It's Official -- No Bike Lanes on Peachtree in Buckhead

I saw the news in the Intown Atlanta news brief that showed up in my inbox Monday morning:

The Georgia Department of Transportation has officially removed bike lanes from its plans during the re-striping of Peachtree Road through Buckhead, and that’s just fine with the district’s city council members. Atlanta City Councilmembers Yolanda Adrean and Howard Shook said they support GDOT’s decision to remove the bike lanes after public outcry. “We’ve always advocated that the number one goal of this and all other road projects in Buckhead must be to move the most cars in the safest and most efficient manner,” said Shook. “This is that plan.” Adrean added: “The GDOT team has proven how well public input and great engineering can come together,” said Adrean. “And we are already developing exciting bicycle routes that will be much safer than the ones originally proposed for Peachtree.” The start date for the re-striping work has yet to be determined.

So there are several things about this statement from City Councilmembers Yolanda Adrean and Howard Shook that are notable.  In particular, Howard Shook's comment that "the number one goal of this and all other road projects in Buckhead must be to move the most cars in the safest and most efficient manner."  That's it -- the purpose of roads is to move cars.  Let's take bikes out of the discussion, since the very thought of bike lanes on Peachtree generates a degree of antipathy that I have found quite extraordinary.  The GDOT proposal that is now off the table would have also improved pedestrian safety.  There's nothing in this statement about vibrant streets, or making Peachtree lively and walkable, nothing about Peachtree as Buckhead's Main Street that ties the community together -- just moving cars "in the safest and most efficient manner," which presumably means without any pesky pedestrians trying to cross the street.  They might want to consider asking GDOT to make Peachtree a limited access expressway through Buckhead, if that is really their
goal.

On Tuesday, the AJC had an editorial/commentary from Richard Dugas, Jr., chairman and CEO of the PulteGroup, a developer with headquarters in Buckhead (incidentally, PulteGroup is the company that has proposed the redevelopment of Elizabeth Ann Lane).  Mr. Dugas said that access to MARTA rail was a key factor in the company's decision to relocate to Buckhead.  "By making access to MARTA -- and bicycle facilities -- a priority, PulteGroup has become an even more attractive employer of choice for the next crop of managers and CEOs, the millennial generation."

There we are, back to bikes. Have no fear, Mr. Dugas, Ms. Andrean says that "we are already developing exciting bicycle routes that will be much safer than the ones originally proposed for Peachtree.” 

I can't wait. 

Irrationality in Buckhead

Let me get this out right at the beginning - I really don't like Buckhead.  Any neighborhood built around high-end retail and soul-crushing traffic is not really a place I am going to enjoy being.  Of course I am sure the people who run Buckhead don't care what I think so that's fine.  Let's move on from there.

And any moving to be done in Buckhead is going to be done very slowly, by car, because Buckhead residents and the business leaders in the neighborhood have come out strongly against a plan by the Georgia Department of Transportation that would replace the underutilized inner lanes, both north- and south-bound, with a center turn lane and use the other lane to add bicycle lanes on each side, between the traffic lanes and the curb.  Originally the plan had been, I think, to extend this configuration northward but now it is only proposed for Peachtree between Deering Road -- just north of I-85 -- and Peachtree Battle (between the small red circles I've added to the map below).

Now in terms of bike infrastructure this is not nothing --the Beltline crosses Peachtree about in the middle of this segment -- but it is not fabulous.  But given the outrage in Buckhead, you would think the road was being permanently closed to vehicular traffic.  Former mayor Sam Massell, president of the Buckhead Coalition, compared public sentiment in Buckhead over this proposal to that generated by the proposal to put a highway through intown neighborhoods in the 1970s and the extension of Georgia 400 through Buckhead.  I find this an astonishing analogy, given that then peoples' homes were being destroyed for new highways.  In this proposal, there will be a dedicated left turn lane and new bike lanes to replaced two underused lanes that are responsible for more than their share of accidents.  The new design will be safer for drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists, but the residents of Buckhead are outraged by the proposal.

That's the word used to describe the reaction to a presentation by an engineer from GDOT at the October 8 meeting of the Board of the Buckhead Council of Neighborhoods.

In the Q&A session, meeting attendees expressed outrage. The apparently unanimous response was solid opposition to the GDOT proposal, though reasons cited for opposition differed. Some felt that bikes had no place on Peachtree since motor vehicle traffic was already very congested and getting worse. Others felt the congestion on fewer traffic lanes on Peachtree would flood their quiet neighborhood streets with cut-through traffic. Some questioned if there were even enough Peachtree area bike traffic to justify having bike lanes. Others expressed concern for the safety for bike riders who would only have a four-foot lane, bounded by a ten-foot traffic lane on the left and the curb on the right. Some argued that Ponce de Leon was a poor model for what should be done to Peachtree since PDL’s right of way was wider than Peachtree’s. And so forth.

To be fair, not everyone in Buckhead actually is outraged.  I know one person who is a Buckhead resident who has been advocating on the other side of this issue, and Jim Durrett, executive director of the Buckhead Community Improvement District, has provided very supportive comments to The Saporta Report.  But Sam Massell has gone on record "opposing any restriping of any part of Peachtree in Buckhead (between I-85 and Club Drive) that includes bike lanes at this time."  (I can't figure out how to attach the pdf of Mr. Massell's letter to the GDOT Commissioner, so I will put the text at the end.  It is available for download with the AJC story.)

