Sleeping Through the Night

We got our dog Leonard from Atlanta Lab Rescue in July 2014.  He was a terribly anxious dog when we got him but time and Prozac helped.  He settled into our household pretty well and life with Leonard had been mostly uneventful.  Then the last time we took him to the vet, she suggested that we try to taper him off the fluoxetine (generic for Prozac) and see how he did.  So we took him down to every other day, and then we missed a couple of doses and figured we'd just see how he was altogether off of it.

He's always been terrified of storms, but unless the weather is bad, he's slept downstairs in the living room by himself.  Bullwinkle, our previous dog, couldn't climb the stairs in our house, but Leonard could.  When we first got him and didn't completely know what to expect, we'd barricaded the stairs with a piece of plywood that we had to step over and that mostly kept Leonard downstairs.  But then after we stopped the fluoxetine, he started waking up at night at 1:30 or 2 a.m. almost every night, and either hurtling himself over the barricade and coming upstairs, or barking until one of us got up.  We restarted the fluoxetine, but it didn't seem to really help that much.  For the last couple of months, almost every night either Tom or I has spent much if not all of the night on the sofa, keeping Leonard company.

This was not going to work in the long run, so on Thursday we had a session with a dog trainer, recommended by Intown Animal Hospital.  We told him about Leonard and what we knew about his life before we got him and what has happened in our household, and stopping the Prozac and the waking at night and how now we were taking turns keeping him from keeping everyone awake all night.  The trainer listened to all this and then looked at us and said, "Why can't he go upstairs?"

Now there was not any particularly good reason why he couldn't go upstairs; when we'd first gotten him, we hadn't known how he would behave in the house, so it made sense then, maybe, but not so much now.  He does eat loose paper that he finds on the floor, but it's been almost two years and that's probably long enough even for us to get the papers picked up.  So night before last I took away the barricade and called him to come upstairs.  He explored a little but ended up falling asleep downstairs as usual.  I put his smaller bed in the family room upstairs where I thought a dog might want to sleep, and I went to bed.

Around 2 a.m. he came upstairs and jumped on our bed.  I got him off the bed, and he settled down pretty quickly in the hallway.  He woke up a couple of times and after wandering around a little quickly went back to sleep, on the floor in the hall between our and Iain's rooms.  That's where he was, sound asleep, when I got up yesterday morning.

Last night I moved the bed to the hall where he'd slept the night before, but I think he stayed downstairs all night.  He didn't make a sound.

A Saturday Morning Bike Ride

Yesterday morning I went on a bike ride by myself.  Since he got his bicycle, Tom has usually come with me, but he didn't yesterday morning, so I could stop and look at things that usually we just ride by.  Here is what I saw.

I rode into the Piedmont Park extension, across Monroe, and over the wooden bridge that goes across Clear Creek, which runs behind Ansley Mall and eventually joins (or perhaps becomes) the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.  Although it may be less polluted than it used to be, as the city has been forced to address storm sewer overflow issues, it still sometimes smells of sewage.  There are signs that say no fishing and no wading.  So it's always a surprise to see wildlife there.  Looking north from the bridge, there was a pair of ducks.

Once I was through Piedmont Park and back across Monroe, there was the ghost bike in memory of the Grady High School student riding her bike home following a school theater performance who was struck by a car and killed in February.  I've ridden by here a number of times but had not stopped before.  Near the ghost bike there's a memorial to Alexia.

Continuing south on the Eastside Trail, there are koi painted on the trail.  I know the Beltline people are fanatical about unauthorized art, but I really like these.  I think the same artist has painted koi on the sidewalks on Edgewood; I probably have pictures from there, too.

In Inman Park, there was a new tiny door I hadn't seen, from TinyDoorsATL.  

And one of the old tiny doors has been relocated.  This is the one at the overpass near the skate park.

Coming back across Clear Creek, looking south this time, there were these turtles sunning themselves on a partially submerged log.

And finally, on that long uphill stretch of Cumberland Road, I stopped at the Little Free Library.  There was a Post-It note on the door, saying the books were all new as of April 16.  I looked, and somewhat to my surprise found (along with the expected popular fiction) a copy of Balzac's Old Goriot and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.  What a great neighborhood.

You miss a lot, if you don't stop to look.

Atlanta Streets Alive Goes Crosstown

Last Sunday was the first Atlanta Streets Alive event of 2016.  Atlanta Streets Alive is an open streets event sponsored by the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition.  If you've never been to an open streets event, you've missed out on a potentially transformative experience.  Clearing the cars off the road and walking or biking the route changes how you see your city.  The first time I participated in an Atlanta Streets Alive event was in May 2012.  Highland was closed from Virginia Avenue to somewhere in Inman Park -- around Corley Street, as I recall.  It never had occurred to me that I could walk from Morningside to Inman Park, but Iain and I did that day.  Since then, I've been at almost every Streets Alive event there's been, if not every one.  There have been events on Peachtree, and the North Highland route has been extended include a section of Boulevard.  There have been two Streets Alive events in the West End.  For most of them, since that first one, I've been a volunteer, but last Sunday I wasn't working (there had been no email, saying they really needed just a couple more volunteers, if any of us could make it), so Iain and I loaded up our bikes in the van and drove to Grant Park.

