Why Can’t We Party in the Street? | Angie Schmitt, GOOD Magazine

The linked article offers a good exploration of the reasons why US cities lack streets that provide places for spontaneous celebration and demonstration. It’s because we’ve lowered the bar for what the public space of streets can accomplish now — it’s become a space that fills a dominating need for the speed and flow of cars.

Walking on Atlanta’s Wall Street

As an example of the varied uses of streets in Atlanta's history, see the two photos below. The top one shows the wonderful mess of pre-automobile activity happening in between the 1871 Union Station and the hulking Kimball House hotel (out of frame on the left). Carriages, trains, pedestrians and commerce are all together in this broad piece of land. This is Wall Street, facing east toward Pryor Street.

Now compare that scene with the one below, from a photo taken a couple of weeks ago:

It shows the upper portion of Wall Street, facing east toward Pryor Street, like the older photo. The ground level below this (where the scene above took place) is parking. The street visible here is rising one story above, to meet up with the viaduct that goes over the train tracks — part of a series of viaducts built to allow cars to pass over easily.

Even at this upper level, the surroundings are mostly parking decks and surface lots, accommodating cars in a space where there once was a grand hotel and a rail station.

While I took this photo, the only other pedestrian I passed was a homeless man (far in the distance) who was pushing his belongings down the street in a shopping cart. To me, it looked like a wonderful kind of protest — he was shunning the narrow, inadequate sidewalk and instead walking his cart illegally in the street.

'Illegally' because the street here is pretty much meant for cars and cars alone. The wonderful diversity of uses it once housed is gone and left almost to a singular cause: car traffic and parking.

Next time you’re driving through Atlanta and you see someone walking in the street outside of a legal pedestrian crossing, I challenge you to not get annoyed or angry. See if you can view it as a protest against automobile dominance of this public space that once served a wider purpose.

Square peg, round hole: fitting a streetcar into car-centric places

The Atlanta Streetcar has been making test runs for a few weeks now. Seeing it travel past a mix of empty buildings, the GSU campus, office towers, parks and parking decks, I’ve had a chance to consider some of the major challenges and opportunities when it comes to realizing its potential for spurring new investment and development along the route. With this post, I’m going to look at the problem of having a streetcar run through some areas on the line that are heavily skewed toward car use. In two later posts, I’ll look at the challenge of empty spaces and abandoned buildings, and then the opportunities for positive change.

Running a train through the parking madness of Downtown With its west side passing through some Downtown Atlanta streets that have been geared much more for car flow and car parking versus pedestrian activity for the past several decades — the streetcar has already experienced a couple of collisions with cars.

Read about it here: Atlanta Streetcar involved in second accident

The streetcar route is starting to expose flaws in parts of Downtown’s built environment which, despite 70 years of trolley lines throughout the 19th & 20th centuries, have grown car-centric. This is mostly due to the incredible amount of parking infrastructure that borders much of the route.

To give you an idea of the clash going on between car culture and streetcar service, here’s an aerial map (above) of the Fairlie-Poplar district that makes up the western part of the rail line. In blue are the parking lots and parking decks that dominate the land use of this area. The red line is the streetcar route:

It’s a recipe for struggle. Car drivers headed to nearby events are drawn to this spot by plentiful parking. During big concerts and games, lanes in these streets are regularly blocked by lines of cars waiting to turn into parking decks and lots. Some of these entrances now have a streetcar railway in front of them.

When you couple that situation with passengers getting out of streetcars and walking to destinations, you have a definite challenge on the level of both pedestrian safety and aesthetic appeal — will people enjoy walking through these blocks that are shadowed by parking decks and their blank walls? And walking past surface lots with no destinations in them for foot traffic?

Interstate access points, meet your new neighbor

The image below shows where the tracks of the streetcar intersect with access points for Interstate 75/85, on both Auburn Avenue (top) and Edgewood Avenue (bottom).

For many years, this stretch of both these streets has been used by cars for the purpose of entering and exiting the interstate, and taking advantage of the ability to quickly make right turns on red — aided by intersections with heavily rounded curbs. Now we have street rails passing through here, as well as the maintenance facility for the streetcars underneath the interstate overpass.

