This was from an email I sent after GDOT presented its new plan for Peachtree Rd Thursday night. The plan has bike lanes for less than half of the project, instead of the entire project as originally drawn. There were a lot of questions, that due to time or perhaps political concerns, weren’t answered completely, so this is my attempt to answer them.
1. Speeding on Peachtree. Even with a heightened enforcement effort, this will continue. This is because of the design speed of the road. This means that no matter what limit is posted, people drive at the speed which they feel safe. Peachtree is 60 feet wide, with open vistas by design. 8 foot sidewalks go right to the curb, flanking both sides, giving additional sightlines. For years traffic engineers believed doing this created safer roads, but instead, it created higher speeds and a false sense of security. Crashes, injuries and deaths increased.
2. What happens to people on bikes when the bike lane ends? I test rode the proposed route for GDOT and the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition. Riding from Peachtree Hills Avenue to Shadowlawn, as per GDOT’s directions, increased the ride from 2 miles to 3 miles. Not terrible, but the hill climbing came out to 265 feet of elevation gain, vs 210 feet when staying on Peachtree. That’s a 27 story building’s worth of climbing, not surprising in neighborhoods called Peachtree Hills, Peachtree Heights, and Garden Hills. This is why you don’t see people riding bikes on those streets, and believe me, they would to avoid the traffic on Peachtree, if it made sense.
3. No connectivity to Path400. The Pharr Rd bike lanes were created to connect to Path400 at Piedmont Rd. But how do you get to Pharr Rd on a bike?
4. The asymmetric lane balance north of Peachtree Battle Ave means that someone on a bike will take one of the two travel lanes when traveling northbound. No improvement compared to today.
5. There will be no buffer from traffic when walking north of Peachtree Battle Ave, which is curiously where most of us live. No improvement compared to today.
6. The B/C (Benefit/Cost) Ratio needs another look. The benefit side only factors the benefits of reduced car crashes and related injuries and deaths, not including people walking or cycling. Now let’s look at the numbers. The cost of the project is estimated at $1,146,600. The benefit of the Peachtree Battle Hybrid is 63.45, which comes out to $72,751,770 (!). That’s the value in reduced car crashes. The benefit of full bike lanes it 79.95, or $91,670,670 (!!) - so even fewer crashes with bike lanes installed. In fact, $18,918,900 worth of fewer car crashes/injuries/deaths.
Put another way, do we really want ~$19M more in car crashes with the hybrid plan?
I asked councilman Howard Shook about that. He wrote: “I continue to believe that moving traffic should be the number one priority of this project.”
So traffic throughput trumps our safety in our councilman’s eyes.
I will leave you with this shot from last night, before the meeting. It’s a guy on a bike, riding legally, with a car trapped behind him. The other cars were able to merge into the center lane. Note also the uninviting sidewalk, only used heavily during the July 4th Peachtree Rd Race, when the street is closed to auto traffic for a few hours. We can do much better. This is the road in front of many of our homes, and it deserves to look like the signature street we claim it to be.
There’s a great post this week on the Atlanta Studies website from Joseph Hurley who works as a Data Services and GIS Librarian at Georgia State University Library. Read it here: Atlanta’s Parking Problem Revisited.
Here’s a quote from it:
…most of downtown has become dominated by substantial parking desk
structures and surface level parking lots, which are placed immediately
alongside one-way streets that are often four to five lanes wide. Cars
regularly treat these exceedingly wide streets as urban highways,
traveling at speeds that are unsafe for an area that should cater to
pedestrians. Courtland Street is a prime example of how providing
“convenient parking” and the removal of on-street parking to allow for
“greater street traffic flows,” exactly what both reports recommended,
has created undesirable urban environments.
As Hurley points out, is Courtland Street in Downtown Atlanta (in the middle of the GSU campus) is truly an undesirable place for anyone outside of a car:
In these two images he’s contrasting Courtland’s state in 1954, when it had two traffic lanes and street-side parking, with its current state of four traffic lanes. Also notice the narrow sidewalks. This is a supremely unpleasant place to walk, in my experience (and I’m a fairly hardy urban traveler). The wide lanes promote high car speeds, and having those fast cars fly by while you balance on a skinny sidewalk is sometimes terrifying, particularly if you have a child in tow. The street-side parking provided an important buffer for pedestrians in 1954 – one that disappeared when ‘maximum car flow at all costs’ became the priority.
