#car-centric developmnent

[atlurbanist]

Classism. Racism. Ageism. Ableism. Climate denial.

No matter how we rationalize the wasteful destruction of nature through car-scaled urban sprawl, or how we rationalize the act of robbing people of chances to live with dignity unless they can drive, those evils are at the core.

[atlurbanist]

Thinking about public health and car-centric places

Unwalkable places fail to promote good health, and fail to be inclusive of people within the full spectrum of abilities and ages. 

by Darin Givens, 1/18/2022

I saw a tweet today that really nails the negative association between car-centric urban design and public health. It's a major problem. I think about it a lot these days:

As of three years ago, I’m unable to drive due to neurological issues. If I still lived in the car-centric suburbs instead of in a walkable urban place, I’d be up the creek. But as it is, I was recently able to walk to CVS a few days ago to pick up a prescription -- something I do regularly. I’m also able to get onto two different bus routes within a block walk.

I feel very privileged to have that ability, but it shouldn’t be a privilege. It should just be the way we do placemaking for the sake of equity and good health. 

Many studies over the years have found that people living in neighborhoods that are easily walkable, and that have transit options other than driving, get more exercise per week.

Unfortunately, we’ve built far too many places that fail to be walkable, fail to promote good health, and that also fail to be inclusive of people within the full spectrum of abilities and ages. 

And for that latter group, the problem isn’t just about the inconvenience of not being able to take a stroll safely for some exercise. It’s about death and injury -- the extreme end of ‘health’.

I’m thinking of the Clayton County 12-year-old with autism who was killed on a typically awful suburban road after being struck by a car, and their caregiver who was seriously injured trying to save the child. And the 7-year-old girl with autism who was killed in a hit-and-run in Acworth while walking near her home.

When we build our developments to be dependent upon cars, and our roads to be prioritized for maximum car flow and speed, we exclude many people from reaping the health benefits of safe spaces for walking. It feels to me like a wrong thing to do; like something that local governments should disallow. 

Maybe it’s something that the federal government should penalize counties and cities for: show us that you’re actively working on creating walkable places that are accessible to all, or we’ll withhold federal money for transportation. 

[atlurbanist]

This tweet has the usual “but people want space and a yard, and Atlanta offers that” stuff from commenters, defending our low-density sprawl.

Which is ridiculous. There's no Barcelona-like option in Atlanta that people have shunned and left empty because they want yards. We literally made it illegal to build Barcelona.

The image in the tweet is a 1990 comparison of Barcelona and multi-county Metro Atlanta, showing the difference between a sprawling land use and a compact one. Heavy rail transit lines are in red.

A much higher percentage of Barcelona's population has access to rail transit, vs Atlanta.

When I look at this image I see:

1.) 2.8 million people (Barcelona) in an area compact & walkable enough to be served well by rail

2.) 2.5 million people (Metro Atlanta) sprawled out into pedestrian-hostile places that can’t be served well by transit.

It's a choice. You want to make compact, mixed-use development illegal? Is enforcement of yards your priority?

OK, well that means we'll be dominated by car dependency and sprawl -- which will lead to inequitable outcomes for access, safety, health, and more. It also means destroying large, contiguous forests.

Metro Atlanta is in a depressing situation with sprawl and low access to high-frequency transit, plus all the negatives that result. But I'm generally hopeful for the future. There are great folks here who understand how to build better places.

By the way -- some folks like to make the "Atlanta has no natural boundaries" argument, as if we're doomed to car-dependency due to lack of a coast or mountains (we're not).

Atlanta's local governments can choose to make compact, mixed-use neighborhoods legal. We can choose to stop demanding, through zoning laws, that most of our developable land be occupied by nothing but low density sprawl.

Just because Barcelona had to be compact due to natural boundaries, that doesn't mean that Atlanta has to sprawl due to the lack of them.

[atlurbanist]

We over-adjusted chaotic streets by making them too focused on car flow.

1928 streets had quite a mobility mix – horse wagons, pedestrians, cars, streetcars, and bicycles, all sharing space. This is the Five Points intersection, Downtown Atlanta, but plenty of other streets had this same mix.