It wasn't hard to find the starting point -- Georgia Avenue was barricaded and there were lots of people waiting for start.  There were speeches first, but we couldn't really hear them; we were too far back.

We did see this beautiful black cat on a leash, while we were waiting for the start.  I often ask dog owners if I can take a picture of their dog; this may have been the first cat that I ever photographed in a public place that was accompanied by its owner.

There was music.  This band with dancers was near the start.

This band was in front of the West End Performing Arts Center.  As in previous events, there was a lot of music along Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard in West End. 

Towards the western end of the route, there was bicycle polo.  There not being so many lawyers involved, it did not appear that you had to sign a waiver in order to play.

On the way back, we stopped to see the chalk art; I think this was near Gordon-White Park in the West End. 

We got vegetarian Caribbean food from a food truck in the West End and then got back on the road.

But we didn't go very far before we stopped for dessert at Krispy Kreme, and then we found the MARTA Army table, where I got my new bus schedule to post.  I first joined the MARTA Army at the last Streets Alive event on Boulevard, when they were set up at a table across the street from where I was working in an Atlanta Bicycle Coalition tent.  I asked Simon if I could take his picture, and he insisted that I be in it too, which wasn't really what I had in mind, but there I am.

Then we continued east, and caught up with the famous phoenixes that always lead the bicycle parade. 

Here's Chantelle Rytter, the force of nature behind the Beltline Lantern Parade and the bicycle parades at Streets Alive events.  Earlier, she had stopped at the same food truck we did, with a few other people, and someone asked her about the photo of her that is currently on the Atlanta Streets Alive website.  She laughed and said, out of all the pictures there are of her, they had to use one where she had a mustache on?

The theme for the bicycle parade this time was zoo animals (since the parade was starting so close to the zoo), and there were lots of zebra bikes like this one.

It wasn't the liveliest or most crowded Streets Alive event I've ever been to -- that's always on North Highland, where bars and restaurants set up tables on the sidewalks and spill into the street, and the there are so many people you can't ride a bike through the crowd -- but in some ways it was the best one.  Grant Park I sort of know -- we used to go to the zoo when the kids were younger, I took flute lessons there for a few years, and now we go to restaurants there sometimes -- but the only time I've been to Summerhill was when I worked at the Summerhill fall festival for Living Walls a few years ago.  The route took us through Summerhill and Mechanicsville, right past the soon-to-be abandoned Braves stadium before we got to West End. These are neighborhoods that weren't well-served by either the Braves or the City of Atlanta.  (Let's see if the redevelopment that is being planned for the area will finally make things better for the people who've lived here all this time, as opposed to just making it better for the developers.)  What was special about this route was the demonstration that these neighborhoods in fact could be connected by what should be one of the great east-west cross streets in the City of Atlanta.  Grant Park is a thriving neighborhood, and once that massive dead zone of parking lots is replaced by something that is actually occupied more than 81 days a year, Summerhill and Mechanicsville should be better places to live.  Connecting all these neighborhoods should help all of them. 

Although there seemed to be fewer restaurants and other local establishments participating along some parts of the route, there was a nice neighborhood festival feel pretty much all along the way.  The neighborhood associations were all there, with tables and tents and friendly people there to answer questions.  I know that the Bicycle Coalition made a conscious decision not to do the same loop in West End this time, but to make the case for connectivity.  It was, I think, a great decision.  They have a petition on their website now, asking for support for biking infrastructure investment along Georgia Avenue and Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard.  The time is right to stitch the fabric of our city back together, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make a pretty modest investment in infrastructure that can help make this corridor one of the great streets in our city.

Dodging the Bullet (This Time)

The weather forecast was dire for the East Coast.  A big storm was on the way and lots of states were going to get slammed.  In Atlanta, rain was forecast to change to snow on Friday afternoon.  Our city, having learned its lesson in 2014, prepared by early school closure of schools and work places.  It didn't sound like anything too bad was expected here, but there could be ice on the roads Friday night and everyone wanted to home in case that happened and things were worse than predicted.

Before I left work, we heard that conditions were already deteriorating in North Georgia.  I stopped at the grocery store on the way home Friday afternoon.  The store was crowded for early afternoon; I think everyone was making sure they were set for the weekend, just in case. 

As predicted, it was really bad to the north of us.  Ice and snow slammed Tennessee and North Carolina, a storm surge hit New Jersey, and Washington and New York City got two or three feet of snow and were pretty well shut down. In Atlanta, nothing much happened.  Saturday morning, we had a dusting of snow and some continued light flurries, but the roads at least in my neighborhood were clear, dry, and free of ice.

