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.