This lovely graphic shows the evolution of Atlanta's old streetcar system. It comes from a 2012 paper by Dawn Haynie at the GSU Urban Studies Institute.

Source:

Atlanta is a a city that was literally built around mass transit lines. Its original evolutionary path saw buildings organized in a format for walking to and from transit stops. I feel like a lot of folks aren’t aware of this.

People will say "Atlanta is a driving city" as if it's always been that way; as if the switch to car-centric placemaking wasn't an aberration in our history -- one we can absolutely change.

We can redesign Atlanta for inclusivity and sustainability by recognizing the mistake the city made by switching to a more car-centric type of urbanism.

We can grow in a better way, designing our new developments and our transportation system so that cars are de-centered and alternatives (transit, walking, cycling) are advanced.

by Darin Givens, 12/24/2023

This image shows part of the United Auto Recovery lot in Hapeville, just south of Atlanta (and this is only a section -- it goes on).

What you're looking at are repoed vehicles waiting for owners to pay lenders off and recover them.

To my eyes, it's also a picture of the need for affordable homes in transit-served density, where the expense of car ownership is less of a necessity and the threat of repossession is less present in peoples' lives.

The struggle of transportation costs is real, and it's getting worse every year.

According to a NY Times report, the average annual cost of new-car ownership rose to $12,182 this year due to increased "purchase prices, maintenance costs and finance charges." That's an incredible cost burden -- one that obviously hits lower-income drivers the hardest.

Too often, we demand car ownership by way of our unwalkable, sprawling urban designs which offer little alternative. We essentially enforce this burden.

Also from that NYT article:

"America’s dependence on automobiles means hefty bills, the risk of dangerous crashes and stress. And now, even with strong wage growth and elevated savings in recent years, high sticker prices and escalating interest rates are starting to take a toll: The share of borrowers moving into delinquency jumped sharply in late 2022 and early 2023"

When you read "borrowers moving into delinquency," understand that to also mean 'people who have little choice but struggle with car-ownership burdens because we aren't allowing them affordable homes in walkable neighborhoods rich with transit services'.

For a look at the savings we could allow residents in a less car-dependent, future version of Atlanta, take a look at this chart showing the difference between car ownership costs and annual transit-pass costs for the average Atlanta transit commuter (source: atltransit.ga.gov).

Of course, you have to multiply that cost of transit passes for each person in a house. But even if we can get to a level of walkability that allows two-car families to trim down to one car, that's a lot of savings.

We can do this. Bit by bit, we can use public tools like Invest Atlanta, and zoning reform, and the city's affordable housing fund, and the More MARTA program (and much more) to provide affordable homes in a compact, pedestrian-scaled setting that's easily served by transit routes.

It's crucial that we remain optimistic about our chances for success when it comes to creating a better Atlanta that lifts people out of the burdensome costs of car-centric places -- not just money, but also poor health outcomes and threats to safety.

MARTA is building a new $37.5 million transit hub next to the Gallery at South DeKalb shopping center, pictured above, according to a new Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about a federal grant for the project. This is a good investment in transit. But...

1.) DeKalb needs to make this place less car-centric in the long run. It's a grossly hostile environment for walking, which is a terrible situation for transit riders and transit investment.

2.) It's strange that the redevelopment plan for Five Points MARTA Station in Downtown Atlanta essentially consists of the same bus-bay + plaza + canopy combo that the burbs are getting (albeit a supersized version). The center of a city should be getting actual development at its transit stations. Transit design that's appropriate for the burbs is not necessarily appropriate for Downtown.

Pedestrian-hostile suburbs aren’t balanced out by the presence of walkable urbanism elsewhere; they’re a problem that should be fixed.

By Darin Givens, 11/27/2022

In Johns Creek, GA you can live a stone's throw from a grocery store that would require a whopping 1.1 mile trek if you wanted to walk to it instead of driving. This is the restrictive zoning that some people want, in order to "protect" single family homes from the scourge of walkable mixed-use urbanism.

Yes, this is the suburbs. But I don’t accept the argument that it’s OK to allow this for the people who want it as an option, versus walkable urban design. Certainly not at the incredible scale that we’ve seen in the past few decades worth of sprawl in the Atlanta metro area and elsewhere. 

Buildable land is a precious resource in the Atlanta region. We aren't making more of it. In fact, to preserve unbuilt ecosystems, we need to stop sprawling into the dwindling forests of the Georgia Piedmont.