Here's what it looked like:

There was some snow art on a car's back window:

And at Morningside Presbyterian, the kids with the sleds had already come and gone by the time I came by.

We were lucky, but many other cities and towns to the north of us are still digging out, or drying out. I haven't heard a lot of complaining about the cautious approach the city took.  No one wants to be the person responsible for school children spending the night on a school bus stuck on I-285 (again). 

But it's only January -- there's still time for some winter weather.

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

Rezoning Elizabeth Ann Lane

The developer's request for a variance at Cumberland and Wessyngton was on the agenda for the Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU) meeting on Monday night of last week.  It's not that I thought it wouldn't go through, but I was curious what would happen.  It ended up being passed with very little discussion.

But there was a huge crowd -- a fill-up-the-sanctuary at Virginia-Highland Church-sized crowd -- and long lines to get in because they were verifying addresses on the way in. The reason for the big crowd was a rezoning request in the Lindridge Martin Manor neighborhood, which is part of our NPU.  (Lindridge Martin Manor is one of the neighborhoods that's been doing great work with the South Fork Conservancy on trails.)  Even though this didn't really have anything to do with Virginia Highland or Morningside, the notice went out widely through the neighborhood email lists that this proposed rezoning was a threat to our neighborhoods and we should show up. 

Elizabeth Ann Lane is a dead-end street off Sheridan, behind FedEx Plaza (on Cheshire Bridge, just south of I-85). 

There is commercial development to the north and west of it, a development of barely detached houses and another development under construction to the south, separating it from the strip mall where the Tara Theater and the Publix is.  So this street is nearly surrounded by commercial development.

All of the homeowners on Elizabeth Ann Lane and the adjacent area of Sheridan Road want to sell their houses to a developer who is proposing to put 89 townhomes on the site.

I didn't go into the NPU meeting with any particular opinion about this, although maybe I was included to oppose it on general principle, since the Virginia Highland Zoning Committee seemed to feel so strongly about it. 

The developer's representative made a brief presentation and implied that the houses were run down and an eyesore and they were doing the neighborhood a favor by getting rid of them.  On the subject of traffic, he said that there are fewer cars on Cheshire Bridge now than there used to be, and really, this wouldn't really make it worse.  Personally, I did not find this a highly persuasive argument.

But then the representative of the homeowners spoke.  They want to sell their houses to the developer, and the implication was that they are being offered enough for them that they can get the bigger houses they need for growing families, including accommodating other family members with special needs.  It was a good deal for them, but it wouldn't happen without the rezoning.  And already there is commercial development on two sides of them, so really, the site probably shouldn't be zoned R-4A anyway.

Then the opposition spoke, led by a (I think) a spokesperson for one of the zoning committees.  The arguments were (1) it's not consistent with the Comprehensive Development Plan; (2) it will take away some relatively affordable housing in the neighborhood; (3) the homeowners have no right to expect to make more from the sale of their homes than their value as single-family detached homes, given current R-4A zoning; and (4) the traffic is bad.  Then a man who identified himself as a professor of urban planning at one of the local universities said very emphatically several times that this was just "bad planning," without ever saying what about it was bad, and someone from the neighborhood said that traffic is so bad that the trucks that pick up trash sometimes skip his home.

While the discussion was going on, I looked up Elizabeth Ann Lane on Google Maps on my phone, and saw the map that I inserted above.  If this is what the Comprehensive Development Plan wants for this particular street - well, my thought was, that's bad planning.  And if the concern is affordable housing, the city could require the developer to provide some below market-rate units to school teachers, firefighters, and police officers.  And although the traffic may be bad, in the long run we do need density, and the developer cited in their proposal the proximity to bus lines on Cheshire Bridge and Lindbergh.

Last weekend, I went to Elizabeth Ann Lane.  Contrary to what the developer's representative implied at the NPU meeting, there was only one house that was in bad shape, and it was boarded up, unlike the derelict house near us on North Morningside.  Most of the houses look like the original houses on my street. 

Across Sheridan Road is a development called Sheridan Place, with pretty big houses with double garages that are really close together, and a new development called Sheridan Estates, with luxury homes "from the $800's" with (according to the signs) super pantries, mud rooms, and European appliances (I hope they work better than our Bosch dishwasher).  Incidentally I note that Sheridan Estates is being marketed by Muffley & Associates, along with their Dream Home program, which is where they pay a premium to buy up older homes that can be knocked down and replaced with other houses.  Given the discussion at the NPU meeting, apparently this is only permitted if the houses to be built are large, really expensive ones.

So I sided with the residents of Elizabeth Ann Lane, but the combined influence of all those opposing neighborhood associations had pretty well packed the meeting, and it was defeated, 189 to 124. I'm not completely sure this is the end of the story; I think the ultimate decision belongs to the city, and the developer's proposal concluded with the statement that any action other than approval would violate the developer's constitutional rights under the Georgia and U.S. Constitutions, so once the city makes a decision, it may still not be done. So we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, I have to wonder if anyone else looked at Google Maps before weighing in on this.