I am astonished at the intensity of opposition that this proposal has generated.  Perhaps people who live and work in Buckhead don't go anywhere else, and don't know that real cities that want to create places that people value are making space for bicycles and pedestrians.  (A few examples below from Minneapolis, Washington, DC, and Chicago and also this link.)

Minneapolis

Minneapolis

Empty bike rental rack - Washington, DC

Chicago

Chicago

Chicago

Perhaps spending so much time staring at the brake lights of the car in front of them has made them not completely rational, and the idea of a person on a bicycle speeding past them, while they are stuck in traffic that they have helped create, elicits irrational rage.  I don't know, but I do know after learning a little more about this issue, Buckhead is now inextrictably linked in my mind with irrational people who would rather have car crashes and dead bicyclists than lose one traffic lane they weren't really using anyway.  Is this a part of town you should feel safe visiting or doing business in?  And any forward-looking business looking to relocate should not go to a part of Atlanta that is so manifestly irrational.  There's plenty of commercial property available where people are not so crazy.

How disappointing that leadership in Buckhead (with the exception of Mr. Durrett) is unwilling to actually lead in a forward-looking way.  It will probably change, eventually, but until then, I'm planning on spending as little of my time and money in Buckhead as possible.

Text of Mr. Massell's letter to Russell McMurry, Commissioner, Georgia Department of Transportation

Dear Russell:

When I worked at City Hall in the 1970s I instituted what we titled the Pedal Pool with donated bicycles for staff who had trips to make downtown.  I have long been a dues supporting member o the Atlanta Bicycle Bicycle Coalition and I support its principles.  We were one of the first to contribute ($5,000) to the Path Foundation to help provide early path work at Chastain Park.  I make a special effort to publish routes (about 11.5 miles) of bicycle lanes in our Annual Buckhead Guidebook.  I have written articles encouraging more respect between auto drivers and bicycle riders and I defend the rights of each group to use our public streets as regulated by local Ordinances and other regulations.

In what seems to be a relatively short period of time, our Community has come some distance in welcoming the growth of this mode of transportation.  I'm confident we will continue to increase the practicality of coexistence between bikes and cars.  This is particularly true in Buckhead as Millennials continue to become a larger percentage in the population profile.

However, from our Members and from the General Public, it appears that the argument we face concerning adding bike lanes now to part of Peachtree separates at about age 30 for those in favor against those opposed.  On a popular vote we believe that would calculate to as many as 63% being in opposition.

The Mission of the Buckhead Coalition is "to nurture the quality of life of those who live, visit, work and play" in this Community, and as such we see our position must be to oppose any restriping of any part of Peachtree in Buckhead (between I-85 and Club Drive) that includes bike lanes at this time.  As such, we respectfully urge the State, our City and our CID to discontinue any further consideration of adding any such bike lanes on this Public right-of-way.

Sincerely,

Sam Massell
President

More on the New Development at Piedmont & Cheshire Bridge

This is the artist's rendering of the development that Millcreek Residential has on their website now.   It would appear that name of the development (previously the somewhat deceptive Morningside Park) has been changed to Modera Morningside.  I am not sure what "Modera" means -- I think it's one of those words that marketing people make up that doesn't actually mean anything, but I'm not sure.  (Interestingly, the name of the GIF image is "Morningside Heights," which I actually liked -- sort of an amalgam of Morningside and Piedmont Heights, the neighborhood on the other side of Piedmont.)

Iain and I have been trying to figure out where the viewer of this imagined scene would have been standing.  I thought it would be from the gorilla car wash (I thought the woman on the far right, walking straight ahead with the Coke in her hand, had left her car there to be washed) but we went there this morning and walked around.  It clearly was not the future view from the gorilla car wash and maybe not even from Grind House (the only establishment on that block on that side of Piedmont that has any landscaping, I might add, but even there not the lush greenery in the foreground of this drawing).  Our guess was it was from the BP station.

Here's the view from the BP station (inexplicably devoid of cars on Piedmont).

And here's the BP station, which does not have vegetation between it and the street.

The other curious thing about the artist's drawing is the near absence of cars on Piedmont.  Now, as my photograph above shows, it is possible at just the right time to capture such a view.  But this photo, also taken this morning, is more typical:

A notice recently went out to the neighborhood, that the Millcreek construction team would be doing roadwork over the next several months that would impact Piedmont, Cheshire Bridge, and Piedmont Circle, resulting in "slight road closures" and detours.  I'm not sure what a "slight road closure" is but if it requires a detour it sounds to me like an "actual road closure."  At the community meeting that Iain and I attended back in March, there was mention of a traffic study, but it wasn't done yet.

Is it done now, and if so, what did it find?  

Just curious.

Jazz in the Park

Last Sunday Tom and I went to the Atlanta Jazz Festival.  A jazz guitarist who was described by George Benson as "one of the greatest guitarists I've seen in my whole life" was playing, and that seemed like it would be would be worth going to.  So while Tom was at the monastery I dug a couple of folding chairs out of a closet and went to Kroger for portable food.

 

We were able to park on Virginia Avenue, not too far from Monroe, and walked from there.  At the park, there were lots of people who had clearly arrived early to stake out their favorite location and set up tents.  The International Stage, where we were going, was on the other side of the lake.  There the crowd was smaller.  There were not many people with tents but lots of people with folding chairs and blankets up close to the stage or farther back in the bits of shade that were available.  We put our chairs near a picnic table in the shade and settled in for the afternoon.

