Life in Atlanta, After T-SPLOST

Monday night we got back from a week-long vacation in Chicago.  We love Chicago, and this time we scheduled the trip so we could attend the Wicker Park Fest and a couple of concerts in Millennium Park.  We'd gotten tickets for a Second City performance in advance and planned to visit all the museums we've enjoyed on previous trips.  We did all of that, and filled in the gaps that were left in the schedule as the week went on.  There was a wonderful piano concert at the Chicago Cultural Center by Anatasya Terenkova and on our last night there we went to the Blue Man Group.  Tom and Iain went kayaking on the Chicago River and the girls and I went on a ghost tour (no ghosts seen, but lots of interesting stories from Chicago's history).  And we found the block of South Seeley that used to be Kroll Street, the street where Tom's great-grandparents lived in the 1890s.  Because the houses had been renumbered, we didn't know exactly which house it was until after we made the visit, but it was a pleasant street in Heart of Chicago, a neighborhood that is now largely Hispanic.

Over the week, we visited lots of neighborhoods.  We visited the shops on Milwaukee Avenue in Bucktown, had dinner in Boystown, and lunch in Pilsen.  We went to Second City in Old Town and visited the zoo in Lincoln Park.  We visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park and the Shedd Aquarium and Field Museum at the Museum Campus along Lake Shore Drive, at the southeast corner of Grant Park.  And except for some walking and a couple of specific other events (kayaking, a water taxi ride from Museum Campus back to Navy Pier, and the ghost tour), all our travel around the city was on Chicago Transit Authority buses and trains.  It wasn't perfect - the second day Tom and Iain decided to go back to the Museum of Science and Industry, there was a long wait for the bus - but it was plenty good enough to get us all over city for 7 full days on our week-long CTA passes.  Google Maps and the text messages we could send at bus stops provided more information, and many of the bus drivers were pretty proactive in asking us if we knew where we were going when we got on the bus (we were joking, after the second time that happened, that someone must have sent out a memo instructing them to do what they could to keep the tourists from getting lost).  Chicago is a fabulous place to visit because there is so much to see and do, in a relatively compact geographic area, and you can't have that without population density, and you can't have that without mass transit that works.

So Tuesday there was the T-SPLOST vote, and it lost in the 10 county metro region, by a lot.  Of course arguments could be made on either side of the issue but it just depresses me that we seem to be stuck in Atlanta with dysfunctional governance and systems, in a region that can't envision anything but freeways and cars and tried to put an interstate highway through my neighborhood in the 1960s and 70s.  Virginia Highland was developed as a suburb that was connected to the city by a streetcar line.  But we lost the streetcars around 1947, and except for the limited service that MARTA provides, we all are pretty much dependent on cars to get around.  But here's the deal -- if we design cities for cars, they are really unpleasant places for people; we end up with isolated buildings surrounded by a sea of asphalt, soul-killing places that aren't the kind of places I can see choosing to live in or to visit, and ever-wider highways that destroy neighborhoods and degrade the environment.

We were on a CTA bus and got into a conversation with a family from Dallas.  I mentioned the light-rail system in Dallas; they told us that it was about to expand further.  Dallas, another southern city that grew up in the Era of the Automobile, is investing in light-rail.  But Atlanta?  It's hard to see any solution given all those people who want to stay in their cars, and want more freeways built so they can do that.

I'm glad I don't have to get on an expressway to go to work or to the grocery store, that there are places I can walk to that I actually want to go to.  But as long as cars are more important than any other form of transportation, and as long as the city is designed for them and not for people, I don't see things getting any better.