I’ve taken a photo of Courtland before myself, when I was walking alongside it and noticed how scary it was to watch pedestrians cross – even with the right-of-way – in front of a line of stopped cars that were all ready to storm through a light as if they were on an interstate entrance ramp.
By coincidence, Tim Keane, the new Commissioner of Planning and Community Development for the City of Atlanta, tweeted a photo of Courtland recently. He seems appalled to find a street this dead and uninviting. Just look at how the buildings don’t ‘address’ the street even through they are next to it:
Courtland is one of many one-way, multi-lane streets in the city center that should undergo a two-way conversion and streetcaping – maybe with bike lanes as well. If we can’t manage to put anything inviting for pedestrians and cyclists along the street in the form of ground-level retail, at least we could make their experience of maneuvering it outside a car safer and less frightening.
A 2008 Atlanta Business Chronicle piece reported that city planners were keen to convert Courtland (and some other one-way, large streets nearby) to two-way traffic as a way of encouraging more pedestrian and cycling traffic, but some owners of large downtown facilities and hotels fear that doing so would prevent the flow of customers in cars that they’ve gotten used to.
But if Atlanta is serious about becoming a city that is friendlier to cyclists and pedestrians, and thus to transit riders who are all pedestrians at some point in their trip, these one way monstrosities have to go – if for the sake of safety alone. According to a piece in Planetizen, the stats are clear: two-way streets are safer for everyone:
The
risk of collision or injury doubles when driving through a neighborhood
of one-way streets. In total, the 22 Census tracts with a high
concentration of one-ways had 2,992 additional collisions and 792 more
injuries requiring medical treatment—some causing loss of life.
Moreover, if you are riding a bike or walking, you are also more likely
to be injured on a one-way street.
““When
the streetcar went away in 1956 two of the major streets became
one-way, so you lost 50 percent of the [retail] visibility and made it
an unsafe, high-speed corridor. These blocks were built for people, but
the environment around them became inhospitable.”
It’s time for these blocks to be for people again, and not so dominated by concerns about car flow.
When few people are calling a street home, it’s easy to rename it
A large section of Spring Street that runs through Downtown Atlanta was renamed this week for Ted Turner – a local pioneer in business and broadcasting who is certainly deserving of honors. But this? Despite the fact that Turner’s condo sits above a Ted’s Montana Grill located at the corner of Luckie and Spring, It hardly seems appropriate – this stretch of road is largely dead.
The news article linked above says this about the renaming ceremony:
“Hundreds of people came – many sitting in the shade of a huge tent provided by the city on the parking lot across from the center of “Turner-verse””
Funny you should mention parking lots. Ted Turner Drive is a great place to see tons of them! And abandoned buildings too. Does it really feel like an honor to have your name on a street that contains so much blighted, underused property?
Xernona Clayton, who also has had a (pretty bleak looking) Downtown Atlanta street re-named to honor her in recent years, gave this praise to Turner: “Ted has transformed this whole city.”
Turner has done great things to be sure, but it’s strange to say that someone has transformed the city while you’re standing in the middle of an area in dire need of transformation. Ted Turner Drive looks pretty crappy for the most part. Xernona Clayton Way does too.
I’m guessing that the reason these fairly dead streets Downtown are easy to rename is because of the lack of businesses and residents on them who could complain. Here’s me hoping that some of these streets that are weighed down with blank walls and parking facilities can get some life on them, particularly since the costly streetcar is now running through them.
The day when City Council can’t find a street they can easily rename – that’s when we know we’ve succeeded in making better places.
Two couples walked out of the courthouse just now in Downtown Atlanta, both with marriage licenses. Two officiants were waiting on the steps to perform the marriages. The man in the foreground said “we’ve only been waiting 22 years.” (at Superior Court of Fulton County)
