bizarre, bi-polar article on the coming Atlanta streetcar and its relationship to MARTA appears in the Next American City site this week. It demonstrates the common misconception that Atlanta’s development pattern is faultless and that MARTA is a failure: Can a New Streetcar Save Atlanta’s MARTA? Writer Mary Jones points out MARTA’s success by noting that it “serves close...
2 tags
4 tags
Yet more MARTA negativity from the AJC
I was just referring to the daily ”what crap can we print about MARTA today to get the suburbanites’ tongues wagging” campaign by the Atlanta Journal Constitution yesterday. And now the prophesy has been fulfilled.
The current headline on the AJC website is “MARTA loses riders after cutbacks” with a teaser line of “Audit finds that transit agency lost thousands of...
1 tag
Census data shows trend toward urban living in...
An article in today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution explores census data that shows an interesting trend: the Atlanta suburbs are no longer drawing people and money away from the city as they have in the past — and this seems to be because of the popularity of urban living.
Here’s the article: Census data show gap closes between city, suburbs
A couple of sections of note:
...
3 tags
MARTA the most efficient rail transit in US? Well,...
How about someone at the MARTA PR department gettin’ on this bad boy and letting people in Atlanta know when they’re riding the most efficient high-speed urban rail line in the US? This is the kind of thing you wanna get in the headlines to combat the Atlanta Journal’s daily “what crap can we print about MARTA today to get the suburbanites’ tongues wagging”...
2 tags
I'm not alone in my parking-lot disgust
Jeanne Bonner of Atlanta Unsheltered writes about how jarring is to see so many parking lots in Atlanta’s urban streetscape:
This photo shows modern Atlanta’s development
As I write in the comments of that post, the issue of parking facilities downtown has become an oddly emotional one for me. I’ve got a big tie to downtown Atlanta and a lot of hope invested in seeing a complete...
3 tags
A score for urbanism on ATL's westside
Say what you want about Walmart. I’m just glad to see the Westside Village, a great revitalization project with some nice New Urbanist elements (and located very near the Ashby MARTA station), get a new place for residents to shop after the sad closing of their Publix grocery store.
According to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, Walmart will take the place of the closed Publix. Construction...
3 tags
Transit & Path Connectivity on the Beltline →
I’m totally geeked out about the Beltline connectivity Thomas Wheatley writes about today in the Creative Loafing blog.
His post states that the northeast section of the Atlanta Beltline’s cycling/walking paths (with transit to come in a few years, hopefully) will connect to both Freedom Path and the coming downtown streetcar. It’s very nice to know that these different...
1 tag
1 tag
WatchVery cool time-lapse images of spots near my neighborhood in downtown Atlanta. Really captures the energy and movement of the city.
lonelinessandthescream:
little timelapse. atlanta. // (made by the ims.)