From much experience, I can report that getting through this area as a pedestrian, with cars making those right turns on red and whipping into the on-ramps in preparation for interstate travel, is unpleasant. Multiple streetcar stops will put passengers on sidewalks here. It will be interesting to see if the amount of pedestrian activity increases or if the challenges of the environment prove too great.

The public street space we allow to pedestrians versus cars -- genius.

- Greater Greater Washington

Alternative commuting in US cities: walking rises in Atlanta

Governing.com has an interesting report on alternative-commuting habits in US cities using census data. Apparently Atlanta (specifically the city, not the whole metro) made the fourth biggest leap in the country with the percentage of commuters who walk to work, between 2007 and 2012. 

The report defines an “alternative” commute as one that involves anything other than a personal automobile.

Some numbers for the City of Atlanta:

This means that roughly 1 in 6 commutes in the city is made with some means other than a personal automobile. Not too shabby, but I hope to see the transit and cycling numbers rise in coming years. 

One thing I don’t see in the report is any mention of multi-modal commuting. I currently use a mix of automobile and transit. And I’m not sure if my telework day qualifies as walking to work or not.

The report also doesn’t address desire. I desire a situation where I could always commute without an automobile. On the other end of the spectrum, I know there are people out there who make an arduous walking or transit commute because they can’t afford a car, but they would prefer to drive to work (or else they would prefer to live closer to work in affordable housing — that doesn’t currently exist — near their job). 

h/t PEDS

Census: City of Atlanta ranks 15th in bike/walk/transit commuting

According to the US Census' "American Community Survey" data from 2012, the City of Atlanta (emphasis - the city, not the full metro) ranks 15th in the US among large cities when it comes to commuting by bicycle/walking/transit. See more US data here.

Initially, this may not sound impressive given that MARTA ridership puts the system 8th nationally. But consider that Atlanta has a relatively low population among large US cities, where we rank 40th. And we have a relatively low density as well, barely even ranking at all (seriously, check Wikipedia; it's sad), So this is a pretty darn good showing for us.

Also consider that our bike-commuting share strangely declined by a considerable degree in 2012. You can download the full stats here, but basically we went from having a kinda-respectable a 1.5% bike-mode share in 2011 (meaning 1.5% of commutes were made on bike) to having a not-so-respectable 0.6% share in 2012.

It's a suspiciously unbelievable drop; nonetheless, these are the official stats used to inform the chart above.

Yes, we can and will do better as we continue to build compact, walkable places in areas served by transit and bike infrastructure. But given our handicaps, I'd say this is a pretty good ranking for our combined alternative-transportation mode share.

European cities resist car-dependency

Pardon me as I drool after reading today's New York Times article on European efforts to make cities easier to walk/bike in and more difficult for personal cars. The focus is on Zurich where cycling and use of public transit are more convenient than driving.

A quote:

What are European cities hoping to gain from these efforts? Here's a short list:

I certainly would never expect Atlanta to be as pedestrian oriented as an old European city like Zurich that grew and matured prior to the automobile. But I do hope this idea of re-building cities to accommodate people more so than cars catches on here. Surely there's a middle ground between our current car-topia and Zurich's pedestrianization (is that a real word or did I just make that up?) that a city like Atlanta could embrace.

Read the full article here and be sure to visit the slideshow to see what a city can look like when it isn't riddled with highway-access ramps, surface parking and garages.

Photo: Christoph Bangert for The New York Times

Jeanne Bonner at Atlanta Unsheltered posted this great photo of the crowds filling the sidewalks of downtown Atlanta for Dragoncon (her full post here). She points out that one of the best things about this kind of event is just seeing so many pedestrians in Atlanta's urban core.

I love that, too. I don't get to see downtown during its busy 9-5, M-F time since my job takes me elsewhere. When I'm here at nights and on the weekends I end up seeing the often empty streetscapes of this northern downtown area around Peachtree Center (the area around Five Points, Underground Atlanta and elsewhere in southern downtown is much more active) where cars outnumber pedestrians. It's great to have an event like Dragoncon or Streets Alive so that we can see the pedestrians have the upper hand.