The long-delayed Jackson Street Bridge parklet moves closer to realitu
ATL Urbanist
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2d ago
City Council’s Liliana Bakhtiari says that funding has been found to complete the Jackson Street Bridge placemaking project! She announced at the NPU M meeting tonight that both this & protected bike lanes for Edgewood Ave are going out to bid this year. The Jackson Street project creates a new pedestrian area that extends beyond the sidewalk – basically a parklet. It will also include a protected cycle track creating a safer connection between the Freedom Parkway Trail and Baker-Highland Trail. This plan has been gestating for several years (it was first announced in 2018). I served on t ..read more
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A traditional neighborhood should be a complete one, with walkable density
ATL Urbanist
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3d ago
threadatl: Darin Givens l March 25, 2024 Here’s a great quote from a new writeup by a local planner, and it challenges us to reconsider what a ‘traditional neighborhood’ is in an urban context: “We need a land use that allows for Traditional Neighborhood Uses: single-family homes, duplexes, small apartments, and small commercial uses like schools, offices and neighborhood retail. Things people can walk to! In our minds, these are the things that give a neighborhood character.” Well said! Complete neighborhoods should be the norm for cities, and they should be allowed by zoning. This is exac ..read more
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Does this mean we’re finally getting infill stations on MARTA’s heavy-rail system? If so, that’s…
ATL Urbanist
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3d ago
Does this mean we’re finally getting infill stations on MARTA’s heavy-rail system? If so, that’s great news! We absolutely need new stations built in between existing ones, to provide access to rail transit closer to the emerging nodes of urban density near the tracks. Important: be sure to wrap in displacement-prevention funding/policy with the new stations, plus Transit Oriented Development with affordable housing at the stations ..read more
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People thought we’d forget about this. I don’t forget. Grudge-holding achievement: unlocked.
ATL Urbanist
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4d ago
People thought we’d forget about this. I don’t forget. Grudge-holding achievement: unlocked. That shiny bridge in the second photo was built over Northside Drive to keep cars flowing during events at the Mercedes Benz stadium, per planning documents, and the city paid for it entirely with $23 million. If it had been built with the help of private money, I wouldn’t be as angry. But spending $23 mil in limited city funds for this was a wretched thing to do. Also wretched was the fact that it was promoted as being a boon for Vine City residents, which is ridiculous. The city doesn’t own Northsi ..read more
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Bell Building is being turned into a new GSU Student Success Center
ATL Urbanist
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6d ago
Darin Givens | March 21, 2024 Exterior work is well underway on an adaptive-reuse project that will convert the Bell Building into a new Student Success Center for GSU! This is exciting to see. You can find information on the successful effort to preserve this structure at the https://savethebell.org site. This has been a nice victory for historic preservation and for the urbanism of Downtown Atlanta! In 2015, Georgia State University announced it was going to raze historic Bell Building and replace it with surface parking lots. This struck me and other preservation-minded advocates as a horr ..read more
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Atlanta streetcars: mule-drawn & electric
ATL Urbanist
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1w ago
atlurbanist: This is an 1882 photo of the intersection of Whitehall (now Peachtree) and Alabama Streets. Notice the mule-drawn trolleys and horse-drawn wagons on the streets. An article published recently, “Did Cars Save Our Cities From Horses? Debating a modern parable about waste and technology,” gives an interesting rebuttal to the common story that personal cars saved cities from mounds of horse manure. Between the era of horse-drawn carts and personal cars was an age of electric streetcars: The late 19th and early 20th centuries was actually the age of streetcars. Running on steel rails ..read more
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If you still haven’t read the book Red Hot City, please do so. Among other things, it speaks clearly…
ATL Urbanist
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1w ago
If you still haven’t read the book Red Hot City, please do so. Among other things, it speaks clearly about the failure of Atlanta leaders to do great things with displacement prevention and housing affordability while Beltline speculation was underway. Someone recently asked me if Atlanta intentionally fumbled the rail-transit & affordable-housing components of the Beltline so it could largely become a tool for upmarket real estate & also a drive-to attraction. That sounds incredibly pessimistic. But yes, it also feels true. What folks who misdirected the Beltline project didn’t count ..read more
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? Very cool! I couldn’t help but add a train to the photo from AtlWinKnee’s tweet (second image).
ATL Urbanist
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1w ago
? Very cool! I couldn’t help but add a train to the photo from AtlWinKnee’s tweet (second image). Put rail on the Atlanta Beltline and turn this into an excellent urban corridor surrounded by infill homes (with affordability), offices, and more. And *build great ped/bike paths like this everywhere* so that the Beltline isn’t such a rare destination for safe walking and cycling. I want the Beltline path to be instructional for Atlanta, so we learn how much demand there is for great spaces to walk and bike. We should expand this quality of experience (including protected bike lanes) on many st ..read more
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West Peachtree at 10th Street: a new tower adds a few stories of screened parking over the sidewalk…
ATL Urbanist
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1w ago
West Peachtree at 10th Street: a new tower adds a few stories of screened parking over the sidewalk across the street from a parking deck. It looks bleak anywhere, but this is 600ft from Midtown MARTA Station so it’s worse. When people say “MARTA doesn’t go anywhere” I think what they really mean is that we’ve built too many blocks of Nowheresville near MARTA…blocks where pedestrians feel out of place – like they’ve accidentally wandered into territory that’s meant primarily for driving. I know that calling on the city to lower parking maximums near train stations is an unpopular thing. I kno ..read more
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The St Pat’s parade on Peachtree today was a great chance to see a city street achieve the best…
ATL Urbanist
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1w ago
threadatl: The St Pat’s parade on Peachtree today was a great chance to see a city street achieve the best version of itself: embracing a huge crowd of pedestrians + culture + storefronts, near rail stations. We need Peachtree to be more like this regularly, not just during parades ..read more
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