Safer Routes to School

There was another community meeting in the neighborhood last week on the ongoing "Safe Routes to School" work going on in the neighborhood.  The work at the intersection of East Rock Springs, Pelham Road, and East Morningside seemed to have been largely stopped for months.  The design was being reconsidered, and changes might be made, we heard.  In the meantime, it seemed that nothing at all was happening.  I couldn't make it to the meeting on Tuesday morning, just like I have not made it to any of the other three meetings that have occurred, but at least the plans that are posted on line look like an improvement over the original design.  It looks like the lane that allows eastbound traffic from East Morningside to cut over to North Morningside without going through the 4-ways stop at the East Morningside/Pelham Road/East Rock Springs intersection will stay open for one-way traffic, which should help traffic flow substantially.

One of the reasons I have not been so excited about the Safe Routes to School work in the neighborhood (in spite of my strong interest in pedestrian safety) is that it had seemed to me to ignore an easy fix to one of the most obvious hazards, the absence of a crosswalk at Wessyngton and Cumberland.  If it wasn't obvious before, it was clearly marked in yellow paint just before school started, "CROSSWALK NEEDED HERE."  But there was no crosswalk.  There were elaborate makeovers requiring lots of construction of many neighborhood intersections, but nothing here.

Until now.  This morning, there were signs on Cumberland Road informing drivers that beginning the week of February 11, this intersection would be an all-way stop.  This is great news.  Now, if we can just get the crosswalk that goes with it, I'll stop complaining.

Walking in the City

The weather was nice on Saturday afternoon, not as cold as it had been, and I thought it would be a good afternoon for a walk.  I asked Iain if he wanted to walk with me down to Elizabeth Street and then back on the Beltline.  No, he said, "there's not much to do on the Beltline."  So I proposed we look for some geocaches, and he was up for that.

Geocaching (for those of you who don't know) is one of those web-enabled activities where people hide containers -- in large parks and forests, often an ammo box, in urban areas, often a film canister (who has film canisters anymore?) or small magnetic container -- that includes a log book.  If you are the person who hide the container, you post the GPS coordinates on geocaching.com and then other people can look for it.  When you find it, you sign the log book and put it back.  If it's a larger container, there may be stuff in it -- things like the small toys that come with children's meals at fast food places -- and you can take an item if you leave one for the next person who finds the cache.  All you need to participate in geocaching is to sign up on the website (it's free) and a GPS.  The handheld ones that hikers use are optimized for this and you may be able to download the coordinates directly from your computer.

We found some caches on the website that were in walking distance from our house, downloaded the information, and headed off.  We ended up not being terribly successful geocachers that afternoon, only finding 2 of the 5 we looked for (urban caches are usually small, and can be pretty difficult to find) but we found lots of other things on a several hour walk around the neighborhood.  Not our neighborhood, precisely; we were in Virginia Highland and Poncey-Highland, but it was close enough I'll claim it.

We stopped at at San Francisco Coffee and got something hot to drink (I opted for hot chocolate, which is my new favorite thing).  The commercial area in Virginia Highland was full of people and is almost always a treat to walk through.  I just finished reading Jeff Speck's Walkable City:  How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time,  and he talks about the importance for pedestrians of human-scaled buildings with lots of variety in what pedestrians see from the sidewalk, with something new to see frequently, and buildings that don't look just alike and not the fake kind of "not just alike" in the new pseudo-urban developments like the one at Piedmont and Sidney Marcus.  In short, the commercial district at Virginia and Highland is nearly perfect, except for the taking-your-life-in-your-hands crossing the street part.  And there is lots to see, walking past the Virginia Highland shops.  This is the one picture I took there.

Who thought you could make a skirt out of chicken wire and marshmellows?  Just fabulous, although I wouldn't wear it.

Farther down Highland we got to Intown Hardware, where they used chicken wire to create another construction, this one involving actual live chickens. 

Then we got off Highland and walked down a side street (I don't remember which one) where this piece of artfully constructed yard art crossed my eye.

We'd never been to the Ponce de Leon part of Freedom Park and this sculpture, by self-taught artist Thornton Dial, was an unexpected pleasure to come upon.

This sign at the Rite-Aid on Ponce de Leon speaks for itself.  

We stopped at the Majestic Diner and had a very late lunch.  I hadn't been to the Majestic in decades and the clientele seemed more upscale than I remembered.  The burger was delicious and the fries were okay, and the service excellent, and no one was living in the ladies' room.  I would highly recommend it.

Next we were back in Freedom Park, this time the section near North Highland.  We didn't find the geocache we were looking for there, but we did find this interesting and slightly disturbing installation.  I am not sure what it is.  I hope it isn't a pet cemetery. 

Then it was back to Highland, we found a nice example of yarn bombing near North Avenue and this wonderful painting was on the side of a newspaper distribution box in the parking lot near the Plaza Theater.