The first performer was a Moroccan musician, Ali Amr, who plays the qanun, a stringed instrument that resembles an autoharp.  It was a great performance but it did seem like it was better suited for a late night, dimly lit club than a bright Sunday afternoon.

Next was Diego Figueriedo, the Braziliam guitarist.  He was terrific.  Afterwards Tom joined the crowd at the WRFG tent and bought a CD.  He said that it took a long time because there was lots of conversation and photograph-taking that accompanied the transaction.

We'd checked the weather forecast before we left and it was "chance of rain after 4 p.m."  That didn't seem like a deal-breaker, but soon after 4 the clouds came in.  We moved away from our spot under the tree and closer to the stage, since we didn't need the shade any more, but then it rained.  Unlike many of the other attendees, we hadn't brought umbrellas.  We talked about leaving -- lots of people did -- but the final performer, Cyrille Aimée, is an acclaimed jazz vocalist and we thought hearing her was worth getting wet.  So we turned our chairs over to keep the seats a little drier and took refuge under some trees until the rain passed, which it did in a bit.

She was fabulous and I'm glad we stayed.  She has a wonderful voice and it was a terrific performance.

Not only was the music great, which it was, but it also was the kind of mellow, diverse group in the audience that is enjoyable to be with.  We shared the picnic table with lots of different people over the afternoon.  It was the closest thing I have experienced in Atlanta in my almost 25 years of living here to the concerts in Millennium Park that we have been to in Chicago.  Which raises the question -- if I enjoy this type of event so much, why haven't I ever been before?

In Chicago, we could get to the park on a bus.  We didn't have to drive and we didn't have to figure out where to park and we didn't have to walk very far once we got off the bus.  (I don't mind the walking, but Tom just can't do it any more.)  In Atlanta, MARTA is limited and you can't really get from point A to point B reliably by bus.  Everyone drives everywhere and that means parking is a mess.  I never went to the Atlanta Jazz Festival before because I could not envision getting there without a level of hassle that I wasn't willing to endure.  There are lots of things that I would enjoy doing that I don't do because I don't want to deal with driving and parking.  Maybe this is just me, but it does feel like this is a quality-of-life tax I pay for living in a city that is so car-dependent.  And of course, I *have* a car.

It ended up not being bad, the getting-there-hassle-part, although it was at the edge of what Tom could do in terms of walking.  Afterwards, we were talking about the possibility of getting to the park by bicycle.  I told him that the new high-tech traffic-stopping light finally got installed on Monroe, making it safer to cross from Cumberland into Piedmont Park.  He asked if there was anywhere at the park to park bicycles.  Yes, I told him, the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition was there, just inside the park, offering valet parking.  

More than Cars

It was a couple of weeks ago; I was on my way to work, driving north on North Highland and then on Johnson Road towards Briarcliff.  I had slowed to a near stop at the traffic light at East Rock Springs because a car ahead of me was making a right turn.  Behind me, a car honked.  Was someone honking at me for stopping for (as opposed to hitting) a car ahead of me that was turning?  That seemed unlikely although I supposed not impossible.

I continued on Johnson Road, driving right at the posted speed limit (30 miles per hour), and a car following very close behind me was flashing its headlights.  At the intersection at Briarcliff, Johnson Road becomes two lane.  I was in the right hand lane, waiting for the light to change, and the car that had been behind me pulled along side me and the driver gestured and honked before pulling forward in the other lane.  Apparently I had completely ruined this man's day by slowing him down to the speed limit for a few minutes.

But drivers take their cues from the road more than from the signs about how fast is too fast to drive, and that stretch of Johnson Road is wide and gently curving.  It feels like you could comfortably drive 45 or 50 miles per hour or faster on that stretch of road, and some people do.  They shouldn't do it, but part of the reason they do is that some of the streets -- especially streets like Johnson Road or even Wessyngton Road  -- are so wide they feel like they were designed for speed.  So many drivers drive fast, regardless of what the posted speed limit says.

There's a wonderful video online about a redesign of a major intersection in a town in England.  The town was cut into quarters through its center by two main roads.  As a consequence the town's business district was an unpleasant place to be and pedestrians felt unsafe and tended to avoid the area.  Someone came up with a shared space design that removed the traffic signal and directed the traffic into something that looked kind of like a figure eight but with pedestrians walking through it.  Some in the town predicted that traffic gridlock and chaos would result.  It didn't.  The design signaled to drivers that they needed to drive slowly, and they did, and because the cars weren't going fast the pedestrians were no longer terrified and the center of the town became livelier and a much more pleasant commercial area.  And the traffic did get through.

I've been thinking about this recently because on one of the neighborhood email lists there has been enormous backlash against the city's plan to add bicycle lanes at the expense of traffic lanes on some city streets.  How dare the city reduce space for cars to make way for bikes!  No one rides bikes, no one ever will ride bikes, and drivers have an inalienable right to drive wherever they want as rapidly as possible regardless of the impact on anyone else.  The only place the drivers thought bicycles possibly belonged was on the sidewalks, where presumably they would only inconvenience the pedestrians.