To improve health outcomes, we need to create less pollution and boost the safety of active transportation; sprawl is correlated with increased energy use and pollution. To improve equitable outcomes, we need neighborhoods near stores/jobs to be more walkable and more serviceable by transit. To improve services for the public, we need our land-use to capture as much value as possible (sprawl does the opposite).

Here’s the scene you would encounter on foot if you tried to get to the grocery store from the homes above. It’s an inhumane environment for pedestrians that demands access to a personal vehicle for navigating it, and for getting to daily necessities and jobs. Saying “if some people want inhumane spaces, we should support that desire with restrictive zoning laws” is ridiculous. 

Car-centric sprawl is not a neutral, harmless “option” for living. It’s a thing that hinders progress on our health/climate/environmental goals. Local governments should not be providing it in mass quantities through restrictive zoning laws.

It was sad to see this beautiful old illustration of the Municipal Market in Atlanta, because I immediately knew how much of that urban fabric was demolished for freeways & parking.

Counteracting this damage to Downtown will take a lot of work.

Illustration source: https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/blog/atlanta-department-of-city-planning-records-now-available/

This is the kind of thing that brings me life-sustaining joy. On Twitter, an ultra conservative author at Forbes links to her awful article warning the U.S. to not adopt good urban designs from Europe that de-center cars and benefit pedestrians/cyclists. Diana Furchtgott-Roth served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. DOT under Trump.

The first commenter on the tweet writes a wonderful smack down of the article, and uses an image I made years ago for this Tumblr blog to illustrate it. I don’t know this person; they live in California apparently. But they’ve brought me happiness by using my stuff to shame a Trump-administration conservative who apparently loves car-oriented cities. 

That image, BTW, shows the exact same section of Atlanta before and after the freeways were built, and the neighborhoods that were destroyed. (I-75/85 and I-20 interchange.)

Bias against buses is nuts.

I'm not usually one to reduce an argument to "get over it" but holy cow, Atlanta -- Get Over It. Stop hating buses because they aren't trains.

Buses suit Atlanta well geographically, and they're quicker to implement than rail. Let's fund expansion of bus service. Prioritize their movement on streets. Create great pedestrian pathways to them.

This is important. Our local car culture needs to change.

The United States is over-parked and under-housed, and I think it’s a tragedy.

But this tragedy begs a question: how did things get this way?

At first glance, the paradoxes seem evident. People are priced out of cities and living on the streets, yet we’ve dedicated huge swaths of land to (nearly empty) parking lots and enormous roads that are home to what we truly value: cars.

The reality of sprawl has forced people into a zero-sum game where buying a car is not a luxury or a helpful tool, but a necessity to ensure any economic success in the current system.

Regulations such as parking minimums still plague the local system of city codes and urban planning, requiring that giant parking lots be built, which only perpetuates sprawl, isolating people and forcing them to drive.

But why do parking minimums, which face considerable criticism, remain in place in many cities?

A Slate article tried to answer that question:

If parking minimums are so bad, then why do we have them? There are two common explanations. One is that well-meaning traffic engineers believed that they could force the private sector to solve the mess of curbside parking chaos, and local politicians are now afraid of risking a dreaded “parking shortage” by letting the market decide how much parking is necessary. A more cynical take is that neighborhoods use parking as a value-neutral argument to stop new development, effectively banning low-income and infill housing without having to say so.

This all tracks. Parking minimums are irrational and wasteful, but they serve the purposes of many areas in the United States.

So how does this work? Imagine someone wants to build an infill project on a lot. The project makes the most sense if you don’t build parking, especially since it’s a smaller building with only a handful of apartments. Yet parking minimums often require the developer to build a certain number of parking spots per apartment, driving up costs to unrealistic levels.

With that leverage, local governments can essentially bargain with developers to get what they want, whether that’s affordable housing or public services. The irony is that these deals have become necessary because of tight zoning laws, which have undoubtedly reduced tax revenue but protected private property interests within the area.

As the Slate article observes, we’re stuck in some sort of hellish make-rules-to-break-rules scenario, where overly restrictive housing and parking rules are imposed on developers. These developers then have to make deals with the city to build something with, say, more density, or less parking. In a world where zoning is used to wield power over developers, local jurisdictions and city councils are reluctant to let go of these laws.

Regardless of your view on the matter, it’s difficult to deny that the market is being undermined, an exceedingly strange occurrence in a market-minded country where decisions are often made based on what is best for the economy. Despite that, U.S. zoning laws have remained oddly draconian.