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May 22, 2012
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Atlanta’s car-centric center, through a visitor’s eyes

An urbanist blogger from Savannah visited Atlanta earlier this year and shared some thoughts about the startling presence of car infrastructure (and lack of pedestrians) in the middle of the city.

A quote:

…notice how much real estate is given over to temporarily storing cars. And, this is a city with a fairly robust rail transit system. MARTA certainly has its flaws, but as the last true subway/heavy rail system built in America, it’s more than most cities have.

To be fair, he’s coming from a city that has one of the most walkable districts in the US, so Atlanta’s bound to be a strong contrast. And he doesn’t mention (or maybe doesn’t know) that there are lots of spots not far from here with a nice amount of pedestrian activity, particularly in my downtown Fairlie-Poplar area and the Peachtree Street corridor further north of the spot pictured above.

Nonetheless, I think he raises some solid points about many central parts of the city containing too damn much car infrastructure via parking facilities and highway on/off ramps. This patch south of North Avenue in particular is a real dead zone, something I’ve noticed many times myself on my regular walks through here.

I’d love to see Atlanta leaders focus on lessening the impact of cars on this area.

Tags: Atlanta walkability car dependency car-centric developmnent urbanism

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January 25, 2012
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The Health Threat of Car-oriented Places massurban posts a cool article about a former CDC administrator who “has become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health.” Here’s a quote about Dr. Jackson’s epiphany while on Buford Highway: On the side of the road he saw an elderly woman walking, bent with a load of shopping bags. It was a blisteringly hot day, and there was little hope that she would find public transportation. At that moment, Dr. Jackson says, “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America.” …Treatments could come in the form of pills, inhalers, and insulin shots, but real solutions had bigger implications. “More and more, I came to the conclusion that this is about how we build the world that we live in.” Read the full article:America’s Health Threat: Poor Urban Design

The Health Threat of Car-oriented Places

massurban posts a cool article about a former CDC administrator who “has become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health.”

Here’s a quote about Dr. Jackson’s epiphany while on Buford Highway:

On the side of the road he saw an elderly woman walking, bent with a load of shopping bags. It was a blisteringly hot day, and there was little hope that she would find public transportation.

At that moment, Dr. Jackson says, “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America.”

…Treatments could come in the form of pills, inhalers, and insulin shots, but real solutions had bigger implications. “More and more, I came to the conclusion that this is about how we build the world that we live in.”

Read the full article:
America’s Health Threat: Poor Urban Design

Tags: urban design car dependency Automobile Dependency walkability

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September 13, 2011
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drawingnothing: I thought this was interesting. What surface parking lots did to Cleaveland’s warehouse district (which is a nationally recognized historic district, oops).  1960s vs today. Shit like this needs to stop but you still see it happening even today in cities around the country. What a sad waste. It looks like someone dropped a car-centricity bomb on their downtown. It devastated parts the urban fabric and turned blocks of land into an asphalt apocalypse. This is, of course, sadly familiar. There are many sections of downtown Atlanta that look as bad as this if not worse. The area around the Garnett MARTA station, in particular, looks like a bombed-out war zone due to the leveling of beautiful old buildings over the decades in favor of surface parking lots for commuters.

drawingnothing:

I thought this was interesting. What surface parking lots did to Cleaveland’s warehouse district (which is a nationally recognized historic district, oops). 

1960s vs today.

Shit like this needs to stop but you still see it happening even today in cities around the country. What a sad waste.

It looks like someone dropped a car-centricity bomb on their downtown. It devastated parts the urban fabric and turned blocks of land into an asphalt apocalypse.

This is, of course, sadly familiar. There are many sections of downtown Atlanta that look as bad as this if not worse. The area around the Garnett MARTA station, in particular, looks like a bombed-out war zone due to the leveling of beautiful old buildings over the decades in favor of surface parking lots for commuters.

Tags: cities density environment parking surface parking urbanism walkability

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July 21, 2011
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Atlanta moves up in Walk Score ranking

Walk Score has released their new 2011 rankings of cities — their first revision since 2008 — and Atlanta has moved up two spots from #22 to #20 (in your face, Houston!).

The ranking by Walkscore.com, a site that measures the walkability of addresses, is of the 50 largest US cities. See the full list here.

I can’t see that the site provides any reason behind the improvement in Atlanta’s score. Let me know in the Disqus comments, please, if you find it or if you have any thoughts about whether or not Atlanta has truly improved in walkability.

Certainly some of the newer mixed-use developments, having filled up their ground-level retail spaces in the last few years, have provided some nice walkable spaces. But I think the best in Atlanta’s walkability is yet to come with the build out of the Beltline, the coming downtown streetcar (and its hoped-for development spur) and the continuation of mixed-use infill such as the new West Peachtree project in Midtown and the conversion of the Sears building on Ponce.

Tags: Atlanta walkability