Last week I was in Geneva, where it's possible to get everywhere I needed to be by riding a city bus.  Every morning I would walk a few blocks to the area near the train station, where cars, bicycles, motorcycles, buses, trams, and pedestrians all use the streets.  There I would catch the bus to my meeting and then in the evening I'd get off the bus there and walk back to my hotel.  I tried several times to take pictures there but none of them captured the sense of the place all that well.  But here's the point -- when the design of the place requires cars to slow down, they do.  And there's room for the people on bicycles and on foot.

It's possible to design a city so that it's for everyone, not just for people who drive cars.  And when that's been done in other cities, it has made those cities better, livelier, healthier, and more prosperous and more pleasant places.

Atlanta's different, I've heard people say.  No one here rides a bike, no one ever will.  We don't have public transit here and we never will, we're too spread out.  Atlanta is all about cars.  Space for cars is all that matters.  To hell with kids too young to drive, people who can't afford cars, and people who are too old to drive -- they don't matter.  All that matters is cars.

But I don't think this is true.  Atlanta can do better than this, and if we do, the city will be a better place to live, work, and do business.

Update on the New Development at Piedmont and Cheshire Bridge

Years ago planning began to redevelop the retail strips between the thrift store and the taco place on Piedmont, across the street from the gorilla car wash and the BP station and The Pagoda and bar/tattoo parlor, between East Rock Springs and Cheshire Bridge.  The two small strip malls in the area were vacated.  That's when Artlite moved to much smaller and (it seemed to me) relatively horrible space facing a gargantuan parking lot at the new development at Piedmont and Sidney Marcus (since that time they've moved into somewhat less horrible space in the same development, but it is still a much smaller store than it used to be, and they're a stone's throw from Office Depot, which seems like it can't be a good thing).  So the tenants got mostly cleared out but the recession hit and nothing happened.  Then businesses moved back into the spaces for a while but now the construction fences are up and demolition begins soon.  Even the taco place is going to go, although that area is not yet fenced off.

Wednesday night representatives of Mill Creek Residential. the Dallas-based company that is developing the site, spoke at a community meeting sponsored by the Piedmont Heights neighborhood association at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church.  As an aside, when I first saw the name "Mill Creek" on the fence, I was highly skeptical.  I didn't think there had been a mill on the site, and I didn't even think there was a creek there.  So this struck me has a highly inaccurate and even misleading name for the property.  But it's the name of the company.  The plan apparently is to name the development Morningside Park.  It is, technically, in Morningside but it will not be very park-like (more about that later).  You might be excused from thinking it would be, though, from their website, which features this nice view of Piedmont Park.

The only thing in the area that looks remote like a park is the cemetery at Rock Springs Presbyterian, catty-cornered across both Piedmont and Rock Springs.  

But I digress.  The two representatives from Mill Creek came and answered questions about the development for about an hour.  I didn't quite catch their names but I think the one on the left (who did most of the talking) is Oz and the one on the right is Chris.  The Fellowship Hall was packed with neighbors from Morningside and Piedmont Heights as well as at least one owner of a nearby business.

The plan is to build two buildings 65 feet tall with 44,000 square feet of retail at street level and 300 residential units.  Behind will be a 7-story parking deck which will be partially underground providing controlled access parking for residents (1.6 parking spots per unit) and open parking for retail customers (5 spaces per thousand feet of retail).  Some of that is surface parking I think because the number of parking spaces they gave for the deck was only 520. They have signed Sprouts Farmers Market, an Arizona-based grocery chain with a recipe for Quinoa Pear Muffins on its website, to occupy 27,000 square feet on the first floor of one of the two buildings.

There will be a delivery entrance that can access the loading dock on the south end of the property, between the grocery store and the thrift store, and the main entrance will be between the two buildings, roughly across from Saigon Basil.  There will be a new traffic light here.  There were lots of questions and concerns about the impact of the development on traffic flow.  Oz said that a traffic study was underway.  Would delivery trucks be making left turns from the southbound lanes on Piedmont?  No, they wouldn't, they would only be turning in from the northbound lanes.  The plan also calls for parallel parking in front of the grocery store that would be inset into the property but still seems like a terrifying thing to do, given the speed and volume of traffic on Piedmont.  Why couldn't they have their main entrance across from Wimbledon?  It just didn't work, on the site plan, with the grocery store at the south end of the development.

There were questions about bike lanes (Oz wasn't sure) and the pedestrian experience.  What features would make the development accessible for pedestrians?  There would be 10 foot sidewalks and crosswalks; that seemed to pretty much be it.  Could they match the new streetscape on Cheshire Bridge?  Maybe they could, they didn't really know, they could check into that.  Did they know about the Piedmont Heights master plan and the proposal to turn the Piedmont/Cheshire Bridge intersection into a roundabout?  They didn't and although they didn't say so they pretty clearly had no intention to re-engineer this intersection.  

There were questions about water and trees.  Is there a creek in that valley?  No.  What about runoff?  There is water retention built into this, somehow, although where it is isn't so clear to me.  Did they know that their notice about trees (planned tree removals, I assume, but I'm not sure) was behind the construction fence and wasn't visible from the street?  Okay, thanks, noted.

The most uncomfortable moment of the evening was towards the end when a woman pointed out that lots of issues that weren't resolved had been raised and she wasn't confident that any of them were going to be addressed because she hadn't seen either Oz or Chris taking any notes.  Oz replied that he'd certainly made some mental notes.  

Iain and I were there and we took lots of notes.  If the guys from Mill Creek would like a copy, I'm sure we'll both be happy to share.

