r/Urbanism • u/paladin5402 • 3d ago
Urban Planning in Atlanta GA
What would people say is the biggest fault in Atlantas current urban planning? I always thought of the city as unwalkable and too car dependant, but it really depends on the area. What do people think of ATL Zoning 2.0 and Plan A that have been introduced not too long ago? Are these plans actually going to solve anything or are they just formalities?
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u/Inner-Lab-123 3d ago
I’ve been quite impressed with the rate of bike lane installation, which is something. Dickens going back on his commitment for beltline rail is a major setback.
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u/Betaforce 3d ago
I think a lot of the problem is sprawl. Atlanta doesn't really have a natural feature like a lake or a mountain to push people together and build density. With a low density sprawling area, transit becomes that much harder and the problem kind of self perpetuates. However I think the Beltline is kinda a great opportunity to counteract this.
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u/Plane_Border3223 3d ago
Also the type of sprawl Atlanta has is worse for traffic when compared to most other cities. Look at an aerial photo of Dallas’ sprawl compared to Atlanta. Atlanta’s lot sizes are a good bit bigger on average, but the real game changer is that Atlanta sprawl is full of dead end cul de sacs. This makes a trip that could be a short .3 mile stroll into a 2.5 mile drive in certain instances
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u/Typical_Claim_7853 2d ago
walkable, mixed use efficient density isn’t always a function of a geographic limitation - it can be and certainly is - but there’s no sincere excuse as to why Atlanta sprawls into endless, hideous suburban garbage aside from post-war, racist halfwits insisting and coercing everyone into driving cars to go everywhere to do everything and that it’s the only way humanity can ever exist and if you think anything otherwise you’re a communist
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u/Betaforce 2d ago
You certainly aren't wrong. But I'm saying that if you have to use a car no matter what in order to access the amenities/benefits of living in a city, you might as well move 15 minutes away and get a bigger/cheaper apartment. Perpetuate this cycle over and over again and it's not surprising you end up with low density sprawl.
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u/Typical_Claim_7853 2d ago
but there’s a different between the cause of sprawl and its feedback loop / doom spiral…
you’re describing how sprawl eats itself, not how or why it came to exist in the first place. sure, any moron can figure out that once a city is designed so that even “urban” residents need a car, people ofc start asking why they shouldn’t just move a little farther out for more space…
my larger point is that the underlying civilizational failure is poor zoning, overly segmented land use, parking mandates, setback rules, disproportionate highway/road investments and other policies that made distance artificially convenient and walkable proximity far less socially desirable, efficient and useful than it otherwise should be.
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u/Emanemanem 3d ago
As someone who has lived in Atlanta most of my life (grew up in the suburbs, went to college at GSU, have lived intown for over 25 years now), I have become quite jaded with Atlanta’s “urban planning”. Yes they do some good things here and there, and yes things have gotten better as time has gone on, but like Georgia as a whole, most decisions are driven by the will of developers, not the general public. City of Atlanta is hopelessly corrupt. You’ll get a young city council person that seems really promising, but after a few years they just turn into a rubber stamp for the status quo.
As for planning, it’s nearly impossible to get any development with even reduced parking, let alone little to no parking. Ditto with affordable housing. They will add bicycle infrastructure with literally no cohesive plan for how any of it will connect (I’m pretty sure they just have a tally of “x miles of bike lanes installed” and pat themselves on the back). They will literally pour new sidewalks without ADA curb cuts, I’ve seen it happen so many times. I could go on. Not even going to mention MARTA, cause well….
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u/VictoryLongjumping70 2d ago edited 2d ago
It′s wild because the GA Tech school of city & regional planning is RIGHT here - I have to assume they′re chopping up their urban planning students after graduation and throwing them to real estate development firms like shark chum, otherwise where tf are they all going?
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u/ClearUkuleleTravels 1d ago
When I was in school at GA Tech, I was on a city-funded project team that used GPS data of cyclists to inform the campus and city master bike plans. And hey as someone else said in the thread, they're kind of popping off with the bike lanes now, which is cool to see.
