Boulevard crosswalk: the finale (for now)
You may recall I was trying to use the power of citizen activism to make my neighborhood more pedestrian-friendly.
I often walk up Boulevard from Grant Park to Cabbagetown or Oakland Cemetery, crossing over Interstate 20 (I even see people jogging through this area).
Unfortunately, while there are crosswalks as you walk over the on and off ramps for I-20, the ‘walk/don’t walk’ lights were not working great and I thought it would be helpful to walkers if there could be a short interval in which cars were prohibited from entering the crosswalk.
And so I enlisted Councilwoman Carla Smith, who represents my district on City Council, to see if the DOT couldn’t see its way to helping us out (since the crosswalks are part of interstate on/off ramps, they fall under the DOT’s jurisdiction).
You can find my last post about it here. Carla managed to find a sympathetic ear at the DOT, which conducted a study of the crosswalk, but as she told me recently, we can’t get what we want.
The DOT has agreed to refresh the crosswalks, and I’ve noticed the ‘walk/don’t walk’ signs are working better, specifically by giving walkers a longer period of time to cross the street before flashing the orange ‘don’t walk’ symbol.
But it’s really not enough because cars can still enter the crosswalk even if the ‘walk’ light is on, as you can see in the photo above.
If you look at the photo, you’ll see the white, solid ‘walk’ symbol.
And yet there is a car moving through the intersection.
So can I really safely cross the intersection on foot? Uh not really.
Carla said all is not lost — she’s ever the optimist — and thinks we may be able to revisit the issue again with the DOT.
But for now, watch it when you walk up Boulevard. It may be called Boulevard but there are many spots where you are not meant to stroll.
How would you de-congest I-285?
Revive285 Top End — an initiative launched by the state Department of Transportation and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority to figure out how to clear up congestion along the northern crescent of I-285 — is seeking public input.
Revive285 has proposed eight alternatives, ranging from weak (just one new bus lane in each direction) to pretty darned exciting stuff that should have happened years ago (a rail line, presumably from the Perimeter area to Cumberland). You can download the PDF here.
I just got a note from Katie Little at Hayslett Group asking me to post information on how to comment (see below).
I hope people who are concerned about Atlanta’s transportation systems — and particularly who want alternatives to the automobile — will comment. But I’d also like to learn more about it, er, the lazy way — that is, by getting someone to explain it to us with some comments.
Stop! Don’t comment here. For the rest of this post — and to comment — head on over to My Green ATL.
Boulevard crosswalk — Part III
Maybe this happens to you.
You retrieve your voicemail messages and a twangy southern voice greets you with a tidal wave of enthusiasm and a word-per-second count that’s warp speed.
And she says, “Listen, Jeanne, we have found the nicest guy. It took us a minute, but we have this little thing around here that we say. It’s not what you know but who you know.
“Yes, we have found the nicest guy at the D.O.T., and he is going to perform a study around the area where we want the crosswalk. We are just [crazy expression of excitement that sounds like it contains the word "pants"].
“He was so super nice. He called us back today and he said we should just call him back if we don’t hear from him. It will not hurt his feelings.
“We are just happy as we could be. If you can find someone you can like and trust, you can get things done! I’m so excited we have found this guy, and you know, he didn’t just cut us down automatically. He listened. Now he has to perform a study. But again I’m just so excited!”
Well, I guess this might happen to you if you happen to live in Councilwoman Carla Smith’s district, and you call over there to ask about getting a crosswalk on Boulevard at the intersection of I-20.
I’m not ready to get as excited as Carla, because if the study says no one but one crazy blogger, a handful of homeless people and some skateboarders cross there, then I think I’m back at square one.
But I’m certainly willing to say we are moving forward!
As I’ve said before, if you live on the east side of Boulevard, in the Grant Park area, and you want to go to Cabbagetown, or Oakland Cemetery or the MARTA station, you will probably walk up Boulevard and have to cross I-20, where nothing currently impedes car traffic, and where the blinking ‘walk’ signs give you about two seconds to cross.
So stay tuned on this….Now about that maglev train line between MARTA and Turner Field….uh, well, still waiting.
Boulevard crosswalk, part two
Wow, this blogging thing appears to work!
District 1 Councilwoman Carla Smith called me this morning at 9 a.m. to follow up on my request for a crosswalk on Boulevard at I-20 in Grant Park.
She said that intersection is actually owned by the D.O.T., so it’s going to take more than a smile to obtain the crosswalk, but I would say we have officially started the process!
As I said yesterday, it would be helpful to install walk/don’t walk signs that provided a dedicated period of time for walkers to cross through the intersection. Right now, the walk/don’t walk signs at that intersection give you about three seconds to cross before they begin to flash, and cars are permitted in the intersection throughout that time.