Sprawl City on Ice

For days the weather forecast had been return of sub-freezing temperatures on Tuesday, and the possibility of snow.  Maybe it would stay to the south and miss the city, or maybe it wouldn't.  According to this morning's AJC, the weather service's advisory was escalated to a winter storm warning around 4 a.m.  But -- somewhat to my surprise -- the schools were open.

The weather was fine yesterday morning.  I wasn't worried about getting home from work -- if it got really bad, I could walk home -- but many of my co-workers have long commutes.  I was surprised at how many of them were at the office yesterday morning.  But the office wasn't closed, and people hadn't been told to stay home, so I shouldn't have been surprised that people had come to work.

There was an emergency message from the school mid-morning.  I said, "That's my son's school closing.  I'll let Tom deal with that."  I didn't read it until later, that it was just a cancellation of after school activities.

At noon there was a message that we could go home.  A lot of people left.  I finished up a few things and left a little after 1.  But traffic was terrible on Clifton and it took a long time to get home, and the drive was harrowing.

This photo doesn't capture it completely because I don't stay on the bumper of the car in front of me when roads are slick.  I think it took me around 40 minutes from the time I left my office until the time I got home.

At 2 p.m. there was a message from school that due to deteriorating road conditions dismissal was beginning at 2:15 p.m.  Tom was out in the northern suburbs somewhere and was stuck in traffic.  He said he might be stuck there over night.  I dismissed that as hyperbole and headed off to pick up Iain and our exchange student.  

It took almost an hour to get to the school.  Roads were packed and some intersections were gridlocked, as drivers filled up intersections and kept cross-traffic blocked.  The short section of Peachtree that I had to drive on was the worst, but I did finally get to the school a little after 3.  On the way home I had to detour because a street in Garden Hills already seemed to be impassable.  We got home at 4 p.m.  Tom did get out of the traffic jam he was caught in and stopped at a Target for steaks, bread, and milk.  He got home a little while after I did.

We made it home, but lots of people didn't.  Expressways were clogged with cars and Georgia DOT couldn't get their trucks out to spread salt or sand.  It was below freezing during the day but it got colder as the evening went on, and the snow turned to ice.  School buses couldn't run, kids were stuck at school or on buses, and expressways were full of cars as bridges and exit ramps iced over.  I kept Channel 11 on last night, seeing the images of roads full of immobilized cars, the stories of children stuck at schools, people who had been in their cars for eight or more hours, trying to get to schools to pick up their children or to get home, or as the evening went on, trying to get anywhere.

I didn't stay up for the Governor's press conference, but the spokespeople for GDOT and Georgia Emergency Management had been getting asked the accusing questions by the TV anchors, why weren't you prepared?  They said they were.  But it didn't matter if they were prepared if everyone in the Atlanta area hit the road at 1 p.m., when Tom and I did.  The roads couldn't deal with the volume, and it didn't matter how ready the GDOT was, if they were caught in the same traffic that everyone else was.

It's the next morning now.  There still are people stuck in their cars.  There are two school buses with children on them at I-285 and Cascade Road.  By this morning, the TV anchors were asking an Atlanta Public Schools spokesperson why the schools weren't closed yesterday morning.  The spokesperson said the weather forecast changed, which is true, but it did change in time that school could have been cancelled.  But I'm sure they didn't believe it.  Sometimes the forecasts are wrong.  The weather was fine in the morning; people would complain if school was closed preemptively and then it didn't snow, or didn't snow much.  

Atlanta was and is paralyzed by 2 inches of snow because our city is dependent on cars and the patterns of housing, work, and school that we have chosen require lots of driving.  *That* is the cause here.  It's not Georgia DOT's fault (except to the extent they have made this car dependency possible, which or course they have), or Georgia Emergency Management's fault, or the City of Atlanta's fault (ditto), or the Atlanta Public School's fault.  It's the fault of the political leaders and private sector interests that allowed the Atlanta metropolitan area to develop this way.

The Cost of Sprawl

The work that was done in the neighborhood, funded by the Federal Safe Routes to School program, is now done or almost done.  Yesterday I saw the new high tech pedestrian crossing lights at Sussex and East Rock Springs, installed in time for the start of school next month.  The sod that was put down where intersection work was done looks great, thanks to all the rain; when they put it down a few months ago I figured it was doomed, since no one was going to water it, and it would fade to brown once the weather got hot -- I'm glad I was wrong.  But on the neighborhood email lists there's still grousing about loss of the right turn lane at Morningside and North Highland and new bike lanes on 10th Street are generating complaints, too.

The traffic is bad in Atlanta and we can't build our way out of it by building more roads -- even if there was the money to do it (which there isn't), extra lanes just generate more traffic and we end up with the same or greater level of congestion.  We have to drive less, and that's hard to do in a city with such limited transit options.  

Atlanta's sprawl and lack of transit options are especially bad for less well-off people.  Combine sprawl with lower-cost housing located far from where the jobs are, and if you doesn't have a reliable car to get to work, well, it's really hard to work.  It's not rocket science, but that was one of the findings in a new study that was highlighted in yesterday's New York Times.  Atlanta's geography is one of the factors that keeps poor people poor in Atlanta.

Our reliance on cars means state and local governments have to support a sprawling road network that does not generate enough tax revenue in many areas to be self-supporting.  It means employers have to plan for parking for their employees, which often means higher costs for them.  And if you don't have a car and you don't happen to live in a neighborhood where MARTA can get you where you need to go, you're just out of luck.

