Problems on the Peachtree Center Avenue bike track in Atlanta

A few months ago, before it was open for use, I wrote about this new two-way bike track on Peachtree Center Avenue in Downtown Atlanta. I had two major concerns about it at the time:

1.) It passes by several loading docks and parking entrances; cyclists compete with vehicles that are moving in and out of curb cuts for those entrances.

2.) The way it connects to another new lane to the north is confusing and puts cyclists in a strange traffic flow at a non-signalized intersection

After the track has been open to the public for a few weeks, another problem is clear: the barrier protection is too weak to prevent cars from entering and parking here (second pic, above). Cars will even brazenly drive down it (top, above). I have yet to walk down this street since the track has been open without seeing at least one car parked in it, often more than one.

This makes the track more dangerous than it needs to be, and it also makes me look foolish. I’ve been advocating for protected bike lanes in the city on this blog (and elsewhere) for a while now. According to studies of multiple cities, protected lanes have been shown to bring huge gains in ridership. Instead of just providing a space for the current crop of cyclists, protected lanes bring new riders into the fold, growing their ranks.

Was I wrong to advocate for barriers like these? Are they not all they’re cracked up to be? A lot of factors are at play here, and all signs point to the need for a stronger type of protection in this instance.

This is a stretch of road that has a lot of loading docks and butt-ends of buildings, as well as parking decks and surface lots. With all of this car traffic moving out of many entrance points – and with much of that traffic composed of visitors to hotels who are probably already confused by the one-way streets here – the kind of protection that might work elsewhere is not good enough on Peachtree Center Avenue.

I suspect corners were cut with the project. The early info I had on the track made it sound like we were getting a level of protection that would be more  appropriate for the the type of car traffic on this street. I’m thinking of something like what’s seem in this pic below of a bike lane in Davis, California. Notice the solid, raised barrier to the right of the cyclist. No one’s parking in this spot without doing serious damage to their tires.

Photo by Joe Linton/Streetsblog L.A.

Additionally, the placement of the bike track on this street can be viewed as a case of “cutting corners.” It seems to me that it would be much more appropriate to put a cycle track one block west on Peachtree Street, so that cyclists are on the front of buildings and don’t have to compete with trucks going in and out of loading docks and cars in and out of parking decks.

At the least, this project serves as a decent showcase for how a street in Atlanta’s downtown can look when a car lane is removed for bikes. Traffic moves slower here with the lane reduction and that’s a good thing – it feels like a safer place to walk around. Now if only we could make it a safe and effective  place to bike, we’ll be in good shape.

Interesting alley in the Peachtree Center area of Downtown Atlanta. I was checking out the space where a new restaurant is moving in. It'll be nice to see cafe tables and activity here.

Atlanta’s retro 80s downtown finds a future in movies

I though this was a pretty fascinating article in The Atlantic:

How 1980s Atlanta Became the Backdrop for the Future: The Southern capital has set the scene for dystopian thrillers such as Divergent and The Walking Dead, most notably via buildings designed by the architect John Portman.

John Portman designed many of the buildings of downtown's Peachtree Center such as the massive Marriott Marquis hotel, the Peachtree Westin, the Hyatt Regency, and several nearby office buildings. These structures make for a marvelous skyline, particularly when viewed from the Jackson Street Bridge (the Portman ones are on the right side of this skyline view):

But their blank street-level walls and their focus on interior usage, via malls and elevated 'gerbil tube' pedestrian tunnels, create dead spaces on the outside. This style of construction may have been a good match for the suburban car commuters of the 1980s, but it leaves a lot to be desired for believers in more modern ideas of good urbanism. The “Portman Zone,” as I call it, is not something that generates lively sidewalk activity. It’s more of a place that you experience on the inside of the buildings, avoiding sidewalks by way of the many sky bridges.

It's kind of fitting that location scouts would look at this outdated development style and find it to look like a harsh, sterile, dystopian future world in movies like Hunger Games and Divergent. The area has been vexing pedestrians for decades, giving people who expect a vibrant set of streets a set of empty ones instead. As the article notes:

This zone takes up a large amount of space in Downtown Atlanta. For a modern urbanist like me, they can be hard to love -- but I try to embrace them on a retro level. They really do tell a story about the way we though about cities in the 1980s. And I think you could put together a decent pub crawl of hotel bars using the pedestrian sky bridges.

Photos by me