This kind of scene was chaotic and it needed some order. But the 'order' we got after 1928 was the wrong kind. We evolved city streets in a bad direction, designing them to prioritize movement of automobiles above all else. Which was a particularly troubling change when you consider the high rate of pedestrian deaths caused by cars in the 1920s.

At this point, we need to undo the car-focused evolution of streets from the mid 20th century, and de-center car flow in our street designs -- yes, let's allow cars, but don't allow them to continue keeping our urbanism as compromised as it has become.

Below: car-sewer streets in Downtown Atlanta

We need to do it for safety, sustainability, equity, and to take better advantage of the things cities do best (a list that doesn't include 'suburban levels of car flow').

I know people will argue that we shouldn't change the car-centric design of city streets until transit is expanded in the suburbs. But I say that it's not fair to prevent Atlanta from achieving better urbanism by maintaining the status quo of car capacity.

Plus, as we've seen with the More MARTA program, expansion of transit is a very difficult, costly, lengthy process. Will the suburbs buy into that process by approving higher taxes? I hope so. But I don't want to stifle Atlanta's capacity for urbanism-excellence based on that bet.

Top-photo source: GSU Digital Collections

[atlurbanist]

Thoughts from a suburban intersection in the city

Slip lanes, free-standing fast food restaurants with drive-thru windows, and a lot of cars -- while standing at the intersection of Ponce and Boulevard, I had to assure myself I hadn't been instantly transported to the suburbs. 

We've got a lot of work to do when it comes to redesigning the city so that it can do some of the key things that cities do best: 

 Prioritize walking, cycling, and transit usage on the street, and... 

 Supply developments that are oriented primarily toward those modes instead of toward driving.

Of course, all of the above needs to be achieved in a way that prevents displacement of lower-income residents, and adds new residents in an equitable way that includes affordability.

I want to specifically address transit: sometimes people will claim that we can't change the density of the city until we've first expanded transit, but I see that as a losing argument. Yes, there's some small expansion of transit that could happen within the status quo. But one thing that works against the success of transit is the existing suburban layout of much of the city. 

It's hard to serve lower-density places -- especially ones with pedestrian-hostile roads and car-centric developments -- with buses, let alone trains. At some point all transit riders are pedestrians, and that walk needs to be a great one if transit is going to appeal to anyone other than the desperate folks who can't drive (like me).

[atlurbanist]

Emory University Hospital Midtown has some giant parking decks (the two highlighted in red on the left are theirs; the one on the right is for a federal office tower). They sit in between two MARTA rail stations. That’s a problem. It makes our major investments in rail less valuable than they should be.

Studies have found that the availability of parking has a negative effect on transit ridership. It’s hard for MARTA to compete with car trips when rail stations are next to masses of parking.

Campuses like these might as well be located several miles from rail so that this space can be filled with something that actually supports transit ridership.

But honestly, I point this out not to slam Emory or to claim that hospitals or federal offices shouldn’t have any parking. That’s not what I’m saying with this post. This is simply one easy-to-highlight example of a problem that exists all around, and the blame belongs with the city.

What I want to emphasize is this: Atlanta has done a poor job with planning transit-supportive density near rail stations; and we have a lot of serious work to do when it comes to rectifying that situation. We need to create great urban places that provide excellent pedestrian experiences while emphasizing sustainable transportation.

People complain that ‘MARTA doesn’t go anywhere’. The part of the city that's in this image should be a 'somewhere’ place. All the places around our city's rail stations need to be delivering many rail passengers, and providing great walking destinations.

[atlurbanist]

If you have zoning codes that force developers to provide housing that comes with parking spaces, what you are implicitly saying is that it is illegal to build housing explicitly for people who are too poor to own cars

Redesigning American Cities for Less Driving | Planetizen, 8/1/2013

[atlurbanist]

How the US became Car Country

This is a great little video promoting the book "Car Country: an environmental history" by Christopher Wells.

It takes a concise look at some of the steps that led to much of our urban landscape being entirely dependent on car travel -- and the way that government and zoning policies nationwide favored car-oriented developments throughout the 20th century.