But here in Atlanta we just keep driving, and complaining about the traffic.

Almost Done

I haven't posted for months because what free time I have (which is not all that much) has been taken up with other things (probably more about that later), so it's time to catch up on some things going on in the neighborhood.

At long last the never-ending construction at the Pelham/East Rock Springs/North Morningside intersection seems to be almost complete.  For months it seemed like nothing at all was happening (Tom had heard there was a lawsuit, but I assumed it was just taking a while to get a new design finalized and approved that would leave the bypass lane that allows drivers from East Morningside to North Morningside avoid the four-way stop).  Whatever the reason for the delay, not long ago the work restarted and at this point is nearly complete.  New curbs, new sidewalks, and new sod are all in place, although there still are some orange cones around and things are not quite finished.  But yesterday when we went by the new grass was already turning brown.  Without watering, I don't think it will make it, and no one is going to water it.  So there you have it.

Likewise, the de-paved area at Cumberland and North Morningside is now filled and sodded, with stone neighborhood marker in place (either that or it's a tombstone indicating the burial place of a Mr. or Ms. Park).

Walking through the area last weekend I asked Iain what he thought the new parklet should be used for; right now all that is there, besides the neighborhood marker/tombstone is a single, lonely-looking shrub.  He said he thought bands should set up and play there, which I thought was a great idea.

This conversation took place on the way to Celebration of Summer, MLPA's annual celebration of the end of school.  It used to be on the Friday at the end of the last week of school, but this year (presumably because of Memorial Day weekend) it was the Saturday of the weekend before APS ended classes.  There was music and snow cones and pony rides and inflatable jumpy climbing things for small- and middle-sized children and ice cream (which was fabulous) and beer for adults. The neighborhood was there blankets and lawn chairs.  It looked to me like everything came off without a hitch, in spite of the repeated last-minute requests for volunteers that kept being posted on the neighborhood email lists.  And somehow the tradition of older elementary school and middle school kids armed with powerful water guns has been eliminated, much to the relief I am sure of the organizers and the musicians with instruments and electronic gear.

And for weeks if not months on my way to work in the morning I've seen workers going into the former Caramba/Waffle Tap location on North Highland.  The brown paper still covers the windows except for the one now covered plywood, and new neon signs, not yet turned on, promise pizza and calzone at some point in the future.  Here's hoping the next restaurant in this location does better than the last two did.

Update:  Iain and I stopped by the former Caramba/Waffle Tap site so I could take the pictures posted above and learned that the new restaurant will be called Timone's (or is that timone's?) and that they are now hiring.

But that wasn't the only sign posted -- there was also this one, on the door.

More to follow, I'm sure.

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.

Update from the Construction Zones

I was out of town last week and wasn't able to attend the meeting Tuesday morning at Morningside Elementary School on the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) construction. Given the absence of news on the neighborhood email lists subsequently about what was discussed there, I don't know how many people were able to attend. In the meantime, East Morningside is still torn up with and the right turn bypass lane to North Morningside is closed. It doesn't seem that there has been much progress made on construction there. Perhaps the absence of news and the absence of progress means there's been no decision made. If they are still trying to figure out how to get drivers to slow down, I can understand the lack of progress.

In the meantime, I came across this blog post from the Atlanta Public Schools from last month, listing the goals of the SRTS project in Morningside. I had to laugh when I saw the first one was "Reducing traffic congestion around the school by 10% every year."

Although the work at the East Morningside/Rock Springs/North Pelham intersection seems to have come to an indefinite halt, the work seems close to done at the North Morningside/North Highland intersection. There still is an orange barrel indicating the obliterated right turn late from North Morningside to North Highland southbound; some better markings, with reflective paint on the new concrete that now blocks the lane, would help. The crosswalks are now marked and aligned with the new islands in the intersection.





At Cumberland and North Morningside, where the whole things started, the big pile of sand has been replaced with a larger pile of dirt, suggesting that they are filling in the new space that they created there. The small traffic island that used to be there is long gone. Instead there's a much larger area that is connected to the block between Sherwood and North Morningside on the northwest corner of the intersection. That work seems to be going slowly, too, allowing ample time for speculation. What are they going to put there, after all the dirt goes in? We've often discussed this, when we walk by on our regular walks with the dog. I've suggested that it might be a good location for the new sixth grade annex but I don't know that that idea has gotten any traction yet.



Of course, if they did that, they probably wouldn't meet that goal for a 10% reduction in traffic.

Completing the Streets

First there were the new stop signs on Cumberland, turning the North Morningside-Cumberland intersection into a 4-way stop (although you have to look and see that there are 4 stop signs; there isn't any other signage indicating that it is a 4-way stop).  Then the orange barrels -- a serious quantity of orange barrels -- appeared near the triangular traffic island at the East Rock Springs/Morningside/North Pelham intersection -- and the lane that allowed eastbound cars to go directly from East Morningside to North Morningside was blocked off.  The result has been backed up eastbound traffic on East Morningside at least at the evening rush hour, as the volume of cars on the road exceeds what can make it through a 4-way stop.  This should not have been a surprise to the people who planned this, as the traffic volume at different times of day is a knowable quantity, and 4-way stops are generally recommended only for intersections with "approximately equal" traffic volumes on the intersecting roads (resulting in equivalent obstruction to traffic flow on both roads in both directions) at specified volumes.

