Fixing southern sprawl

This video is part of an award-winning, six-part series called American Makeover and features many of the local thinkers, developers, and researchers who participated in this month’s Congress for New Urbanism’s conference in Atlanta. One of the participants was David Byrne, who was interviewed by Creative Loafing about bicycles, cities, and Atlanta.

U.S. Trans Sec rightfully disses GA

Via Blake Aued's blog:

For decades, Athens residents have despaired of ever seeing a much-needed and much-discussed commuter train to Atlanta move forward while our leaders pay lip service to the concept.

Georgia is the largest state in the nation that does not fund mass transit. Do not expect any help from the Obama Administration – which has set aside billions for light rail – until state officials make a commitment.

“The Northeast (high-speed rail) corridor has its act together,” U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood told AJC columnist Jay Bookman. “The Midwest corridor has its act together. The governors there have set aside their own egos and their own ambitions” to work together on bringing high-speed rail to those regions.

“If the people of Atlanta think it’s OK to sit in traffic for an hour and a half on the way to a doctor’s appointment, so be it,” LaHood said (hat tip to JMac).

Come to think of it, just about every politician I’ve ever interviewed, from governor on down to county commissioner, has been in favor of the Brain Train. Yet it never gets done. Funny how that works.

Indeed. Haha.

Parallel universes

AJC journalist Jay Bookman deconstructs Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine's plans to solve metro Atlanta traffic problems by building more multi-lane, interstate-style highways:

The highway "would run about two miles east of the existing [I-285] connector. It would start at the intersection of Ga. 400 and I-85 and travel south to connect with I-20 and then I-285, a 15-mile route."

But,

Even the chairman of the state Transportation Board, Bill Kuhlke, has acknowledged that the era of major road-building is over in the metro area.

“Transit is going to be the biggest part of the answer for this particular region, “ Kuhlke said earlier this year.
Unfortunately, that realization is not widely held among the state’s elected political leadership.

Far more common is Oxendine’s claim that “we got to build a lot of roads around metro Atlanta,” a mind-set that blinds people to other possibilities.

For example, the so-called “Brain Train” — a proposed commuter rail line linking Athens, Gwinnett County and a downtown Atlanta multimodal station — would provide a more efficient and less destructive means of moving passengers from the northeast suburbs to the airport than the parallel connector, and at a fraction of the cost. But that kind of solution just can’t get a serious hearing from the state’s current leadership.

Given that reality, one of three things has to happen to address metro Atlanta’s transportation crisis:
We have to change the mind-set of state leaders; failing that, we have to change state leadership, period; and failing that, the region has to demand the authority to plan and finance its own transportation solution.

In other words, instead of a parallel connector, we need a parallel universe.

National rail plan includes GA

"President Barack Obama announced plans Thursday for a national high-speed rail network that would include lines crisscrossing North and South Georgia connected through a hub in Atlanta."

Full story.

Deep decline in driving

I'm a sucker for alliteration.

AJC relays:

It may not feel like it, but the American road is a lot more open these days.

In a year of historic changes in how we live, the federal government today is expected to announce yet another blockbuster. From November 2007 to October 2008, the U.S. saw the biggest sustained decline in miles driven in recorded history, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

Never before have Americans put the brakes on automotive travel in such a decisive way. Month after month, for an entire year, drivers put fewer miles on the road than they had the year before. It was an unprecedented stretch of highway-driving decline, according to FHWA spokesman Doug Hecox. The agency has been keeping records since 1942.

Vehicles on U.S. roads clocked 100.6 billion fewer miles in the year ending in October than they had traveled the year before, according to a monthly federal report expected today.

Georgians were among those helping drive the trend. Every month, they drove less than they did in that month the previous year. In August —- traditionally a big month for vacations —- Georgians chose to stay off the road by the biggest margin of the year.

In contrast, buses, trains and HOV registries are packed.

State Department of Transportation Commissioner Gena Evans is one of those people who cut down on driving.

After she and her new husband, former state Transportation Board Chairman Mike Evans, saw the rising cost to fill up his Hummer, she started riding mass transit to work in downtown Atlanta much of the time.

Gas prices encouraged the GDOT Commissioner to switch from a Hummer to public transit. No baby steps for Gena Evans!
Let's see if she takes her personal realization and packs that "ready to go" list of state transportation projects with desperately needed mass transit infrastructure (bike paths and sidewalks would be nice stocking stuffers as well).

California sets an example

Good news from the west coast: pending legislative efforts to curb sprawl and greenhouse gas emissions.
From the NYT:

SAN FRANCISCO — California, known for its far-ranging suburbs and jam-packed traffic, is close to adopting a law intended to slow the increase in emissions of heat-trapping gases by encouraging housing close to job sites, rail lines and bus stops to shorten the time people spend in their cars.

The measure, which the State Assembly passed on Monday and awaits final approval by the Senate, would be the nation’s most comprehensive effort to reduce sprawl. It would loosely tie tens of billions of dollars in state and federal transportation subsidies to cities’ and counties’ compliance with efforts to slow the inexorable increase in driving. The goal is to encourage housing near current development and to reduce commutes to work.

OK, Sonny. You said you were committed to fixing GA's traffic congestion crisis. Are we gonna have more of the same, or are we gonna get on board with real solutions?

Emory Univ selling low cost bikes

Check out this article from CNN. Our neighbors down at Emory are really encouraging bicycle use!
UGA, take note and follow the leader!

Excerpt:

The school is selling discounted bicycles to students and faculty, adding bike lanes to campus roads and stocking bikes that can be borrowed for free.

The university is pushing its $250,000 "Bike Emory" initiative, launched a year ago, in hopes of convincing students and faculty that the eco-friendly bikes are a better alternative to their four-wheeled, gas-guzzling counterparts.

Cycling already has a foothold at many colleges, where hefty parking fees, sprawling campuses and limited roads make it tough to travel. Still, most students are reluctant to leave their cars parked.

"They're using them to drive from residence halls to class, which is a two- or three-block commute," said Ric Damm, an administrator and cycling coach at Ripon College, which is giving away $300 bikes to freshmen who leave their cars at home. "We thought, 'How can we provide an incentive to get them out of that behavior?"'

Kunstler on Atlanta

James H. Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and, more recently, The Long Emergency, on Atlanta's particularly heinous case of the sprawls:

There was ... a gathering recognition among the prospering classes that the development explosion of the past thirty-odd years around Atlanta had begun to produce diminishing returns, as the geeks in econ might say, tending toward a decrease in the quality of life -- to use the kind of euphemistic, understated, neutral language that was commonly employed to describe the fucking mess that even hardcore suburban growth cheerleaders, in their narcotic raptures of consumerism and gourmet coffee, had begun to dimly apprehend. Above all, traffic had become intolerable. That was pretty much the sole criterion for the quality of life in Atlanta: motoring convenience (or lack of). You dared not venture out anymore to a restaurant on a Friday evening in Buckhead, the Beverly Hills of Atlanta, unless you wanted to spend half the night listening to books-on-tape in your SUV. Routine mid-day trips to the supermarket now required the kind of strategic planning used in military re-supply campaigns under wartime conditions. Mothers with children were spending so many hours on chauffeuring duty that they qualified for livery licenses. Motorists were going mad, literally, behind the wheel -- one berkserker tired of waiting at an intersection shot out the signal light with a handgun. The people of Atlanta were clearly driving themselves crazy with driving.

Whole article here.