Atlanta: don’t accept drive-to urbanism! Connect great communities with great streets
7 Last Things: #4. A few final thoughts on Atlanta as I retire the ATL Urbanist blog.
The Atlanta region is famous for its car-centric sprawl, which separates houses and destinations from each other in ways that demand car trips. We often think of this type of built environment as being exclusive to the outer suburbs, but that isn’t true.
When it comes to mobility options, there’s good and bad to be found in both the burbs and the city. Just as there are wonderfully walkable places in the outskirts of the region (check out lovely downtown Woodstock, GA for an example), elements of car-dependency can can end up marring our best intown efforts at walkable urban development.
A mixed-use, compact place like Atlantic Station (below) can be a pleasure to walk through once you’re inside. But approaching it on foot or bike from another neighborhood can be a challenge – and the streets themselves are at fault.
Writer James Russell noticed this phenomenon, which I call ‘drive-to urbanism’, when visiting Atlanta recently. After checking out the string of mixed-use density around the White Provisions complex on Howell Mill Road, he wrote a post that ends up being overly harsh, but that has good insights nonetheless: “Sprawling Atlanta Tries to Be a City”:
“There are sidewalk fragments along Howell Mill Road, but you wouldn’t call it walkable. The area itself is isolated from the rest of the city, as so many neighborhoods are, by highway and other infrastructure corridors.”
Those challenges for pedestrian and cycling mobility on roads like this make for a situation where builders likely expect that people will drive to communities – even mixed-use, compact ones – and understandably provide a lot of parking. But all that parking raises the cost of rents, exacerbating what is already a growing affordability problem intown.
A study shows that the average dollar amount that a parking space adds to housing costs is $225 per month, but keep in mind that this number falls in the middle a a really wide range of values. In a place with really high land values and construction costs – such as Midtown Atlanta for instance – this monthly costs would be much higher.
So there’s a lot to be gained from building better connections to our new communities. Walkability and affordability can both be improved by making our streets more attractive for trips outside of a car. To get some insight on what the city can do to address this need, I spoke with Tim Keane, Atlanta’s head of planning.
Interview with Tim Keane, Commissioner of Planning, City of Atlanta
How can the city address the problem of what I call “drive-to urbanism,” where you have little pockets of walkable density that aren’t connected to each other or to the rest of the city by any means – at least not in a comfortable and safe way – other than car?
The step that will address the issue you’re raising is a complete rethinking of the streets. Not in a small way but in a big way. Not, “should we repair the sidewalk and put in the ADA ramp,” but to utterly think of the right of way as a different thing.
The streets in Atlanta, with very few exceptions, are completely maxed out for the car. We’ve scraped out every bit of the right of way, over many years, for cars. And for cyclists and pedestrians it’s a bit unnerving. That’s something we’re really going to need to face over the next few years, having to carve out space from our streets – from the cars and for the others.
The quality of life in our city, going forward, is completely dependent on the way we can remake our streets for something other than cars – for walking, for cycling. Whereas before we thought the only way to get our quality of life higher was to get the congestion down and get the cars through the intersection faster, now it’s the opposite of that. And not in the suburbs, where you’ll probably want to still eke out every bit of space for cars; but in the city.
The city can’t be a better suburb than the suburbs. All we can do is be a better city. We’ve got that market. We’re the city. Well, what does it mean to be a better city? What it means is that you can walk and ride your bike and get on a bus or a train for some things. Let’s take Marietta Street and Howell Mill Road. Those streets could be remade into streets where you’d love to ride your bike or go for a walk.
And this includes people who drive everywhere and never get out of their car. We all share this. This is not an us versus them thing. You might drive to every single thing you do. You might drive two blocks to the drug store.
The issue, though, is that your trip two blocks to the drug store is going to get more difficult whether we remake the streets for bikes and peds and transit or not. As a matter of fact you might argue that it’ll get even worse if we don’t because not only you – who wants to drive two blocks to the drug store – but everybody else who’d rather walk or bike has to drive. It’s as simple as that.
Do you think that’s something that has to be sold to Atlantans as far as winning over hearts and minds on this issue?
Oh my gosh, it’s a huge job. I mean it’s just been proven so many times. This is not something we made up.
And what we’re really talking about is you’ve got in places like West Midtown or in lots of places like Ponce City Market where things are getting denser – but what about the urbanism? That means the streets. Yeah, we’re getting denser, but is it becoming an urban place?
I would argue that the private sector in many cases is doing a fantastic job. If you look at Atlanta compared to other places just in the south – because in every city people are building stuff like this to some degree – but if you compare Atlanta to what’s going on in Charlotte or Raleigh or other fast growing areas, the quality of the private sector [here] is high, comparatively. Everybody’s trying to innovate architecturally.
The issue is the public side of it – the public realm and coming to grips with that kind of remaking. I mean, you’ve got the private realm remaking former industrial properties and commercial properties, remaking them into denser, more urban style forms of living. But what about the public realm?
And by “public realm,” you’re mainly talking about the right of way of streets?
I’m mainly talking about streets. The reality is that streets are the most prevalent and significant public spaces we have. The city is pursuing the remaking of Martin Luther King Boulevard on the west side. And that should become a great public space.
And when it comes to these things I’m not necessarily talking about big streetscape projects where you’re really fancying the street up. That’s not the point. It’s not to be tricky about the streets. It’s to be meaningful about how you allocate space on our streets for everyone. And I mean the cars, the pedestrians, the cyclists, the transit vehicles. Inevitably, what that means, is that the pure right of way that has been devoted to just cars goes down. Perhaps significantly.
Chicago has done a great job on some of their streets in downtown. They are carving out space for bikes and transit for this very reason: “We can’t beat the suburbs of Chicago on driving but we [meaning downtown Chicago] can beat them on everything other than driving.” It’s an economic development issue for them. They’ve invested in their bike infrastructure so that jobs would come there.
We’ve gotta be really aggressive about bikes because people who are moving to cities, they expect to either not own a car or to not use it that much.