Farther up the street there was this great homemade sticker on the back of a traffic sign.

Besides our stop at the Majestic we also went to Urban Outfitters, where Iain got some suspenders,  Young Blood Gallery (which is changing owners and having a big sale), and found the Indie-Pendent, which I have wondered about but never quite known where it was.  It was while we were walking down the alley where the Indie-Pendent is located that Iain told me he didn't want to live in Atlanta when grows up, that he wants to live in a real city with real public transportation. It might change by then, I told him.

Later I thought about Iain's initial response earlier in the afternoon, that there would be "not much to do" if we walked the Beltline.  On the walk we ended up taking there were things to see all along the way, and on the stretches where there weren't obviously, we found things to see because we were expecting it to be an adventure.  But a park?  Not so much.  (We didn't walk Freedom Park from Ponce to Highland.)  Jeff Speck wrote about that too, in Walkable City.  "Green spaces in cities are a lovely, salubrious, necessary thing.  But they are also dull, at least in comparison to shopfronts and street vendors. ... verdant landscapes do not entertain."  That's why the I-hope-it's-not-a-pet-cemetery installation was such an unexpected pleasure to find.

It was a great afternoon.  We didn't find most of the caches that we looked for, but it didn't really matter.

Ride or Die

When I got home from work on Monday, I saw one of my neighbors out walking his dog.  We chatted for just a moment and he commented that he'd been enjoying being in the city over the holiday with so little traffic.  We've noticed that too, how empty the roads are, with schools not in session and so many people off work and out of town.  Even those of us who are here are not driving so much.  For me it's been trips to the grocery store and driving kids to movie theaters.

I guess it was last Saturday when I took Sarah to Phipps Plaza, where she was meeting a friend to see a movie.  Even with the city in reduced-driving mode, Lenox Road was still a slog and I had some time to look around at the sights of Buckhead while sitting at red lights.  So much new construction there (albeit all of it initiated and most of it completed before the real estate/fiscal collapse in 2008) -- with all those tall, gleaming buildings, it almost looks like a city.  But even on a day when many people were not going to work, the streets were clogged with cars and all I could think, looking at those buildings, was what on earth were they thinking, building them there.  Even though there are two -- two! -- MARTA stops in walking distance from the intersection of Lenox and Peachtree, almost everyone who works in or visits any of those buildings is going to come in their own automobile.  How are all those cars supposed to get there and back?  They can build the buildings but the cars still degrade the quality of the experience in very substantial ways.  (And I wasn't even thinking about parking.)

For Christmas, Caroline gave me a copy of Jeff Speck's new book, Walkable City:  How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.  The book includes many references to Atlanta, mostly as a bad example.  One of Speck's points is that traffic congestion isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as it isn't an excuse to build more roads (which only leads to more sprawl and more congestion on down the line); there's a lot of elasticity in the amount people drive and if the cost in time and aggravation is high enough, many trips just aren't made.  It also can -- in cities that have the political will to do it -- drive investment in transportation alternatives.  "The cities with the most congestion are often the cities that provide the best alternatives to being stuck in congestion.  Of the ten cities ranked worst for traffic in the 2010 Urban Mobility Report, all but three -- Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta -- have excellent public transit and a vast collection of walkable neighborhoods."

A couple of months ago I saw part of a presentation from the ProWalk/ProBike ProPlace conference in Long Beach in September -- I can't remember who the presenter was and I can't find it now -- in which the speaker made the point that the absence of transportation alternatives keeps poor people poor.  If the jobs aren't in your neighborhood and there isn't public transportation, you can't get a job if you're poor, because you can't afford a car.  This is not a rocket science kind of observation, but I had never thought about it that way before.

And I'm not very optimistic that Atlanta will be anything but a cautionary tale for the foreseeable future.  The road builders and the developers are too tight with the people who make the policies (and maybe are the people who make the policies) so there will continue to be strong pressure to build road capacity to support the unsustainable sprawl that makes up the Atlanta metropolitan area.  MARTA will continue to be hemmed in by counties that don't want transit (or at least don't want anyone from Atlanta to come into their county) and starved for resources by a state legislature that doesn't like Atlanta and likes public transportation even less.

We found this sticker on one of the Park Atlanta parking payment machines off Edgewood last month, and Iain got Sarah the T-shirt that goes with it for Christmas.  On the way back from the movie at Phipps I asked Sarah about her experience with MARTA.  It doesn't feel safe, she said.  Not enough people.  Right, because all the people who have cars are driving them, and even people who can't really afford cars have to have them because this is Atlanta and that's what we do in Atlanta.  

As long as cars come first, we'll continue to make what in the long term are the wrong decisions for the city.  That "Ride or Die" slogan might be for the metro area, not for its citizens.  Maybe we won't die, but we won't flourish, either, sitting in our cars looking at the tail lights of the car in front of us.