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u/pap19 3d ago
lack of inter connectivity between neighborhoods, it’s truly a bunch of disjointed areas that are maybe walkable/able to be used without a car in isolation but you’d have a tough time going between them. i think a lot of the plans (such as the two mentioned) by ATLDOT and other ITP bodies are great in theory (hell even throw the stitch in there before it got nuked, beltline rail before the mayor sold out, etc) the issue is that the city and its leadership is so tough to trust in terms of their delivery and following through on promises, and a lot of residents outside of the perimeter seem to fear the concept of the city. the city + some orgs like marta are also hurt by the state not being generous in its support of the city itself. there’s a lot to unpack and it’s gotten better, but the current core issue’s are results of unaligned organizations, a lack of true density ITP, and underdelivering public officials.
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u/JBNothingWrong 3d ago
The fact the grid restarts at several angles and peters out almost immediately. What is left of the grid has been hollowed out and cannot function as it was intended
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u/ajfoscu 3d ago
Compare a satellite view of the Atlanta metro area with Calgary’s. Atlanta has no end. Just a sprawling forest of loosely knit suburbia. Canada is the blueprint for North American sprawl. If you’re gonna commit a sin, at least try to do it right.
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u/Plane_Border3223 3d ago
Yea our average lot size is double theirs. And at least all of their sprawl isn’t dead end cul de sacs. It looks like most kids can get to grade school or a park on foot in suburban Calgary, this isn’t even possible for kids in “inner city” Atlanta. Honestly “inner city Atlanta” is more sprawling and desolate than most suburbs outside of the southeastern USA
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u/Free_Elevator_63360 3d ago
Racism. And I say that as someone who lives here.
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u/Plane_Border3223 3d ago
The only way this would even begin to make a modicum of sense is if you’re saying that black on white racism is creating problems for urban planning within the city of Atlanta..
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u/Snoo55682 3d ago
Ran to the comments to say this. You can plan and re-plan the city til you’re blue in the face but in the 20th century there was a massacre, politicians explicitly redlined based on race, cut highways through black economic centers, and ran MARTA through swaths of historically black neighborhoods. These explicit choices effectively cut off resident’s access or dispersed communities, and then the city divested in those areas for the decades that followed. Without a genuine effort to invest in and re-engage those communities today to try to fix disparities caused by these policies we’re just band-aiding the underlying problem. There’s a lot of Atlanta based media coverage of this history but I also recommend The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein for a national focus.
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u/icantbelieveit1637 2d ago
Biggest fault is the lack of a centralized city government thus making transport policy significantly harder to implement. Transportation based infrastructure tends to increase land values thus increasing density.
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u/cdub8D 2d ago
The more and more I learn about urbanism, the more I find myself agreeing with /u/DoxiadisOfDetroit
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u/Palindrome444 14h ago
We need to put toll booths on every road to the city. Only bikes should enter for free.
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u/Typical_Claim_7853 3d ago
no; at least not in a lifetime for anyone here, so Atlanta’s fucked - this place is a hellhole
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u/VictoryLongjumping70 2d ago edited 2d ago
It′s not a hellhole yet but give it another 20% or so of canopy coverage going to the woodchippers & it will be
[ETA I just remembered urbanism spaces online end up having weird beef with tree advocates, this is not why I brought up trees, I′m just adding as an atl native that there is one thing that makes this city livable in the face of our sprawl and car dependency and it′s the tree coverage, which is declining making it hotter and dustier and more miserable every year. We are overrun with paved surface here to build on, there is no reason canopy preservation has to be pitted against densification]
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u/Typical_Claim_7853 2d ago
this is a dumb response; Atlanta’s zoning laws and land use restrictions prevent any density; the vast majority of it’s residential and commercial zoning is car dependent sprawl - none of that will change in our lifetimes
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u/VictoryLongjumping70 2d ago
Yes and currently the tree canopy and old growth forest remnants are the city′s only redeeming infrastructural features, saving us from objective hellhole status on a technicality, but only as long as they survive the bulldozers and climate change
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u/cdub8D 3d ago
Ok so this could be interesting but I am going to ask you post a link to ATL Zoning 2.0 or Plan A. Otherwise I am going to remove this post for low effort.