There's also work being done at East Rock Springs and Johnson Road, and North Morningside and Highland; work is also planned on East Rock Springs near Morningside Elementary School, but I don't know if that has started yet.  All of this is thanks to Safe Routes to School, a Federally-funded program to make neighborhoods safer for kids to walk to school.  In 2008, Morningside parents wrote a grant to improve safety for children walking to Morningside Elementary School.  Since all the construction started, there's been complaints from drivers about almost everything, from the 4-way stop at North Morningside and Cumberland to the changes at Morningside and East Rock Springs.  At North Morningside and North Highland, the right turn lane for southbound traffic on North Morningside is now gone.  Due to inattentive drivers, this was a hazard for pedestrians -- drivers would only look to their left for cars before turning, and any pedestrian to their right was at risk -- but I understand that that intersection now backs up at peak times as well.

Once the construction started, there was a community meeting arranged by Alex Wan at Morningside Elementary, but that was during the daytime and I couldn't make it.  The Georgia Department of Transportation sent some people out last week at 6 p.m. one evening (presumably to check out how bad the backed-up traffic was on East Morningside).  According to the MLPA, there will be a right turn lane on East Rock Springs, and they are still considering whether or not the East Morningside to North Morningside lane that bypasses the 4-way stop can be re-opened. "This will not be considered if GDOT cannot find a way to slow that traffic as it moves onto N. Morningside." Well, good luck with that. That's the fundamental problem, that people in cars assume that this nice, wide road was built just for them and that the most important thing in the world is for them to be able to get from where they were to where they want to go as quickly as possible. Bicyclists, pedestrians, people walking their dogs, parents with baby strollers are mobile speed bumps that obstruct the flow of traffic and should just stay out of their way.

In September, the Georgia Department of Transportation adopted a Complete Streets policy. The idea behind Complete Streets is that streets need to be designed for all users, not just drivers; Georgia's Complete Streets policy includes accommodation for transit users, something not include in many other states' Complete Streets policies. This is a really good thing and I am delighted to see the GDOT doing something other than planning to build interstate highways through our intown neighborhoods, but even an excellent policy cannot do it all. All the traffic-calming in the world won't slow down Atlanta's sleep-deprived, long-commuting, large coffee-consuming drivers. The angry drivers on the neighborhood email lists say that if the problem is speeding, the police should enforce the speed limits. Well, good luck with that, too; the level of noncompliance with residential speed limits is so high that enforcement would take all the police in the city. So what could be done?  Activist David Engwicht recommends reclaiming streets from cars by moving the social life of the neighborhood closer to the street, putting "something intriguing" in your front yard, and waving at drivers (which might slow them down because they think mistakenly for just a moment that the pedestrian they are endangering might actually be someone they know).

There isn't a simple solution. Engineering changes can be part of the fix, but people have to change their behavior, too. It used to be socially acceptable to smoke, and it really isn't, anymore. It shouldn't be socially acceptable to drive too fast in residential neighborhoods. Maybe every block needs an activist with a radar gun who takes pictures of license plates of speeding cars and posts them on line (something I have thought about doing). But in the meantime, Georgia policy is that pedestrians and bicyclists and transit users have the same claim to Georgia streets and roads as drivers. If there are enough of us out there, maybe it will make a difference. And maybe while we're at it we should wave at the drivers as they speed past us.

Road Work Ahead

I thought the orange "Road Work Ahead" signs were for the new four-way stop at North Morningside and Cumberland.  Then they showed up with the orange barrels and the port-a-potty and closed the section of the street where North Morningside transforms itself into East Morningside and bypasses the intersection of East Rock Springs and North Pelham.  It looks like something serious is underway, but it's not at all obvious exactly what.

It is obvious though that forcing all the eastbound traffic on East Morningside through the 4-way stop at East Morningside/North Pelham/East Rock Springs produces a massive traffic backup, at least at 7 p.m.

It turns out that this work -- the new 4-way stop at North Morningside and Cumberland and the construction work now at the junction of North Morningside and East Morningside -- are funded through a grant program intended to make walking safer to school.   The plan, according the the Safe Routes to School plan, is to close the lane connecting North Morningside to East Morningside.  It's not clear what else is envisioned, since the diagram that is noted is not included (or I couldn't find it) in the pdf that is on line.

I'm all for pedestrian safety, and crosswalks and slowing traffic are an important tools to improve safety.  But no data were included in the plan on actual traffic volumes through these intersections.  I hope that whatever they end up doing works better than what they have right now.  Cars were backed up, toward Piedmont, as far as I could see at 7 p.m. this evening, when I took the picture above, and Tom said it was that way at 5 p.m., too.   It may be that the plan is to put a traffic light at the intersection -- that's what the budget for the project would suggest -- and rely on drivers re-routing to avoid the area.

For the impatient drivers in the neighborhood, that four-way stop at North Morningside and Cumberland may be the least of their problems.

Stopping on North Morningside

One day last week stop signs appeared on North Morningside Drive, at the intersection with Cumberland Road.  There already were stop signs on Cumberland, so with the addition of the signs on Morningside, it was a four-way stop, even though there was no signage (yet) to indicate that.  The neighborhood email lists made note of the new signs and the city tried to get drivers' attention with orange "road work ahead" signs on Cumberland, but it probably still will take a few weeks for drivers to get used to having the stop signs there.

