ATL Urbanist

This is why we moved downtown

It was a Saturday filled with fairly mundane events, but what sets them apart is that we did them all by walking around the neighborhood.

We started off by walking to the Park Market at Centennial Park (every second and fourth Saturday) to get a couple of things. Then we went to Le French Quarter Cafe to get fresh-baked pastries for next morning’s breakfast.

For lunch we went to Dua on Broad Street. I wish I’d taken a photo — it’s such a beautiful sight to see so many Broad restaurants, previously open only for the weekday lunch crowd, open on Saturdays now. Rosa’s, Rueben’s, Dua and a couple more were doing well, with people eating at sidewalk tables.

Next was a trip to Woodruff Park so our kid could play on the ATL playscape. The grass (photo below) has recovered well from the craziness of the Anchorman 2 filming. Bonus: I spotted the first Brown Thrasher I’ve ever seen downtown.

Then we walked to the very busy Curb Market (photo at top) to buy a few things, including some ground Campesino coffee — my favorite brand — sold at the Sweet Auburn Bread Company. 

So it was a lazy afternoon of lunch and shopping for me, my wife and our kid. Unremarkable by most standards, but lovely to do without getting in a car and while putting money into neighborhood stores.

Choices we make for ourselves, our families & our cities

Blogger Mathildepiard writes this today about an NPR report:

What I found really interesting is that this story, which was supposed to be about how parents struggle to make sure their kids get enough exercise, ended up being about biking, traffic, and urban planning.

One mother talked about how she spends her afternoons in Los Angeles traffic, ferrying her two boys from one sporting activity to another. She explained that her eldest can’t really just bike around in her neighborhood because it’s not bike-friendly enough.

The story also profiled two other moms, both in Portland, and I especially loved how both talked about the choices we make for ourselves, for our families, for our cities (emphasis is mine)

Read her full post here.

My family had an interesting choice to make a couple of years ago. We were moving from a Midtown townhouse and had to choose a place that was both in our modest price range and in a walkable area.

Though downtown fit those criteria, a move there would force us to rely on sidewalks and MARTA much more than we had before, with our shared car parked four blocks away from our building in a garage. We would also be without some of the amenities nearby we had in Midtown.

In the end, we went with downtown because it was well-connected to transit and walkable — more so than most any other spot in the city, in my opinion. The small indignities of getting groceries inside without a driveway and walking in inclement weather are, for us, well worth suffering through for the benefit of being able to walk out the door to go some place we like, without needing to hop in the car first.

The need for walkable growth near MARTA stations

There’s a great post on the Saportat Report today that mentions the potential for growth around some MARTA stations. This quote from the post is by Arthur “Chris” Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah:

“I’m actually surprised about development around MARTA,” Nelson said about the low density of offices and residences next to stations. “There’s a lot of opportunity around MARTA rail stations for more concentrated development.”

There are some MARTA stations that have a particularly significant potential for walkable growth in the way of transit-oriented development and I’ve included photos here.

Take a look at the unmet potential for pedestrian-focused, mixed-used development adjacent to the Kensington Station, above, and the Indian Creek and Bankhead stations, below.

I understand that these were originally built to be park-and-ride stations, but as the post on Saporta Report points out, trends in housing demographics are changing — how we view the function of our MARTA stations should change with them. Nelson makes note of the key changes:

According to several studies…more and more Americans want to live in walkable communities — places where they can ride bikes or ride transit to get around. But metro Atlanta’s development patterns currently don’t have enough walkable communities to meet demand.

These MARTA stations could potentially provide a great opportunity for meeting that demand for walkable, transit-connected communities. 

In the post, Dan Reuter, land use division chief for the Atlanta Regional Commission, says this:

“We have a dozen MARTA stations that need a lot of love and are ready for more urban development around the stations.”

Looking at the photo of what surrounds the Dunwoody Station, below, you can see that even with a station that is nearby commercial and office density, the area immediately surrounding the station is given over to car parking. There’s a lot of potential for a more pedestrian-focused type of development here.