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Stimulus equals sprawl
The wish list of stimulus-funded road and bridge projects that Gov. Sonny Perdue just submitted to the feds is at best a mixed bag when it comes to smart growth.
Check it out. Suburban counties — including Bartow ($22.5 million), Cherokee ($34.2 million), Gwinnett ($70.6 million) and Henry ($34.4) — would get the biggest share of the Phase I stimulus money, much of it going to sprawl-inducing projects like the widening of Eagle’s Landing Parkway in Henry County. In other words: welfare for developers.
Another big portion goes to politically influential parts of rural Georgia: A whopping $48 million would pay for a bypass around Gordon, Ga., in Wilkinson County. It’s part of the Fall Freeway, a “developmental highway” long-backed by Middle Georgia business interests and politicians. Developmental highways are, by definition, roads that are not needed, because their purpose is to spur sprawling development not to meet a transportation need; they’ve played havoc with the rural economy by diverting traffic from quaint downtowns to the outskirts, where land speculators long ago snapped up land to convert into Hardee’s, Wal-Marts, Speedways and other signature landmarks of smalltown sprawl.
What would go to the urban core of metro Atlanta? There are some pretty good pedestrian and bike enhancements ($750,000 for the very cool South River Trail in South DeKalb, for example, as well as a healthy $10 million to make downtown and Midtown more bike-and-foot friendly). And $17.5 million would be spent to repair the Mitchell Street bridge over the railroad gulch downtown.
All in all, however, this is barely better than the usual approach that the state has taken toward transportation: While some money goes to urban areas (where there’s already development and where the amount of density might allow people to drive less) , most of it’s being directed toward priming the pump for more sprawl or simply being thrown away on wasteful projects in rural no-growth areas.
But hey, that’s par for the course in a state where the Legislature just failed to take a simple, no-cost step to improve MARTA’s funding formula and failed for a second-straight year to approve a method of funding transportation improvements. Part of the reason the projects are so heavily weighted toward rural and suburban roads is because the state DOT doesn’t plan for nearly as extensively for transit, because there’s no ready funding mechanism to pay for commuter rail, streetcars and other projects that are needed to help people get around thye inner metro area.
The feds must still approve the project list.
ATL jobless rate 8.7%
Metro Atlanta’s unemployment rate hit 8.7 percent in February — the highest rate around these parts in a couple of generations.
More significantly, it’s the 15th straight month that the ATL’s rate was higher than the national rate. That’s one thing that separates this recession from previous post-World War II recessions: In two early 1980s recessions and in 1991 and 2002 recessions, metro Atlanta’s robust economy kept unemployment well below national levels. The current 8.7 percent level is the highest since the U.S. Labor Department standardized the way unemployment is measured across the country in 1976.
Why so bad this time? The housing bust has hit Georgia particularly hard, partly because much of the state’s economy is built on the housing-industrial complex (homebuilders, lenders, etc.). The airline bust and the high-tech bust haven’t helped.
But it also can’t help that the state’s political leaders haven’t been foresightful enough to deal with the direction the state’s economy was going. For years, a wide range of folks — ranging from business leaders to environmentalists to education advocates and academics — have been warning that allowing suburban to dictate infrastructure spending and policies, while cutting money for education, would prove disastrous.
Certainly, the economy would’ve been tough under any circumstances. It is everywhere. But more foresightful approaches to growth might have left us with a more balanced economy, less vulnerable to a downturn in housing.
Georgia DOT lists stimuli
STUCK IN THE STATION: Dallas managed to build a streetcar system. Will the stimulus finally push along Atlanta's languishing proposals?
Where’s all that transportation stimulus money going in Georgia? Mainly to roads, it seems.
The Georgia Department of Transportation has done a nice job of clearly laying out on its website where some $1.1 billion in transportation money from President Obama’s stimulus package is going. The site, which is really oriented toward informing local officials and potential contractors, doesn’t yet break down the projects in detail (that’s coming, apparently). But it does outline how money is going into broad categories.
For example, of the $144 million directed toward public transportation, only $7 million will go to MARTA while $126 million will go toward other systems in urban areas. It’ll be interesting to see whether that money finally gets transit projects, like the Brain Train, further down the track.
The really big question, though, is how some $900 million in highway money will be spent. If DOT and the state’s metropolitan planning organizations, shovel the bulk of it into new roads and highway expansions, the stimulus will have the effect of extending sprawl and worsening metro Atlanta’s environmental/quality of life problems.
If, on the other hand, a big share of the money goes toward maintaining roads that already exist — a far bigger need in Georgia than is acknowledged by politicians who want to build roads — then existing communities will benefit, as will the economy and the environment.
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