A year or so ago the city put four-way stops at East Rock Springs and North Morningside and at East Morningside and Rock Spring Road.  Although it made the merge from North Morningside to East Morningside more difficult, it was easy to avoid it by a change in route.  (But that meant I went straight on Pelham, and one morning soon after I changed my route I almost ran the stop sign at Pelham and Pine Ridge; it wasn't my usual route, yet, and I wasn't looking for a stop sign there.)  Those four-way stops did slow down the traffic, and I don't see people run the stop signs often, so I'm optimistic that the new signs at Morningside and Cumberland will do the same.  It will be much safer for pedestrians crossing Morningside.

It's distressing to see the complaints about this on the neighborhood email lists, that if the problem is speeding, enforce the speed limits, but that the priority should be for motorists to get where they want to go as soon as possible, that the four-way stop will create a "totally unnecessary back up" during morning and evening rush hours.  The people out walking their dogs or pushing their toddler in a stroller or riding their bikes -- well, they should just stay out of the way, I guess, because God forbid that a driver have to stop at a stop sign.

I just read The Great Neighborhood Book, which has an entire section on traffic, which is to say on the adverse impact speeding cars have on neighborhoods.  "For 80 years, traffic engineers have been trained to see their job as moving cars through cities as rapidly as possible with a minimum of inconvenience.  Little thought was given to how pedestrians, kids at play, and entire neighborhoods were inconvenienced and even terrorized by roaring traffic."  Yes.  Exactly.  

Now, if we could just get a crosswalk at Wessyngton and Cumberland....

Morningside's Best

Morningside is an old neighborhood, dating back to the 1920s if not before, but Wessyngton Road is much newer - connecting North Highland and Cumberland Road, it is straight and much wider than other Morningside streets that are not major thoroughfares. The official descriptions of the property on this street calls this the F.P. Smith Estate subdivision. I don't know who F.P. Smith was, but I am assuming that sometime after World War II the property was sold for development and you can't develop it without a street - so Wessyngton Road was built, and the houses started to appear. The lots are only 50 feet wide and the older houses on the street are (by current standards) small ranch houses nearly devoid of the architectural charm of the older Morningside neighborhoods. (We also have no sidewalks on our street, except along the apartments, at the corner of Wessyngton and Highland, and in front of two of the newly built houses across from the church. I assume that this is because the street was built in the Era of the Automobile.)

Our house was built in 1950. When I bought it in the late 1980s, it had a funny cupola sort of thing on the roof that accommodated an attic fan. The fan was nice, but (along with many of the other houses on street) it didn't look anything like the classic Morningside houses. That's the reason I could afford it at the time - I couldn't believe I could find a house in this neighborhood that I could afford, and of course it was because this wasn't one of those Morningside streets with the big old houses.

We put a second floor on our house in 1998 which not only meant we did not have to give away a couple of our three children, but also that the house looked more like it belonged in the neighborhood than it had previously. (Kudos to Ben Dooley, the architect, who did the magic in design, and Fernando Reyes, who at that time lived across the street, who was our builder.)

Iain and I were walking the dog the other evening and I picked up a flyer for a house on the street that is for sale. The flyer is advertising an "adorable home on one of Morningside's best streets." I was stunned by this. Not the "adorable home" part - it may well be extremely adorable - but the "one of Morningside's best streets" part. Presumably this was written by a real estate agent who actually knows something about Atlanta real estate, and I don't know who in their right mind would characterize Wessyngton Road as "one of Morningside's best streets" from the real estate point of view (unless of course they are thinking "buy a relatively affordable 1950s ranch house and knock it down and build a Large House that is Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses," but that is too depressing to contemplate.)

There are plenty of wonderful things about our location - proximity to both Highland Walk and Virginia-Highlands commercial areas, so we can walk to both Alon's and San Francisco Coffee, and we are in the district of Morningside Elementary School, a public school with high test scores, even though it is chronically infested with head lice - but plenty of other streets in Morningside can say the same thing, and might not be wide enough that the cars cutting through assume the speed limit must be 50 mph. (Our neighbor Tim tried to get a speed bump but no luck. Tom and Dan had proposed pot holes to slow the cars down. Really big ones. You get the picture.) Little ranch houses, no sidewalks, and a real estate agent says this is "one of Morningside's best streets"?

But of course, the real estate agent is right - it's just that what makes Wessyngton one of Morningside's best streets is not captured in any statistic that anyone can look up in a table somewhere. There is a tradition here - I am not sure what to call it, but for lack of a better term I will call in neighborliness - that one doesn't expect to find in a city. Years ago, people who don't live here any more hosted parties and invited me, and I got to know people I otherwise might not have met. The social committee baton has been passed, and now there are several of us who pick the dates and send the emails, but we didn't start it - it was here already. Morningside Presbyterian Church has been a wonderful neighbor and has let us hold block parties in their parking lot, but there are also baby showers and going away parties. If you met someone at a block party, you might stop and talk when you're out walking the dog, and then, if you see someone you don't know carrying a flatscreen TV out of their house, you might call 911. There's the informal network of flat tire repair, pest control, and plumbing help. The race car bed went from one side of the street to the other and back, from Max to Iain to Benjamin.

So that's the story. Even with the speeding cars barrelling down the hill toward Cumberland Road and no sidewalks, it is a great street.

But it's not the houses, it's the people in them.